Month: March 2026

I think I’ve been trying to sit with the why of it all. Why is this the ending Bolaño chose? What does ending on a short flashback section achieve for the story? Is it to sandwich the book between two Garcia Madero sections for symmetry? Did he want a chance to play around with the idea of a travelogue/ road trip novel in a more traditional way, outside of the interviews in the middle sections?

This section was fun and I love the idea of a road trip, especially one where you’re out looking for clues, but the mention of all the different spiders they were facing ruined the fun vibes for me (I’ll stay home, thank you): “Night noises: wolf spiders, scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, black widows, desert toads” (630). Garcia Madero was as insufferable as ever. He spent so many words making sure we knew he found Cesárea overweight and how he couldn’t believe he was sleeping with Lupe. It doesn’t seem like he likes his friends much, not even Belano or Lima, constantly making comments and sounding annoyed at what they say or how they act.

I was also thinking a lot about the flow of the text/ the pacing as I was reading, mainly how Bolaño slows the text down when it starts to pick up pace. Like when they’re going through the drawings of the sombrero over lines and guessing what was drawn, and Lupe’s guesses are coming quicker and quicker. Then, she gets stumped for one second and suddenly Garcia Madero is commenting on a dead plant he sees approaching in the distance, narrating a bit of the landscape (612). It takes the readers out of the game for those few lines and slows down the narrative before resuming the game for four more drawings. I don’t know what, exactly, his aim was with this but it helped remind me that they’re still on the road and that the journey is still moving forward? Or is it just his placement of an omen, like on the next page when they end on the drawing of “[f]our Mexicans keeping vigil over a body” (613). A little foreshadowing.

Throughout the book, there were certain parts where I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be funny and I just don’t understand the joke, or if the audience is purposefully being left out of the joke and it isn’t supposed to make sense outside of the “in” crowd. An example in this section is when the group was stopped by patrolmen when leaving Nacozari: “Are you from Nacozari, officer? Lupe asks him. The patrolman looks at her and says no, why would she think that, he’s from Hermosillo. Belano and Lima laugh” (602). Or, later on, with “Just the mention of Maximilian’s army cracks us right up… A Belgian head of a Belgian regiment. It cracks us up. A Belgian-Mexican regiment” (638). Literally what are they talking about?

To conclude my thoughts on this conclusion to The Savage Detectives, I enjoyed this section (maybe?) more than the previous ones. It felt like a Christmas special in a tv series. This could have been because it was shorter, or because it was a story where the main characters are all together in an isolated sort of tale. Overall, I’ll probably give The Savage Detectives a 3.75/5 star rating, in that it was good for what it was but I probably won’t reread it or recommend/ lend it out to friends.

I only read five chapters of The Shadow of the Wind this week (maybeeee 65 pages), which means I have about 190 pages to read next time to finish off the book (hoping for some nice weather so I can read outside). I did read some spoilers on another blog post, which was my own fault, but I am looking forward to seeing where the ending goes. I mentioned in last week’s blog post how I wondered whether authors of long books owe their readers something in their ending that differs from short books, but now I’m wondering whether/how that changes when the long book is not a standalone but rather the first of a series.

This short part that I read included a twenty page experimental(?) interlude, when the characters were interviewing the elderly Jacinta about Penelope and Carax and how they came about deciding to get engaged.

This was only the second (I thought there was a third but couldn’t find it) time the author has used this interlude style of prose, the first being back when they were asking the priest about Nuria Monfort (209).

The way it’s written feels like a flashback scene in a movie (quite dramatic). It’s all italics and is supposed to be the narrative of the person being interviewed (eg. the priest’s section gets interrupted and they mention that he paused in his narrative) but it’s told in third person and doesn’t sound like it’s being told the characters’ voices: “As a child, María Jacinta Coronado was convinced that the world ended on the outskirts of Toledo and that beyond the town limits there was nothing but darkness and oceans of fire” (268). Following Jacinta’s interlude, she continues her narrative for two half-pages in her own voice.

I thought that this flashback writing style choice was kind of weird in its inconsistency, especially since it’s only happened twice (again, maybe) and not every time the characters interview someone about Carax. Now I’m sitting here wondering if it has a structural purpose or if it is just a neat little writing quirk.

My questions for this week come back to ideas of pacing (from our class discussions) and endings. I would say that The Shadow of the Wind (for all I complain about slogging through it) (and it isn’t just me, here is the top review on Storygraph from when I went to make sure people agreed with me that it was medium-paced) is a medium to fast paced book.

I guess when we’re talking about pacing for a long book, should we have longer beginnings and more drawn-out endings? Would this help our middle sections (which has too many pages to be entirely fast-paced without tiring the reader out) to feel like they can cut out some of the excess that takes away from the main story arc?

I’m running out of things to write about. This is our fifth blog post on Bolaño, which will make about 2000 words by the end of this, and I’m struggling to come up with likes or dislikes that I haven’t already harped on about. I’m liking the book well enough by now, which is more to do with the amount of time I’ve invested than anything else.

My favourite section from this week took place early on in the reading, where we have Edith Oster, “sitting on a bench in the Alameda” (424). She speaks on meeting Belano for the first time, a casual meeting in Mexico City, and then their subsequent acquaintance in Barcelona.

I think mostly I loved the vibes/aesthetic/energy of this entry, of an artist and all her artist connections and experiences in various artsy cities. I also loved the existential thought processes, first causing her to end her relationship with Abraham and then with her both not caring if she died and fostering an intense love of living. This led to the weirdly intense (kind of a one-sided therapy-esque?) relationship she grew with Belano in such a relatively short time: “I knew, I was conscious of the fact, that there were many things I hadn’t told him that I probably needed to tell him or should tell him, and I thought that if I died riding or if the horse threw me or if a branch in the pine forest knocked me to the ground, Arturo would know everything I hadn’t told him and would understand it without needing to hear it from my lips” (429). She had all this trauma and all this inspiration and plans for her film, and yet she chose to spend so much energy making sure that this one specific person understood her. Then, it was like once she finally finished telling her entire life story (after moving in with him), she got bored of him and left for somewhere new to do it all over again (iconic). I also appreciated that the ending of this section, while not particularly happy, was still hopeful (out of medical care and with a new job) (makes for a pleasant enough ending).

I guess my questions going forward into the final section of our reading are predictably pretty focused on the idea of conclusions. How do you conclude a long book and do you have to do it differently than a short book (is there added incentive or responsibility to make it worth the extra effort of suffering through to the end)? How do I myself want/expect/need Bolaño to end this (what kind of final section could be satisfying versus what would feel like a waste of 600 pages)?

I am ready to be finished this book. I know at the beginning of the semester, I commented on the fact that The Shadow of the Wind is the first book in the series and that I was optimistic about being able to continue with the following books. Maybe one day I’ll love picking them up, but I will first need a healthy break from this plot line. It isn’t even a bad book, I think it’s just so drawn out (too long?) that I don’t care what happens anymore.

The characterization has never been particularly deep, but it’s easy to look past that for the first quarter of a book (especially as the main character spent time growing into adulthood). At close to 300 pages in, over the halfway point, I just wish there was some sort of spark (something worth reading about the main character or the plot). The “mystery” of Carax (the author of the books that “chose the main character) hasn’t really developed. I don’t feel further along in the story now than I did at the end of the last section. Everything new that we have learned about Carax, about the protagonist, and about his friends/family/love interests has been more of the same. We’re wandering around the city talking to people and linking together repetitive bits of info (practically chasing wild geese at this point).

As I’m writing this, any tone of frustration (that I’m not allowed to DNF this book and have to slog through it) present is probably just me being dramatic and I very well might turn around in two weeks time and give this book a five star review. There’s a lot of book left (200ish pages?) and we could just be at the lull in the middle of the story (at which point I would say we could have maybe done without some of this repetitive middle fluff and had a shorter novel).

Again, to reiterate my disclaimer from previous weeks, I’m sure the reading experience would be different if I was reading the book in one go over a few days instead of over several weeks. I’ve mentioned before that I wonder if I’m missing things by forgetting them as we read our other class material in between, but also I feel like there’s something to be said about momentum. Riding a bike is not fun if you only pedal once every 100m and just wobble and inch along; maybe I would be more forgiving (in terms of waiting for the story to get to the point) and enjoying the reading more if I wasn’t putting the book down every 100 pages.