Month: March 2026

Ahhh. This was the easiest that picking up Bolaño has been all semester. I’ll admit I’ve done most of my reading early Wednesday morning and late Wednesday night this semester (so that I can write my blog before midnight and work on things for my two other Thursday classes that are due in the morning afterwards). This ended up being the case this week as well. So I’ll say, having to read 50 pages after mowing through a few-hundred-or-so some weeks felt GREAT.

Thinking about Jasmine and David explaining how they explained The Savage Detectives to their friends, here’s how I would describe the road so far (did anyone watch Supernatural? lol):

“Juan García Madero joins the visceral realists, a poetry group in Mexico in the mid-1970s, where he meets Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, and bums around Mexico City for a while. Then, the three of them, plus a prostitute Lupe, end up in an Impala (Supernatural again?!) driving as fast as they can out of Mexico City to complete a double-headed quest: both escape Lupe’s cruel pimp Alberto and start a pilgrimage to find Cesárea Tinajero, touted as a figurehead of the visceral realist movement. Then, we skip over their journey, and hear from a vast collection of closely- or loosely-related acquaintances of stories.”

And now, Part III, the season finale if you will! Or maybe the second piece of sandwich bread if we think about Part II being a giant whopper of a sandwich – we’re looking at Scooby-Doo proportions here. Okay that’s enough random thoughts…

In Part III, we return to the first days of ’76 as García Madero, Lupe, Roberto and Ulises in Quim Font’s Impala driving out from Mexico City to escape Alberto and to find Cesárea Tinajero. I found Bolaño captured well the mundanity of a road trip, even one with life and death consequences, García Madero quizzing his friends on literary devices and his drawings of birds-eye-view sombreros. This had me thinking of how I spent time on road trips. I grew up in Vancouver but my family is from California (=American citizen, which we uncovered during one class. Not a point of pride) so I’ve spent a lot driving to California, which takes about two days. Plenty of time to pass: usually I read, zone out, or gossip with my mom – we usually have more to gossip about on the way home!

I enjoyed a literary reference I finally got! Hot on Cesárea’s tail (or rather, making something out of nothing), our searchers uncover Pepín Allevenada, a bullfighter, and refer to Hemingway’s sad matadors. I took an American literature class in my second year (uh no not American again) and we read In Our Time, which is a collection of short stories interspersed with little snippets of other stories, many of these of matadors – almost Part II-esque. Here’s a quote that felt Bolaño-esque about a bullfighter who had a poor fight:

“Afterwards I saw him at the café. He was very short with a brown face and quite drunk and he said after all it has happened before like that. I am not really a good bull-fighter” (p. 95).

Both aspects of the quest unite when the quartet find Cesárea and at the same time are found by Alberto. I was a little ambivalent about Cesárea’s death: on one hand, that’s sad both that she died for herself and also for the visceral realists, but at this point I was down for whatever Bolaño had written to get to the end. It felt like he was playing with his reader again though; all that just to have her die.

Going back to John v Ava on whether we like endings or not, I will yell it from the top of a hill that I am happy to have ended The Savage Detectives. My ritual of finishing a book: I put my bookmark in my bookmark tin, I mark it off as “Finished” on GoodReads, and then I decide if I want to keep the book or pawn it off to a local lending library. I think I would like to reread this book on my own time; having to cram it all in for late Wednesday nights was not optimal reading for me. But I’ll give it a year or two to simmer.

Anyway, thanks for reading! Even though I didn’t love this book, I did enjoy reading it.

Back to Les Misérables for this week! Here’s a quick summary of the book so far:

Jean Valjean was convicted for a crime in his youth. He repented and became a beloved mayor, but then tenacious police officer Inspector Javert found out about his criminal past and started hunting him down. Along the way Jean rescued a little girl named Cosette, whose mother he knew. Last we left off, Jean and Cosette were living on a farm, Javert still hunting to no avail (yet anyway).

The next section of the book is called “Marius,” which is what I read for class today. Marius Pontmercy is a new character, though linked to the story so far: Thénardier, the barkeeper who raised (read, abused) little Cosette, fought in the Battle of Waterloo alongside Marius’s father. Thénardier scavenged a medal off of almost dead Monsieur Pontmercy, who mistook his actions as trying to save him. Thénardier really is no good, and contrasts through with Jean as a man who appears noble yet is cruel behind closed doors.

Marius is a young man raised by his royalist grandfather and his unmarried aunt. After his estranged father’s death, Marius learns that his grandfather had intentionally kept the two separated; he then rejects his grandfather in memory of his father, leaving home for Paris. With this rejection we see a return to the ideals of the French Revolution: where his grandfather represents the royalists, Marius turns away to embrace a more Napoleonic stance. Marius meets new friends along the way, which brings me to my next discussion point.

I would like to discuss the relationship that I see between Les Misérables and The Savage Detectives. Though as we discussed in class, it seems that long books are long for many different reasons, in this section I found that these two long books anyway share a few similarities. First of all, Marius reminded me a lot of Juan García Madero: orphans raised by family members, now young men, pushed to be lawyers but reject this path in favour of wandering, and then leaving home to look for answers in other people and ideals.

Additionally are the expansive lineups of characters, as well as portraits of them, Victor Hugo stating explicitly, “This is the history of many minds of our time” (206) to justify these lists. Marius, his grandfather, father, and aunt, down to the parakeet that she owns, are described in detail as each are introduced, which is different to the first-person snippets that we get of characters in The Savage Detectives, but still provides an equivalent portait of characters.

Here is one (abbreviated here – it lasted a page!) portrait that cracked me up: “Monsieur Mabeuf’s political opinion was a passionate fondness for plants, and an even greater one for books…he had the appearance of an old sheep” (231).

Marius meets a host of like-minded friends in Paris, “The legitimate sons of the French Révolution” (a very visceral realist-esque), and they discuss, instead of poetry, revolutionary ideals at the Café Musain. Here, visceral realism and the Revolution reach a similar status of the young folks, Enjolras, a friend of Marius, declaring that “Citoyens: my mother is the Republic” (222)

Marius, living nearby where we last saw Jean Valjean and Cosette, observes in the Luxembourg gardens a father and daughter – the father is nicknamed Leblanc and the daughter Lanoire. Though they have new names now, we have met Jean and Cosette once again. At first, he finds Cosette homely, but six months later he is beguiled, and falls in love with her beauty. This novel was written in 1862, so some of the ways that Hugo describes girls is disturbing from a modern standpoint: “that pure and fleeting moment which can only be described with these two words: sweet fifteen” (237). Marius then proceeds to what we might interpret today as staking Cossette/Lanoire, following her around the park and to her home, though here it is presented as innocent and genuine love. Eventually, freaked out by this persistant follower, father and adopted daughter move.

For a discussion question building off of this relationship, what do you think about navigating past standards that do not live up to modern expectations?

I’ve sort of avoided saying this in my blogs because I feel bad, but I can’t hold it in any longer: if The Savage Detectives were not for class, I would have stopped reading around page 200. Which I do not usually do – my mom calls it “book martyring” where we both have to finish a book once we’ve started (she’s been trying to get through Braiding Sweetgrass for the last six months or so). I almost always finish a book, but sometimes it’s a battle. But I would not have even book martyred by way through this. If we think back to Cesarea Tinajera’s one poem – the rectangle on the lines – I started off my reading Part I as going along the strait line, then slowing my reading became the wavy line and last I left off it was certainly the jagged line. This week, I was really dreading going back to Bolaño.

However, I decided to try to refresh my mindset. Which, with Bolaño’s style is pretty easy to do – if you don’t like one story or perspective, pretty soon you’ll get another one. And if you don’t like the next one, well, maybe then you’re out of luck. But usually there is something for everyone as they say.

I felt like the stories in the section for this week were longer, which made them easier to follow, for example the lottery winner, or the lawyer who kept saying things in latin (?). I felt like I got a clearer picture of both Arturo Belano and Cesarea Tinajera, and that the perspectives were more clear about explaining the whole who/what/where/when than previous sections, which helped me focalise my understanding of the book better through these common threads. I have struggled most with The Savage Detectives during the stories that I just cannot connect to my understanding of the plot: why is this here? Why do I have to read this? I find myself asking heatedly. Having these two touchstones helped guide this reading into more enjoyable waters.

I think my favourite chapter of this section was that of Edith Oster, I can’t really say why other than I was just the most entertained. I have found throughout the narrative a pull towards female characters. I was sad when Edith lost her cat – for a character who self-reportedly cries all the time, she didn’t seem too sad about it. Reading the scene about horse riding conjured up a passage from the beginning of the book that I had totally forgot about – something about another girl and Belano with horses. Reading that passage at the start of this (very tiring) semester feels so long ago now that the memory has mushed and blurred and I almost wasn’t able to place the horse scene from earlier in this book. On page 445 she also mentions a nurse named Rosarío from Mexico City – could this be the same Rosarío from García Madero’s narration? I hoped so – she’d be doing better now.

Though the timeline expands outward on one end – we make it into the 1990s, and does conversely closes in on 1975 and Cesarea Tinajera. I enjoyed how the analysis of her poem (or not poem) mirrored our own discussion in class, looking at the title, the rectangle as taking a journey over the waves, other interpretations too. It felt like the book predicted what we would say pretty well! And, the final chapter revealing what I have long been hoping for: a directive of what the driving force of this whole narration is. Let’s find Cesarea!

GARCIA MADERO ALERT. I was wondering if we would ever hear about him again, until the very final pages of this section when Ernesto Garciaz, the only living expert on visceral realists in the world, says…”Juan Garcia Madero? No the name doesn’t ring a bell. He never belonged to the group.” (585)

“Of course I’m sure,” he says next, anticipating perhaps the reader’s surprise at this. Who then, was Garcia Madero? The other 17-year-old that Ernesto names? Someone else? Anyway, for my sake I really appreciate both the return to the beginning as well as the more direct plotline for the next section.

Discussion question: perhaps we’ve talked about this in class, but would you prefer a more “direct” plot in The Savage Detectives, or do you like the style in which it is written?

Whew! Even though it is my first time reading both books, after the polyphony of The Savage Detectives, returning to Les Misérables felt like sliding back into a favourite armchair after a long day. Here, there is one narrator, one clear protagonist, and one clear antagonist. What a comfy seat.

I started a section, called “Cosette,” after a character I will discuss below. The section begins at the end of the Battle of Waterloo – which brought me back to Grade 9 Social Studies (shoutout Ms. Chen!), as well as ABBA and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Funny how historical moments become pop-culture phenomena, and funny too how this chapter begins at one of the most famous “endings” in history.

Hugo takes time to describe the scene at the end of battle, describing bodies, blood, and nature ravaged or untouched. A few lines that made me think of Auxilio’s story were, “The moon was an evil genius on the plain…what mattered it that the earth was red, the moon retained her whiteness. Such is the indifference of heaven” (p. 121), how the moon and its light marked the passing of time. Auxilio and the Battle of Waterloo had the same moon!

Here, we see a man, unnamed, (a tendency of Hugo is to have a chapter about a character and only reveal their name at the end – usually we are meant to guess who it is, but in cases like this I was not sure who this homme could be!) pilfering medals from fallen soldiers. Who could it be? Surely not Jean Valjean, our convict turned beloved pious mayor turned man on the lam hunted by tenacious Inspector Javert? It couldn’t be! And aha, the pilferer is revealed to be Thérnardier! Oh rats, who was that again? I shuffled back through the book…Thérnardier is the tavern keeper who took Cosette, a seven-year-old orphan, into his and his wife’s “care” after her mother can no longer care for her.

And so, we return to the life of orphan Cosette, who lives a Cinderella-like existence at the mercy of Thénardier, his wife, Thénardiess, and their two pampered daughters. While Eponine and Azelma play with beautiful dolls, Cosette knits stockings for them under the table so as to take up less space and avoid abuse; “These three little girls could not count twenty-four years between them all, yet they already represented all human society: on one side envy, on the other, disdain” (144).

One night, when poor Cosette is forced to fetch a pail of water, she imagines all sorts of terrors waiting for her, beasts and ghosts prowling the trees, though nothing scares her more than the Thérnardiers. As she struggles with the bucket, she rescued by another unnamed man – this time it is revealed to be Jean Valjean, freshly escaped from jail. Seeing her state of despair, Jean buys her the most beautiful doll in the village, and rescues Cosette from the tavern. Yes! I thought. Stories like this are common, especially in fairy and folk tales, but reading about Cosette now had me reflecting on the vulnerability of children who don’t have anyone able to defend them. I suspect this is on all of our minds these days.

Luckily, Cosette and her surrogate grandfather Jean are able to take up residence in the Gorbeau House, where a “maternal” sort of love occurs, where Cosette is allowed to play and learn. The narrator adds that the teachings of the bishop in the first chapter and the family created with Cosette fully brought Jean back from the brink of criminality.

But the happy times don’t last for long: the indefatigable Inspector Javert, who represents black and white authority, like a hound on the trail, sniffs out Jean! On the run once again, Jean now has to navigate a flight with a young girl – after close calls and clambers up walls, the two take refuge in a nunnery, where a man Jean had once helped welcomes them. The section ends.

In this section, we see the idea that our past can haunt us no matter how we atone for it, the redemption of love, and how authority views “crime” – that Javert pursues Jean for helping Cosette’s mother (in a chapter past), yet no one pays any mind to the abuse suffered by Cosette. I really enjoyed reading this section.