Roberto Bolano's novel, The Savage Detectives, has received nearly universal praise. I didn't realize just how much until I finished the thing and then googled it to see what everyone else thought.
Bolano could write. That is a sentence of fact, and I think that yes, it is indisputable. There's not much point in analyzing the fact yet again, since so many others have already done it completely satisfactorily.
But The Savage Detectives is not a perfect novel. The middle section is way too long, and at times almost lost me. And I would like to see Bolano write about something other than minor Latin American writers and writers' scenes. (The "visceral realists" of the novel are an inconsequential group of poets in Mexico City in the 1970s, taken way too seriously. The other book of his that I've read, Last Evenings On Earth, is full of short stories about mostly Chilean writers exiled from their homeland. I'd add that I found Last Evenings to be the superior work.)
But rather than make an argument for Bolano, or try to pick apart his few flaws, I'm just going to print some of my favorite quotes and passages from The Savage Detectives, and hope that their brilliance is not obscured by the lack of context:
For no apparent reason, my heart was broken. --p.31
Drink up, boys, drink up and don't worry, if we finish this bottle we'll go down and buy another one. Of course, it won't be the same as the one we've got now, but it'll be better than nothing. Ah, what a shame they don't make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time passes, don't you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us. --pp.184-185
Now let's take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He's the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther. --p.208
And then something even more surprising occurred to me. I thought: my glasses have fallen off. I thought: until a moment ago I didn't know I wore glasses. I thought: now I can perceive change. --p.405
These were the days of deep soul-searching. And yet, at the same time, I have to admit, nothing mattered to me... --p.412
A little creepy, isn't it? Sublime, in a way, but creepy too. Like all crazy loves, don't you think? If you add infinity to infinity, you get infinity. If you mix the sublime and the creepy, what you end up with is creepy. Right? --p.450
What, haven't you ever seen a chick like me? No, he said, never. He was pretty honest, but it was the kind of honesty that makes you not know whether to feel offended or flattered. --p.543
When he got to the hospital everything seemed submerged in a kind of hideous normality and that's when he knew the end had come. --p.579
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