Matt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Savage Directors

by Roberto Bolano

Towards the end of this last spring, Roberto Bolano's name was getting tossed around left and right by reviewers and critics from all the major and minor forums, from NPR and Harper's down to the Internet minions. For once, I'll have to concede to the hype. Bolano, a Chilean who vagabonded much of his life through South America, Mexico and Europe, ultimately dying in Spain of liver failure at the age of 50, considered himself to be a poet above all else. But man, did he write some mean fiction! Though the workers of this word industry have compared him to both Borges and Cortazar, I'd say that Bolano was a different  beast altogether.

The Savage Detectives, the most recent of his novels to come out in translation, is a sprawling melancholy web that contains a broad cast of memorable characters (hormonal post-pubescent poets, flamboyant Mexican aesthetes, schizophrenic architects, Trotsky's granddaughter, ex-ballet dancing prostitutes, etc.) and few staggering prismatic shifts in narrative perspective. Where Borges has his head stuck in an ideal geometric maze and Cortazar has great wafts of Europe following his trail, Bolano has his feet firmly on Mexican soil and embraces its world of crooked politics, petty violence, promiscuity, mezcal haze, dope-addled reverie and scatological thought. The main thread through the novel is the tale of two young drug-peddling poets and their search through the Sonoran desert for a lost poetess whose sole published work they found in a dusty obscure avant-garde literary journal. The bulk of the book is a kaleidoscope off of that central kernel and goes out in every which way, both geographically and historically. Great stuff.

Also be sure to check out By Night In Chile, about a priest who moonlights as a literary critic who advises Allende while trying to prevent pigeons from destroying Europe's ancient churches, and Distant Star, about an elusive skywriting poet whose art has a sinister bent. All of it is wonderfully fantastic. Forthcoming is a translation of Bolano's unpublished final work, 2666, that sprawls even more over the course of some thousand plus pages. Watch out, Pynchon! http://www.thesavagedetectives.com/