The Savage Detectives and 2666, both by Roberto Bolaño
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Roberto Bolaño is a force unto himself. This bears out when reading any of his novels, but especially his two greatest works—The Savage Detectives and 2666.
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The Savage Detectives is the story of Juan García Madero, a seventeen-year-old poet living in Mexico City. He records his time with the flag bearers of the Visceral Realist movement of poetry, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, as they search for the "mythic" founder of the movement from a generation prior, Cesárea Tinajero.
The novel is filled with the brashness of youth; the discovery of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and death; and a violence that seethes beneath the lives of the visceral realists and their ilk, especially that of Belano and Lima.
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2666 is a novel in five interrelated parts, really almost five novels sutured together by overlapping themes and characters. The core of the book revolves around the unsolved murders of women who work in the maquiladoras in the city of Santa Teresa, a "disguise" for the real unsolved murders of such women in the real city of Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican city once again in the news for its overt violence.
2666 is less concerned with youth than The Savage Detectives, as it is more concerned with exploring and navigating the bewilderment and loneliness and violence and mortality of middle age.
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References to literature and the act of writing abound. In fact, they provide many of the most haunting scenes in both books. I will never forget the copy of Rafael Dieste's Testamento geométrico hanging from a clothesline for days, the character who placed it there coming back to check on it, to watch how it weathered (in "The Part About Amalfitano" from 2666).
Many of the references are real, while others are fake. Some of the enjoyment is trying to determine which is which.
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It took me a long time to read each novel. I didn't want them to end. I wanted to savor them. I wanted to immerse myself in Bolaño's language (and that of his translator Natasha Wimmer) and stay there. I didn't want to return.
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File under:
*Bolaño
*Literature in translation
*Modern classics
*Novels
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