"And a funny thing happened to me with those kids, or the coffee they bought me, I noticed something strange about them, it was as if they were there but at the same time they weren't there, I'm not sure how to explain it, they were the first young Mexican poets I'd met and maybe that was why they seemed odd, but in the previous months I'd met young Peruvian poets, young Colombian poets, young poets from Panama and Costa Rica, and I hadn't felt the same thing. I was an expert in young poets and something was off here, something was missing: the camaraderie, the strong sense of shared ideals, the frankness that always prevails at any gathering of Latin American poets."
—page 136, The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
"Mexico is unbelievable (here she digressed, but only in Espinoza's letter, as if Pelletier wouldn't understand of as if she knew beforehand that they would compare letters), a place where one of the big fish in the cultural establishment, someone presumably refined, a writer who has reached the highest levels of government, is called El Cerdo, and no one even questions it, she said, and she saw a connection between this, the nickname or the cruelty of the nickname or the resignation to the nickname, and the criminal acts that had been occurring for some time in Santa Teresa."
—page 142, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
What do I find so compelling about a tale of four academics who specialize in a reclusive novelist that none of them has ever met?
First, it is their echo and distorted reflection of the young visceral realist poets of The Savage Detectives. These four critics—Pelletier (France), Espinoza (Spain), Morini (Italy), Norton (America)—would not have been proper members of the visceral poets but fringe members or friends of the core members, if they even ran in such circles in their youth. Now, however, they have grown up, sold out, become established, settled down, matured. They have academic credentials and tenure to protect. They must publish and lecture and debate. But they still remember what they once had and the loss is palpable.
Second, it is their abject loneliness. They revolve around one another like stars and their planets and their moons on a macrocosmic scale or like protons and neutrons and electrons and smaller, stranger particles on a microcosmic level. They love one another. It is camaraderie and friendship, philos and eros, companionship and fucking. It is the choice between the inherent misunderstanding and violence of relationships or the threat of the abyss. It is choosing the lesser of two evils. It is shoring up our defenses against our own mortality. It is joining with another to stave off thanatos.
Third, it is the hauntedness of these four individual atoms. It is their ghostlike wanderings across Europe and Latin America, as they converge upon Santa Teresa. It is their traces as they enter this city of the Sonora Desert. It is the hints and forebodings of dangers, some which I fear may be revealed in short order and others that I fear will never be revealed.
It is the loss. It is the quiet places carved out of "prehistoric rocks." It is the specters of the twentieth century, looming large yet unnamed. It is death, palpable and tasted.
"The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower."
—page 129, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
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