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Sunday, December 13th, 2009
I checked The Savage Detectives out from the library yesterday and started reading it. (This may have been a foolish decision: it looks as of 20 pages in, as if this book is going to devour my consciousness utterly, and for a long time; when I had been planning to spend the next two weeks working on an essay about Pamuk.) What joy! Every page is just delightful. But here's the thing: on nearly every page, Bolaño is telling me about source material that I ought to read if I want to really understand where he is coming from. For example, on November 8, Madero writes: "I've discovered an amazing poem. They never said anything about its author, Efrén Rebolledo, in any of our literature classes," and goes on to quote El vampiro -- he says it haunts him in the same way as his reading of Pierre Louÿs -- and then on November 10, at the end of a truly breathtaking scene, he mentions 9 books that the 3 visceral realists he has met are carrying:
- Manifeste électrique aux paupiers de jupes -- an edition of poetry by "Michel Bulteau, Matthieu Messagier, Jean-Jacques Faussot, Jean-Jacques Nguyen That, and Gyl Bert-Ram-Soutrenom F.M., and other poets of the Electric Movement, our French counterparts (I think)."
- Sang de satin, by Michel Bulteau
- Nord d'éte naître opaque, by Mattieu Messagier
- Le parfait criminel, by Alain Jouffroy
- Le pays où tout est permis, by Sophie Podolski
- Cent mille milliards de poèmes, by Raymond Queneau
- Little Johnny's Confession, by Brian Patten
- Tonight at Noon, by Adrian Henri
- The Lost Fire Brigatde, by Spike Hawkins
So much new! Most of these authors I have not even heard of, much less read. (In this I find a point of identification with Madero, who at 17 is discovering poetry.)
 A few more authors, from November 14: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is one of the earliest Mexican poets (unrelatedly, I am entranced by Madero's line from November 7, "I finished Aphrodite, the book by Louÿs, and now I'm reading the dead Mexican poets, my future colleagues.") -- RodrÃguez wanted to name the visceral realists' magazine after her; and Laura Damián is (according to RodrÃguez) "a poetess who died before she turned twenty, in 1972, and her parents established a prize in her memory."
posted morning of December 13th, 2009: 3 responses
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I was telling a friend today how much I'm loving The Savage Detectives and how he ought to take a look at it, and came up with: "Imagine if Jack Kerouac had been 30 years younger and lived in Mexico City." Interesting -- this is the second time I've been trying to describe Bolaño and come up with a Beat point of reference. (Previously I described one of his poems as sounding like Ginsberg.)
posted evening of December 13th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, December 14th, 2009
I've noticed several times Bolaño's statement that he was "less embarrassed" by his poetry than by his novels -- don't remember where I first read that, but it was recently referenced at MobyLives -- it crossed my mind today when I remembered his poem about Lupe in The Romantic Dogs: She worked in la Guerrero, a few streets down from Julian's,
and she was 17 and had lost a son.
The memory made her cry in that Hotel Trébol room, ... -- very similar material to what he will later write about Lupe in The Savage Detectives. And the funny thing is, that poem seemed to me like about the weakest one in The Romantic Dogs, whereas the writing about Lupe in the novel is strong and resonant. Not sure exactly what to make of that... Perhaps that Bolaño wrote his fiction best as prose, that his best work as a poet was not narrative; perhaps that this poem was a rough draft for a characterization in the novel?
 Update: ...or another possibility, that The Romantic Dogs does not contain Bolaño's strongest poetry work at all -- this is the assertion made by Chad Post in today's edition of Making the Translator Visible -- Post interviews Erica Mena, translator of (among other things) Bolaño's poem "Tales from the Autumn in Gerona," which will be published in the March issue of Words Without Borders [link] and which Mena and (tentatively) Post find to be much better than the poems in The Romantic Dogs. Something to look forward to, certainly.
posted evening of December 14th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
Scott McLemee has an interview with Marcela Valdes -- whose essay Alone Among the Ghosts prefaces the newly published volume of Bolaño's non-fiction -- at Inside Higher Ed today, on the subject of the new book and Bolaño's writing in general, and his current popularity. Asked about the "Bolaño myth", Valdes observes, "The fact that American publishers have used Bolaño's life story to sell his books? Is this really a mortal sin? The book industry is in such terrible shape these days that publishers are trying everything to sell books." -- this is a nice perspective, a good way to step back from the dire imprecations of Castellanos Moya... McLemee quotes a line from Bolaño's Playboy interview; when asked about his feelings on posthumous works, he responded, "Posthumous? It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that's what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage." -- I had not realized this: Bolaño had been battling the disease which would kill him since the early 90's, which means a great deal of his corpus, including The Savage Detectives, was written under the shadow of death. I wonder what led the interviewer to ask that question -- was Bolaño's health public knowledge? It seems almost indelicate... Earlier today I happened on his The Many Masks of Max Mirebelais at Words Without Borders -- it is one of the biographical sketches that make up Nazi Literature in the Americas. Its closing line comes across as extremely dark given the knowledge of its author's health: "Death found [Mirebelais] composing the posthumous works of his heteronyms." Based on this excerpt, Nazi Literature in the Americas looks like an extremely demanding read -- if anything moreso than The Savage Detectives; I think my understanding of the passage is really severely hampered by not being familiar with the poets he mentions (and of course by being familiar in only a limited, general way with Haiti's modern history).
posted evening of December 16th, 2009: 2 responses
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Sunday, December 20th, 2009
I'm wondering how many of the characters in The Savage Detectives are real people from Bolaño's cohort in D.F. in the mid-70's. According to infrarrealismo.com, Ulises Lima is based on Mexican poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro*; clearly Arturo Belano is Bolaño himself. I am assuming GarcÃa Madero is made-up, and that the Font family must be based at least loosely on real people. The rest of the Visceral Realists must be a mix of real poets and inventions...
 * Oops, and Papasquiaro is itself a pen name, just as Ulises Lima is; the poet's actual name is José Alfredo Zendejas Pineda -- that Wiki page also lists a number of other poets who are presumably represented in The Savage Detectives.
posted morning of December 20th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, December 25th, 2009
...So instead of writing that futile piece this week, I spent my time absorbed in reading The Savage Detectives. Lots to say about it! One thing I was wondering about pretty constantly was, who is the documentarian who is compiling the narratives that make up the middle portion of the book? It can't really be Belano or Lima for various reasons. It would be nice if it were GarcÃa Madero, but that does not seem plausible either. (It is interesting to notice that GarcÃa Madero is almost entirely absent from this middle section -- the only time his name is mentioned is by the Mexican professor who's publishing a book about the Visceral Realists, to say that he does not recognize the name. But who is he talking to?) One way to look at this middle section which does not require the presence of an archivist, is as a collection of short stories -- many of the narratives stand up on their own as short stories, and the linking, interweaving threads shared between them serve to draw the reader through the collection.
posted evening of December 25th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, December 26th, 2009
It's 1976 and the revolution has been defeated
but we've yet to find out.
We are 22, 23 years old.
Mario Santiago and I walk down a black and white street.
At the end of the street, in a neighborhood straight out of a fifties film, sits the house of DarÃo Galicia's parents.
It's the year 1976 and they've trepanned DarÃo Galicia's skull.
Another thing I spent a lot of mental energy on while reading The Savage Detectives, was on wondering how closely the events being narrated corresponded to actual events in the lives of Bolaño and his crowd. For example the poem "Visit to the Convalescent" from The Romantic Dogs narrates a visit Roberto and Mario Santiago make to the house of their friend, DarÃo Galicia, after he has surgery for an aneurysm. It reads like memoir, like something that really happened... In The Savage Detectives, Angélica Font tells the story of Ernesto San Epiphanio's convalescence and eventual death following his brain surgery at the end of 1977, by which time Arturo is in Barcelona and Ulises either in Europe or Israel, I'm not sure which, but in no position to visit Ernesto. So as I'm reading I'm wondering what changes have been made and what the reasoning is... Is Ernesto's character based on DarÃo? Or is Bolaño just using an event from DarÃo's life to tell a story that is much more about Angélica than about Ernesto, a relatively minor character? From poking around with Google it's clear that much of the broad framework of the story is true to life -- it would be interesting to learn where the story diverges from life.
posted afternoon of December 26th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
So here is something I find frustrating about La sombra del viento -- it is seeming to me like way too much time is given over to Daniel's longings for female companionship. I understand that he's an 18-year-old kid, and one who has never kissed a girl, and he's going to be spending a lot of time thinking about that -- I can identify quite easily with that head -- but it just seems lamely cartoonish when every woman he interacts with is described in superlative terms as the most beautiful woman he's ever seen. Particularly annoying when he presents himself as such an ingenu, it seems like there are very labored descriptions of the beauty of women's faces and how he wants to kiss them but no acknowledgement of anything else. GarcÃa Madero's constant harping on his virginity in part I of The Savage Detectives could get annoying certainly but at least he was up front about what he wanted.
Le hablé de mi primera visita al Cementario de los Libros Olvidados y de la noche que pasé leyendo La Sombra del Viento. Le hablé de mi encuentro con el hombre sin rostro y de aquella carta firmada por Penélope Aldaya que llevaba siempre conmigo sin saber por qué. Le hablé de cómo nunca habÃa llegado a besar a Clara Barceló, ni a nadie, y de cómo me habÃan temblado las manos al sentir el roce do los labios de Nuria Monfort en la piel apenas unas horas atrás.I told her about my first visit to the Graveyard of Forgotten Books and about the night which I had spent reading The Shadow of the Wind. I told her about my encounter with the faceless man and about that card bearing Penelope Aldaya's signature which I kept with me always, without knowing why. I told her how I had never gotten to kiss Clara Barceló, nor anybody, and how my hands had trembled brushing against the lips of Nuria Monfort just a few hours before.
See I can't quite picture him relating these particular details of his saga to Bea, the current object of his infatuation, as he's telling her about the mystery of Carax.
posted evening of January 20th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, April 10th, 2010
We're back from vacation! Pictures soon. I have a whole lot of new reading material on hand... While we were in Modesto I visited my childhood hangout Yesterday's Books (it seemed so much smaller...) and got a cheap copy of Paradise Lost, which Mark (on Good Friday!) convinced me I ought to read. It certainly is easy to read -- not sure how much I am getting out of it, but it rolls in through my eyes quite easily. In San Francisco we visited Ellen's old friend Maryam, who gave us copies of her new book Returning to Iran -- a look at events there from an expatriate's eye. Reading the first few pieces I am interested and looking forward to the rest.
Also in SF, I visited Libros Latinos on Mission and 17th, and picked up a bunch of books. They are a used book store specializing in Spanish and Portuguese lit with (seemingly) an academic target market. Definitely worth dropping in if you are in the area, a beautiful selection. I got:
- Prólogos con un prólogo de prólogos by Borges -- forewords that he has written for a wide variety of books, published in 1974. Cervantes, Whitman, Swedenborg, MartÃn Fierro, Ray Bradbury(!), his own translation of Kafka...
- MartÃn Fierro -- no idea if I will ever actually get to the point of understanding this, it seemed like a nice book to have on hand while I'm trying to understand Borges.
- Putas asesinos by Bolaño
- The black sheep and other fables by Augusto Monterroso (who will be the first author Bolaño has hipped me to) -- these are pleasant little fables about (mainly) animals. The blurbs on the back, from GarcÃa Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Isaac Asimov(!), might be the most compelling pull-quotes I've ever seen.
- I did not buy, because of the price, Borges Laberintos DruÄmelić, which is "The Immortal" and "The Circular Ruins" illustrated with stunning color plates of the paintings of Zdravko DruÄmelić -- if you're looking to buy me a present, look no further.
- The steep markdown which Libros Latinos offers on cash transactions meant I still had enough money in my pocket to stop at Nueva LibrerÃa México down the street and get a copy of Don Quixote.
...Arrived home lugging a big bag of books (Ellen and Sylvia also did some book shopping on the trip), and found on my doorstep a book I had ordered a while back from a used-book seller, Raul Galvez' From the Ashen Land of the Virgin: conversations with Bioy Casares, Borges, Denevi, Etchecopar, Ocampo, Orozco, Sabato. My shelves are full!
posted evening of April 10th, 2010: 2 responses
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Friday, April 16th, 2010
In "Last Evenings on Earth," there's some ambiguity about the nature of the book B is reading. It's identified as a book of French Surrealist poetry with pictures and brief bios of the authors; but the long paragraph about Gui Rosey's disappearance reads like a summary of the book, and the book being summarized sounds more like Savage Detectives than like a brief biographical sketch. Perhaps what is being summarized is what's going on in B's imagination as he reads...
posted evening of April 16th, 2010: Respond
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