The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
"The Savage Detectives" is a novel by Roberto Bolaño that follows a group of avant-garde poets in Mexico City from 1975 to 1996, centered around a literary movement known as visceral realism. The narrative is intricately structured, divided into three sections that unfold non-chronologically. The first section introduces Juan García Madero, a young aspiring poet who encounters the enigmatic founders of visceral realism, Arturo Belano and Ulysses Lima. They rebel against mainstream Mexican literature, gathering a community of artists and navigating the underground literary scene while financing their endeavors through marijuana sales.
As the story progresses, the middle section presents testimonies from various individuals recounting encounters with Belano and Lima, weaving humor, drama, and political commentary into their tales. This part reveals the disillusionment and disarray that follow the initial fervor of their movement. The final section returns to García Madero's perspective as he, along with Belano, Lima, and a young prostitute named Lupe, embarks on a journey to find a reclusive poet from the past. Their quest culminates in tragedy, highlighting the harsh realities of their lives and the deeper existential themes of ambition, loss, and the complexities of human experience. The novel ultimately explores the notion of savagery, not just in a literary sense but as a reflection of the human condition itself.
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published:Los detectives salvajes, 1998 (English translation, 2007)
Type of work: Novel
The Work
The Savage Detectives recounts the history of avant-garde poets from 1975 in Mexico City until 1996 in Africa. Their literary movement, visceral realism, begins with a mischievous revolutionary fervor but later spins apart through jealousy, murder, flight, despair, insanity, and, in a very few cases, self-discovery. Although the underlying plotline is straightforward, the narrative structure and multiple points of view belong uniquely to this novel. It is divided into three sections that present the story out of chronological order.
“Mexicans Lost in Mexico” concerns the last two months of 1975 and takes place wholly in Mexico City. It is told through the diary entries of Juan García Madero, a seventeen-year-old whose ambition is to study literature and become a poet. He encounters two older poets, Arturo Belano and Ulysses Lima. Belano and Lima are poètes maudits, the founders of visceral realism, which is defined mostly by its vigorous opposition to mainstream Mexican literature. They gather about them a variety of younger poets, painters, and dancers, publish magazines, organize or invade poetry readings, and migrate from one dive to another in endless discussion. To finance their literary work they peddle marijuana. By chance, the pair discovers that a previous poet also used the term visceral realism to describe a literary movement. This poet is Cesárea Tinajero, a shadowy figure from the 1920’s known for a single published poem. Belano and Lima decide to track her down.
Meanwhile, García Madero helps rescue a young prostitute, Lupe, from her pimp. As the section draws to a close, the pimp threatens violence if Lupe is not returned to him. With the timely help of Belano and Lima, García Madero and Lupe barely escape a shootout. The four flee Mexico City, heading for Sonora and the last known location of Tinajero
The long middle section, “The Savage Detectives,” leaps forward in time. Belano and Lima have fled to Europe; no mention of García Madero or Lupe occurs until the last pages. The section comprises a series of testimonies about Lima and Belano told by former visceral realists and some others whom the pair interviewed about Tinajero. Although there is much humor (often bitterly ironical), sex, emotional and situational drama, literary and political quarreling, and historical anecdotes, the tone of these testimonies is curiously flat, as if they are legal depositions. With occasional exceptions they are presented in chronological order from 1976 until 1996. As each person tells a story, the reader gradually accumulates information about Belano and Lima. The reader learns that something bad has happened to them, and they live like lost souls, bouncing from one place to another in Nicaragua, France, Spain, Austria, and Israel. Lima eventually turns up in Mexico City again, years later, a broken man. Belano continues to write, makes a modest living for himself in Barcelona, marries, has a son, divorces, falls desperately sick with pancreatitis, and slides into despair. Knowing that he is dying, he goes to Africa as a correspondent, hoping to be killed in action. He is last seen near Monrovia, Liberia, trying to evade a rebel army.
“The Sonora Desert” reverts to García Madero’s diary, which records the events of the first six weeks of 1976. Belano, Lima, Lupe, and García Madero speed north in a borrowed car, pursued by Lupe’s pimp and his henchman. Searching throughout Sonora, Belano and Lima at last succeed in their detective work: They find Tinajero working as a washerwoman in a border town of down-and-out killers. Although her life has been a long decline into poverty, she has filled notebooks with her writing. Just as the four fugitives contact her, the pimp finally catches up. In a scene that bursts from tranquility into violence, Belano and Lima kill their pursuers with Tinajero’s help, and she is killed in the process. In a cuttingly ironical twist, they never have a chance to talk to her about visceral realism. The four fugitives then split up. The final pages concern García Madero and Lupe, who have become lovers. He finds Tinajero’s notebooks and reads them. Although he does not describe their contents in his diary, he refers to them as if they are a disappointment. He is forced to see beyond his ambition to become a poet, and the future looks as bleak as the desert that he and Lupe continue to roam.
Like García Madero, the antitype of Belano, Belano himself comes to recognize that the frame of his literary interest—visceral realism or any literary program—affords too narrow a perspective on what is really visceral in a person’s experience. As a character remarks about one seriocomic episode, “It gave us a glimpse of ourselves in our common humanity. It wasn’t proof of our idle guilt but a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence.” That is the real savagery of The Savage Detectives.
Review Sources
Booklist 103, nos. 9/10 (January 1-15, 2007): 47.
Globe and Mail, June 9, 2007, p. D10.
Harper’s Magazine 314 (April, 2007): 99-106.
Los Angeles Times, April 8, 2007, p. R5.
The New Republic 236, no. 15 (May 7, 2007): 53-55.
The New York Times 156 (April 12, 2007): E6.
The New York Times Book Review 156 (April 15, 2007): 1-11.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 17, 2007, p. H5.
Publishers Weekly 253, no. 49 (December 11, 2007): 42.
The Washington Post, April 8, 2007, p. D1.