After reading The Savage Detectives, I felt the way I did after watching Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Which is to say I was asking myself: “What the hell was that??”
Like Nick and Norah, The Savage Detectives involves a tedious scavenger hunt that ultimately is supposed to lead to deeper lessons about the human condition. Nick and Norah cruise through the boroughs of NYC in a oh-so-ironic Yugo looking for “Where’s Fluffy,” a terribly named band that communicates about upcoming gigs through brain teasers to ensure that only the most clever indie rock riddlers find them. The Savage Detectives is about a group of boho Mexicans who call themselves the Visceral Realists searching for a 1920s avant guard poet named Cesarea Tinajero.
Nick and Norah is basically a movie strung together to justify a soundtrack. After hours of roaming around on a series of pointless adventures, Nick and Norah decide to forego Fluffy and make out in their parent’s basement. And, apparently, we’re supposed to be interested because we like the song they exit with. Likewise, The Savage Detectives is just a series of self-indulgent narratives designed to show how “revolutionary” the Visceral Realists are. And we’re supposed to care because it’s not like Octavio Paz….or something. It’s a so-called poetry movement consisting of people that never write, never publish and have no philosophy. And there’s no reason to find Cesarea, either, since she only published one piece 50 years earlier in a friend’s homemade zine, and even that doesn’t contain a single word – it’s a stick figure drawing.
So, what’s the point?
As near as I can figure, it’s all elaborate masturbation committed by and for the benefit of the author, Roberto Bolano. Bolano himself started some bullshit poetry group in Mexico that was too clever for its own good, and the story is basically a rehash of partly autobiographical adventures that don’t advance a plot or create a reason for caring. There are endless pages written by a pedantic teenager explaining the different varieties of poetic meter. There are women in the book that serially sleep with the different members of the group and confuse that with sexual liberation. And there are the cliched art house fags that discuss the differences between butch, femme, queer and homo as terms to best describe them.
Despite the NY Times gushing with praise over The Savage Detectives, I hated this novel. It was like reading On the Road, which was a painfully boring experience despite its presence in the canon. But at least Kerouac knew the art of brevity – Bolano goes on for 650 pages! Frankly, I think it’s time for me to give up on Latin American fiction. With the exception of Jose Saramago, who I believe is a genius writer, I’ve hated everything from south of the border. From Marquez and his pastoral magic and peasant fantasies to Esquivel’s sex and recipe books, nothing has resonated. Give me West African literature any day of the week. Now THAT’s some good writing.
