Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.A couple of times over the past year or so, I've heard the expression "like a Bolaño novel", and being a curious reader, and finding this highly-rated example on my library's list of audiobooks, I gave The Savage Detectives a listen, and in it, nothing happens, and if anything did, I'd rather not talk about it, because I didn't understand it.
This novel is in three parts. In the first, we meet the (apparent) protagonist through his diary entries:
I’m seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I’m in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I’m an orphan, and someday I’ll be a lawyer. That’s what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night.Instead of following his uncle's plan, however, Juan Garcia meets an avante-garde group of poets who call themselves the Visceral Realists, he drops out of school, loses his virginity, writes poetry, and when an angry pimp shows up at a New Year's Eve party, Juan Garcia joins a group on a roadtrip to ferry Lupe the prostitute to safety.
The second part interrupts at this point, and taking up two-thirds of the novel, it's a series of over forty first-person accounts of people who have come into contact with two of the Visceral Realists -- Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (the alter-ego of author Roberto Bolaño) -- who were the other two men with Juan Garcia and Lupe in the getaway car. Spanning the years from 1976 to 1996 and stretching over four continents, these accounts were a real slog to listen to as they were shortish and had nothing in common other than the unflattering glimpses of Lima and Belano.
If you add infinity to infinity, you get infinity. If you mix the sublime and the creepy, what you end up with is creepy, right?And what do you get if you mix the surreal with the boring? Do you end up with surreal or boring? That may be the real question, right? In the third part, we rejoin the getaway car, and for the longest time (nearly an hour?) I listened to Juan Garcia quiz the others on their knowledge of obscure poetry terms as they decide to spend their time on the road trying to track down a reclusive Mexican poet, popular in the 1920s, named Cesárea Tinajero.
If all of this is typical -- if this is what the phrase "like a Bolaño novel" is meant to convey -- at least I learned something, but it was an expensive lesson at 27 hours of bored listening. If this reads better on the page, I'm willing to accept that the mistake was mine, but I think I've learned an even bigger lesson: I just don't connect with Latin American fiction. I wasn't wowed by Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera, or, more recently, by Vásquez's The Sound of Things Falling. These are all considered great literary works, so I can accept that the problem is with me, and even so the problem remains. No me gusta.
