Bolaño

I don't know if I can match the reviews, but I finished Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and would now like to recommend it to everyone I know. I am excited, first of all, to have found a book that I'm able to recommend to anyone at all; most of the novels I enjoy are difficult to read and hard to sell. What I think lends this book its appeal is that there are no literary barriers to entry: The prose is conversational, made up of nearly 50 different narrators who tell their stories as if they are being interviewed on the street or on a bus. The off-the-cuff vibe of the novel is deceptive, of course: It is an intricately woven narrative about poetry, politics and sex, among other things; and the author was a spiritual disciple of Borges. There are ongoing references to the Latin American literary scene that will be lost on English-speaking readers, but that is just background that's not essential to enjoying or understanding the story. Bolaño does all the work so we don't have to, creating a reading experience that is effortless.

I won't say a lot about the plot, because there isn't much of a plot. We follow several young aspiring poets who drink and do drugs in Mexico City in the 1970s, and in the next two decades they go their separate ways into Paris, Barcelona, West Africa and elsewhere. The main character is an alter ego of the author, who, in real life, was born in Chile, spent time in Mexico and died in Europe five years ago. We do not ever hear directly from his perspective, but only from various people who knew him; and so, as in Virginia Woolf novels, our perception of the main character shifts depending on who is talking. Just like in Faulkner, every narrator has a distinct voice; and as far as I can tell, the translation is a work of genius. (And yet: An article in the New York Review of Books did point out that "it is probably impossible to make Mexican Spanish sound like Mexican English." No me vengas con chingaderas is translated as "don't give me this crap.")

But I am already trying to explain this book like an English major, which is exactly the wrong approach. I think any intelligent person would enjoy this novel, particularly those in my generation, and especially people who hated English classes, and maybe even people who don't like to read books. There is an old interview with David Foster Wallace where he said it was pointless to blame the public for a general lack of interest in serious fiction: If a book does not gain a following, he said, it is because "it doesn't speak to us." I can say without hesitation that The Savage Detectives speaks to us. The translator's introduction expresses the hope that it will get American readers excited about a modern strain of Latin American literature that has little in common with the Magical Realist classics of an earlier generation. It may also help people get excited about literature in general.

A translation of Bolaño's last novel, 2666, is forthcoming. One reviewer described it as "one of the great novels of my [Spanish] language, a raging monster of a book; the rest of Bolaño's work pales in comparison." I really can hardly wait.