Time in a Bottle

Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano have made it to Europe, at the point I've gotten to thus far, and Ulises Lima farther than that, to Tel Aviv. Today I want to talk a little bit about how the oral history structure of the book is working, and how that contributes to the way, discussed earlier, in which Our Guys are got at peripherally, rather than head-on. First a note on what it is not: every once in a while, when someone says something particularly nice about Arturo Belano, I am tempted to think what I have been told is sometimes thought, viz., this looks like a way for Bolaño to sneak in some nice things about himself, like Norman Mailer's huffing and puffing about "Norman Mailer" in the Armies of the Night, or anything that has to do with Agent Michael Scarn. But I don't think so. I don't have a really definite reason for why I don't think so; maybe it's just because I haven't read the introduction, and don't yet know how narrowly or widely the life of Belano differs from the life of Bolaño.

But I mention this because it is, critically, not that displacement strategy which I think is served by the oral history. Now, to be disclose-y, I am not what you'd call an oral history expert; the only other one I have read is Rant by Chuck Palahniuk which, like the Savage Detectives, is totally made up. What I think Bolaño is doing, and doing better than Palahniuk does in Rant, is to create different time signatures. The passages that made up Rant tended to be roughly the same size, and passed not chronologically as far as the events related were concerned, but seemed presented chronologically with their telling. Not so with the Savage Detectives. So far, I have sorted out three kinds of passage: one, the self-contained stories, like Auxilio Lacouture on her activities during '68 or Norman Bolzman talking about Ulises Lima in Tel Aviv; then, the running commentaries that keep pace with Our Guys, like those by Quim Font and his daughters, or Luis Sebastian Rosado, whose years of comment keep ticking up; and then, by itself, the very long description of an encounter with Arturo Belano and Felipe Muller that we get, alway from 1976, from Amadeo Salvatierra. That last one, in particular, is probably one on which to keep an eye.

As usual, these ideas are inchoate, and consist mostly of notes and very little of judgments (beyond the fact that, given that I am now reading this book at a rather fast pace, they appear to be working). But so. There's something about the Savage Detectives to bear in mind. Until to-morrow, friends.

Los Detectivos Salvajes: (Upside Down Exclamation Point)Primera Vista!

So what's going on in the Book Club Book, you ask, having remembered that it is Roberto Bolano's the Savage Detectives, translated into English by Natasha Wimmer? Not a lot. As far as I know, I and Blood are reading it actively, and we have slight commitments from the Dudebrodawgman's father, which is good, but anyway here comes a CAVALCADE OF SPOILERS so sit back.

I'm 140 or so pages into the book, which has been narrated by a guy named Juan Garcia Madero, who is usually called by his friends the Poet Garcia Madero. i do not want to hang out with the Poet Garcia Madero, but that's ok, because he is about to be relieved of narrative duties. What will continue, I know from reviews, is a bunch of different narrators will take over and slowly tell us more and more about the Main Event of this novel, the chief visceral realists, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. Even if you hadn't read the reviews, you would know that these guys are ones on whom to keep an eye, given that a) they always show up as a unit and b) the latter guy has a name that looks a whole lot like Roberto Bolano's name. This is maybe one of the few times I have wondered why a writer would throw such an obvious reminder of himself into a text and come up with an almost immediate answer: in a book in which the most important people are only seen peripherally, it's a heck of an effective way to get us to remember that he's important. And that might make Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano the coolest people I've ever seen in a piece of writing.

They show up occasionally in Garcia Madero's diary, which is more about women that he has slept with. The bounce in and out, usually making oracular claims like that the visceral realists walk "backward, gazing at a point in the distance, but moving away from it, walking straight toward the unknown." Garcia Madero:

I said I thought this sounded like the perfect way to walk. The truth was I had no idea what he was talking about. If you stop and think about it, it's no way to walk at all.

Too true, pedestrian Garcia Madero. And that's the whole point of these guys: marked with his author's name, Arturo Belano and his friend maintain their haunting, outrageously cool auras, models of coolness cooler than real people, or even real head-on characters in a novel could ever be. They are just too cool. Do you guys think so? I mean, every time I read about them much I want to grab one and maybe two friends of mine and move somewhere -- Vancouver, Tucson, Buenos Aires, anywhere far away -- and sit on curbs and smoke Camels and talk about books. It was brought to my attention that that was just what I wanted to do all of the time, which is not true, because as you know, some other non-book stimuli make me want to be drunk, rather than talking about books in Tucson. I am intrigued to see whether or not Bolano can keep this up; throughout the rest of this long book, whether or not is possible for mystique to be sustained for so long. Also, can people maintain being this cool while being way into poetry? Brian Blood says no. Next time I talk about the Savage Detectives, one of these days, I will tell you about the poetry angle that Blood finds so silly. Til then, patriots.