The Savage Detectives Reread 9780231550659

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The Savage De t e c t i ve s Rere a d RE R EA DI N GS

REREADINGS EDITED BY NICHOLAS DAMES AND JENNY DAVIDSON

Short and accessible books by scholars, writers, and critics, each one revisiting a favorite post-1970 novel from the vantage point of the now. Taking a look at novels both celebrated and neglected, the series aims to display the full range of the possibilities of criticism, with books that experiment with form, voice, and method in an attempt to find different paths among scholarship, theory, and creative writing. Vineland Reread, Peter Coviello A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread, Ivan Kreilkamp To Write as if Already Dead, Kate Zambreno

The Savage Detectives REREAD

DAV ID KURNIC K

COLUMBIA UNIVERSIT Y PRESS

New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kurnick, David, 1972– author. Title: The savage detectives reread / David Kurnick. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2022] | Series: Rereadings | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021036131 (print) | LCCN 2021036132 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231194105 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231194112 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231550659 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Bolaño, Roberto, 1953-2003. Detectives salvajes. Classification: LCC PQ8098.12.O38 D4835 2022 (print) | LCC PQ8098.12.O38 (ebook) | DDC 863/.64— dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2021036131 LC ebook record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2021036132 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky Cover illustration: Jessica W. Schwartz

For Luann and John

CONT ENTS

INTRODUCTION  1

Games of Taste • Time to Read • Nonoptional • Normal People • The Map and the Territory

I . M E XI C A N S LO S T I N M E XI CO ( 1 975)  3 5 SOME NEIGHBORHOODS OF PART I  73

Fucking psychopaths • Poetesses • Maricones • Putas • “Octavio Paz” • Literalism, or poetry • Los infra

I I . T H E SAVAG E D E T E C TI V E S ( 1 976 – 1 9 9 6)   8 6 SOME MICROCLIMATES OF PART II  136

Maybe this, maybe that • The clown car and the ark • Poetesses II • Maricones II • Vaya nombrecito • Ulises continental • (Historically real) • An atlas of the novel • A space odyssey

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I I I . T H E D E S E R T S O F S O N O R A ( 1 976 )   1 5 5 Fading Signals • An Invisible Day • Myth and Demystification • Coyotes • Games • The Edge of Empire • How to Read Donald Duck • Windows • A Twist in Reality • Noncommunicating Vessels • Hapax legomenon CODA  179

Acknowledgments 185 Notes 187 Index 203

The Savage De t e c t i ve s Rere a d

I N T RO D U C T I O N

GAMES OF TASTE

A

few years ago, I attended an academic conference where a prominent scholar of Latin American literature announced that he hated The Savage Detectives, a novel he considered overwritten and overrated. The statement provoked enthusiastic hooting from the back of the room, as if in glee at a taboo being broken. At the coffee break, I approached the critic and confessed I was a fan of the novel. Bolaño is a one-trick pony, he replied, and his trick is to parody and empty out the genres of Latin American literature—the dictator novel, the novela negra, the novel of testimony, and so on. This trick organized his writing at the level of the sentence, the chapter, and the novel. I said this sounded like an interesting trick, at least; he conceded that it was true Bolaño was a master at this exercise—but once you saw the trick there was nothing else, and hispanophone writers were no longer interested in his work. He claimed, happily, that the Latin American sales of Bolaño’s books were down. I asked him why he thought U.S. readers who mostly lacked familiarity with these Latin American literary traditions WCOVER OF LOS DETECTIVES SALVAJES, EDITORIAL ANAGRAMA, COMPACTOS SERIES.

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had embraced Bolaño. This, he told me, was the result of a clever marketing campaign: Bolaño’s big books had been released alongside new editions of Kerouac, and American readers were encouraged to understand the Chilean writer as a Southern Cone Beat. I expressed skepticism: Did anyone remember that marketing campaign? Was Kerouac selling well? My interlocutor was losing patience. Critics love Bolaño, he said, because they can pour whatever theory they please into his work. He told me Bolaño’s work was an excuse for American readers not to read any other Latin American literature. When you read The Savage Detectives you’re not enjoying yourself, he said, as much as you think you are. There was a lot going on. I was struck by the high-handedness of these proclamations, but I wasn’t sure they were wrong. This uncertainty was partly just a matter of how artistic judgment works. Taste, precisely because it’s an intensely subjective matter we feel compelled to make others agree with, is awash in bad feeling. The buzzkill always has the advantage over the ardent fan, an advantage the literary theorist Gérard Genette called the “authority of the negative.” The question “How can you like this?” is, he noted, always more disturbing than “How can you dislike this?” The quickest way out of this bad feeling is to imitate your naysayer: surrender your taste, learn to despise, or to believe that you despise, what you had previously enjoyed. (More bad feeling, of a new variety, ensues.) In my case, the bad feeling was as much a matter of geopolitics as of aesthetics. My enjoyment of Bolaño wasn’t quite real, my new acquaintance said, and the part of it that felt real was a function of American ignorance. The conversation didn’t end my pleasure in Bolaño, but it stayed with me. It crystallized something that was becoming visible in the academic and academy-adjacent social worlds I inhabit: Bolaño, and especially The Savage Detectives, had become

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shorthand for a certain brand of American cluelessness. In a 2018 essay in n+1, Nicolás Medina Mora, a Mexico City native living in the United States, reported on a trip home during which he sat in a café listening to an expat gringo couple discuss plans to rent a house on Oaxaca’s beach-lined coast. Medina Mora invents their backstory: they’re bien-pensant gentrifiers, the kind of people who insist on calling their Brooklyn neighborhood by the Spanish name used by the Puerto Ricans they’ve displaced. Soon it becomes clear that their enclave is being overrun by finance types, and they decide to push on to fresh frontiers. “They were getting tired of going to magazine parties and gallery galas where they disliked most of the people. And then one day he stumbled on his old copy of The Savage Detectives and found himself thinking: Why don’t we just move to Mexico City?” Medina Mora doesn’t say Bolaño’s novel is bad. But he suggests that it’s peculiarly liable to being liked in bad ways. A lot of Bolaño skepticism turned on this fine distinction. In the academic world, a 2009 essay by Sarah Pollack, a specialist in Latin American literature, offered a carefully argued version of Medina Mora’s point. Pollack made it clear she considers Bolaño a writer of “genius,” but maintained that this was only one component in the runaway anglophone success of The Savage Detectives. Pollack claimed that Bolaño’s compelling biography—his youthful wanderings and poetic experimentation, his experience of Pinochet’s dictatorship, his death at fifty, just a few years after he began to achieve massive international recognition—had played a part in his renown. So had his press’s publicity campaign: Bolaño’s previously translated work had all been brought out by New Directions, the independent publisher with a pedigree in foreign and experimental fiction, but the contract for The Savage Detectives had gone to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which had a bigger marketing budget. FSG decorated the novel’s jacket with a photo

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of Bolaño at twenty, long-haired and skinny and standing on what looks like a Mexico City rooftop. This picture, Pollack wrote, was “a nostalgic memento that for U.S. readers evokes the rebellious counterculture of the sixties and seventies,” and it facilitated the reception of the novel as escapist fantasy: “Thanks to Bolaño, U.S. readers can vicariously relive the best of the seventies, fascinated with the notion of a Latin America still latent with such possibilities.” Pollack wasn’t wrong about the exoticism characterizing much of the anglophone reception of Bolaño. The worst offender may have been a New York Times piece on Between Parentheses, the 2011 English translation of Bolaño’s 2004 collection of essays and talks. The book showed Bolaño to have been a searching reader of a large swath of world literature (page through it and you’ll find discussions of Baudelaire, Borges, Highsmith, and the Goncourt brothers; Pepys, Perec, Piñera, and Walt Whitman). But the Times writer, a normally thoughtful Dwight Garner, sounded as if he were reviewing The Mark of Zorro: “The swashbuckling Bolaño could declaim and brawl at the same time,” he proclaimed. “He was a lover and a fighter.” Reading Between Parentheses, Garner averred, was “not like sitting through an air-conditioned seminar with the distinguished Señor Bolano. It’s like sitting next to him, the jukebox playing dirty flamenco, after he’s consumed a platter of Pisco Sours. You may wish to make a batch yourself before you step onto the first page.” (The online version takes this last limp joke weirdly literally, offering a hyperlink to Epicurious’s recipe for the frothy beverage.) There is indeed an unbuttoned quality to Bolaño’s style, but it hardly demanded this cartoonish rhetoric. It was difficult not to feel that the panLatin whateverness of Garner’s review expressed a particular condescension to Spanish-language writing—hard to imagine

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the Times recommending Manischewitz to accompany your Roth, a wheel of brie with your Houellebecq. Such patronizing praise could obviously tell nobody much of interest about Bolaño as a writer. But just for this reason, I was wary of letting the critique of the Bolaño phenomenon stand in for a reading of Bolaño—wary, that is, of letting an interpretation of this novelist’s work be captive to the stupidest things some Americans had said about it. As a fan, I of course had my own reasons not to want to see myself in Pollack’s and Medina Mora’s diagnoses. But beyond my own investments, there were questions to be asked about the logic of their arguments. As often in criticism that speculates about audience motivation, the interpretive claims didn’t always follow cleanly from the established facts: Who knows how many readers of The Savage Detectives bought the book because they saw the author photo? Who can say whether those readers wanted, as Pollack claimed, to “relive the best of the seventies” (whatever that was, and if they had lived through them the first time), and whether that fantasy took them through the novel’s 647 pages? More striking still was the way these writers black-boxed their own assessment of Bolaño’s work while they attended to the reviews, blurbs, and promotional material that sold or distorted it. Even when they explicitly claimed admiration for his work, the arguments about Bolaño’s bad readers seemed to hint that the author himself was at fault. The suggestion was crystallized in Pollack’s “thanks to Bolaño,” with its ambiguous sense that the novelist had engineered the misreadings, or at least not armored his work against them. Soon I saw this slippery sense of causality everywhere. In 2015, the translator and critic Veronica Esposito reiterated the worry that Bolaño— a writer she loved—was loved by American readers for the wrong reasons.

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Bolaño’s major novels, Esposito wrote, “played off liberal American politics and curiosity about our Latin American neighbors”— a formulation suggesting that the books had been purpose-built to cater to Americans (in addition to intimating that curiosity about other parts of the world is blameworthy). Esposito’s verbs did a lot of quiet conflating, so that the work’s success was consistently described as the author’s plan: Bolaño didn’t just become a best-selling author but “was able to take advantage of and become a major commodity”; in a global market favoring books that could be translated with relative ease, “Bolaño turned such a style to his advantage”; in a literary field increasingly defined by well-publicized international prizes, “Bolaño both anticipated and profited from these developments.” You don’t have to believe in the disinterested purity of The Artist to be struck by these critics’ faith in their demystifying logic: the suggestion is not just that most successful writers angle for success but that Bolaño’s big success was the result of his big skill as an angler. The picture that emerges is of a canny selfmarketer. This logic—whereby suspicion of the work’s readers shades into disdain for the writer—reached its oddest moment in a 2009 essay entitled “Questions for Bolaño” by the eminent scholar of Latin American literature Jean Franco. The piece’s inquisitorial title was a rhetorical gesture: Bolaño, dead six years at the time of the essay’s publication, was evidently not going to be responding to these questions anytime soon. The essay is nonetheless incisive about the formal and political meaning of his work. Franco establishes the kinship of The Savage Detectives with formally jumpy, art- and politics-obsessed novels by Julio Cortázar and Roque Dalton; she is acute, and dubious, about what she calls Bolaño’s “romantic anarchist” politics—his preoccupation with friendship as the most meaningful unit of social and ethical life, the absence in his fictional worlds of explicit

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appeals to state reform, a fatalism that can feel apolitical. But the essay’s ambivalence goes beyond the usual scholarly skepticism; its insights are laced with animus. Near the opening, Franco describes Bolaño’s major novels as “two huge teasers”—a description she awards because of their failure to reach traditional closure (a peccadillo commonplace in most twentieth-century experimental fiction). She jokes that his prolificness in life and the steady pace of posthumous publication make it reasonable to “suspect that Bolaño may not be a person but a company.” Finally, after noting that Bolaño is popular in a moment in which “Twitter replaces commentary,” Franco jumps to the startling claim that “Bolaño has turned illusion into a doctrine, twitter [sic] into a life project.” Never mind that Bolaño died three years before Twitter’s debut. The retrocausal logic of Franco’s swipe makes this writer not only a wily PR genius, shilling his product from beyond the grave, but a posthumous devotee of one of the twentyfirst century’s more toxic media inventions. Other writers followed suit. There was a piece decrying the “Bolaño Myth,” another warning of the “Roberto Bolaño Bubble.” The latter, in the New Republic, regretted high-mindedly that when such a small percentage of books published in English is translated from other languages— 3 percent is the commonly floated number, 0.7 percent if you just count literary fiction and poetry—Bolaño was taking up more than his fair share, especially with the posthumous publications: “We have enough,” the piece concluded. Worse, this writer claimed, Bolaño’s popularity had “hidden costs,” among them the risk that anglophone readers will think “that he is the only Latin American writer of importance to emerge” since García Márquez. A curious cultural protectionism suffused these responses, a concern with a volatile product getting into the wrong hands. A kind of novelistic vibranium, Bolaño’s work apparently had the ability to obliterate

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continents of literature. This notion that the way to counteract American ignorance about Latin American literature would be to curb American enthusiasm for a major Latin American author was peculiar. That the Bolaño craze might result in increased interest in hispanophone writers among English readers was rarely mentioned as a possibility. (But as some of these same writers would later concede, there is a case to be made that this is just what happened: a host of writers about whom Bolaño had said nice things in print— César Aira, Rodrigo Fresán, Alan Pauls, Carmen Boullosa, Juan Villoro, Sergio Pitol, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Mario Bellatin, Andrés Neuman, Horacio Castellanos Moya—have arrived in English or seen the number of their books in English translation increase since his death, almost always with Bolaño’s stray comments used as jacket blurbs. And a host of writers too young for him to have read—Alejandro Zambra, Valeria Luiselli, Samanta Schweblin, Yuri Herrera, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Fernanda Melchor, Álvaro Enrigue, Guadalupe Nettel—have been published in English to widespread attention, in a wave of interest in Latin American literature that has been plausibly traced partly to Bolaño’s prominence.) And yet the skepticism remains intriguing despite the factual shakiness of some of its predictions. The wariness with which these writers expressed their admiration, the careening quality of their disdain—now aimed at American readers, now at publishers, now at Bolaño—all of it bespoke a distress that wasn’t utterly clear about its origins or meaning. A few lines in Esposito’s essay hinted at the emotional and political energies swirling around this crisis of taste. Decrying the romanticizing coverage of Bolaño’s death, in particular the speculation that the liver disease that killed him was the result of a (probably apocryphal) heroin addiction, Esposito strikes a satirical pose: “The writer who boldly leaps where none have leapt before, who mixes

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passion and love together into art. This is the Bolaño we love to read. . . . Our sweet hearts flutter at the thought of artists who ‘die too soon,’ and they absolutely purr for a man who lived a selfdestructive life because he wanted to.” Quite apart from the content of the claim, one notices the expression of self-contempt—parodically expressed but vivid nonetheless. I was unpleasantly sensitive to these tones of selfblame: He did die too soon, I thought to myself. What’s wrong with saying so? I was pretty sure Esposito felt the same way, scare quotes notwithstanding. Whence this eagerness to ridicule a fairly unremarkable sense of regret for the loss of a figure you admire? Why the desire to see literary appreciation under the most contemptible aspect? Rarely had the principle of de gustibus non est disputandum felt so disputable; rarely had the space for liking something felt so besieged by a worry over what that liking might say about you. If aesthetic judgment is particularly vulnerable to “games of influence” (Genette), the game here seemed to be operating according to rules nobody wanted to state openly. The sense you got was that it was embarrassing to be caught liking Bolaño, even if it was hard to say why. And in truth, I could relate. It was embarrassing to be an American who liked Bolaño, and not just because in doing so one may have become a dupe of marketers or indulged in exoticizing projections. It was embarrassing because, for anyone remotely alert to the distribution of world power, being American is itself embarrassing. And being an American consumer of cultural products from abroad underlines that geopolitical shame with an intellectual one: impossible to disburden oneself of the phantom image of the Ugly American, trampling over local customs, missing cultural cues, expressing even in one’s appreciative curiosity (especially there) an offensive entitlement. Even thus overdrawn, the picture has its basis in fact. As important, it

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forms an inevitable, if infrequently remarked, psychic accompaniment to any act of mildly self-aware North American crosscultural consumption: the American ignorance and arrogance exposed by the Bolaño skeptics was in no way surprising, as anyone who has participated in the competitive anti-Americanism among Americans abroad knows. For every asshole traipsing through Mexico City brandishing The Savage Detectives, there was someone else who knew enough to bury his copy deep in his luggage and, if asked, to pretend never to have heard of it.

TIME TO READ I too wanted to protect my experience of this writer. I began reading him in 2006, during a trip to Barcelona for which there was no real reason except that I had a place to stay. A friend who shared a rambling apartment with four or five roommates would be out of town for a few weeks and had offered the use of his room. The apartment was in the medieval city center, whose cramped streets were overrun with the kind of tourists I wished not to be taken for. My Spanish, of which I was proud, turned out to be a liability: more than once I was asked why I hadn’t bothered to study Catalan, a reproach that felt both unfair and humiliating. I dutifully saw and appreciated the sights, but really had no idea what I was doing there—my first and still most intense experience of the pointlessness of tourism. I spent a lot of time in the apartment trying to avoid the other tenants, who came and went according to the mysterious rhythms of a European summer, disappearing for days on end. I did finally have a conversation with one of the roommates, an anthropology student from Madrid. We coincided one morning in the tiny kitchen, on the table of which I’d noticed a copy

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of Bolaño’s 2666. I didn’t recognize the author or the title, but the book was arresting to look at: a brick of a thing, 1,125 pages bound in the gray of Anagrama’s Narrativas hispánicas collection—the drab color rendered ominous by the cover image of a distant female figure slouched on a folding chair at the edge of a field of dry, clumpy earth. The book never left the table, but I’d noticed a bookmark making its way through the pages. I asked the anthropology student if it was his. He said it was, that the book was newish, had appeared just after the author’s death in 2003, that everyone he knew was reading it, that it was disturbing and compelling. “I like it. I think. It’s really good.” Three distinct sentences. He sounded somehow appalled. I clearly remember him poking at the cover a little dubiously as he offered this praise, as if testing roadkill to see if it might still be breathing. We both watched the book, which listed a bit to the side as he did this. I still can’t say why, but these five minutes gave me a sense of direction in the city, the feeling of finally having something in particular to do. At the bookstore the next day, I was almost relieved to find that 2666 wasn’t in stock. Instead, I bought a 1997 short story collection called Llamadas telefónicas (Phone calls), also an Anagrama title but in the more colorful Compactos series—this one had an inviting purple cover. The purchase suited my ingrained preference to scope the foothills before trying an author’s “big” books. The first story in Llamadas, called “Sensini,” was strange and sad and also very funny, although there were no jokes. A first-person narrator, a young and broke Chilean writer living in Catalonia, enters a short-story contest sponsored by the small industrial city of Alcoi and picks up third place and a tenthousand-peseta prize. When he receives the prize booklet published by the municipality, he learns that second place has gone to the Argentine writer Sensini. The narrator admires the

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older man’s work, knows something of the leftism that has forced him into exile, and has guessed from details in his most recent story that his son may have been “disappeared” by the Argentine dictatorship. The narrator gets hold of Sensini’s Madrid address through the prize committee and writes him a letter about exile, art, the commerce in literature. Sensini responds warmly and urges the narrator to keep entering contests, as he plans to do. The setup is perfectly Borgesian, the concept pleasingly “high.” The two men, I thought, would engage in a set of writerly games, and ironies would coil inside ironies: as they write to each other via the postal system, they will write against each other via their submitted stories—the to and the against becoming harder to differentiate. Their status as writers and as exiles will unite and divide them. Does the narrator want to be Sensini’s disciple or to dethrone him? Is it quite decent to become someone’s artistic son when his real son has just been murdered? What meaning can the literary game sustain in the face of the political facts? I wasn’t wrong about any of this, exactly—the story delivers on all of these themes—but the power of “Sensini” was only half in the elegance of its premise. What most moved me was Bolaño’s willingness to stray from the structure he establishes. As the story winds on, its details have less and less to do with the “discussion questions” it seemed designed to elicit. We learn that Sensini has died after returning to Argentina. Later, his daughter Miranda contacts the narrator as she passes through Catalonia and tells him the details of the family’s fruitless attempt to find out what happened to her brother Gregorio. Sitting with her on his apartment’s balcony, the narrator tells Miranda that her father was “a very good writer,” an observation that provokes an impatient response—perhaps because the narrator’s judgment is presumptuous, perhaps because the very topic seems absurd in the context

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of their somber conversation. But she stays with him on the balcony, and the story ends with the narrator relaying the strange sensation that “from now on, imperceptibly, things would begin to change”— and his sudden realization that if Miranda is twenty-two, then he “must be over thirty.” Everything is equivocal; nothing quite fits the ironic symmetries of the story’s opening. Eventually it seems that this not-fitting is the point—that the emotional charge of “Sensini” consists precisely in feeling its structure crumble in the face of the accumulating facts. To be sure, the metafictional machinery snaps beautifully shut with the note at the bottom of the last page: “This story won the City of San Sebastián Narrative Prize, sponsored by the Kutxa Foundation.” But the laugh this provokes in the reader has nothing to do with our appreciation of an O. Henry–style irony clicking neatly into place. Instead, that very neatness has been infused with pathos by its juxtaposition with those disjointed final pages: there is order, “Sensini” seems to say, but only in the world outside the story. Only later would I understand the subtlety with which Bolaño thereby inverts our received idea of art as the place where the chaos of life is given structure: in finishing off his story with a real-world gesture of symmetry, Bolaño gives the fiction an uncanny aura of messy verisimilitude. The “facts” of the story—the narrator’s ambition, Sensini’s talent, Gregorio’s death, Miranda’s mysterious contempt, her equally mysterious patience—remain strangely untouched by the self-reflexive structure in which they are not quite contained. The story gives an almost unbearable sensation of realness, of something happening the way things really do happen. I could say “Sensini” is my favorite piece of Bolaño’s writing. But what I found there I found in everything else of his that I read: all of it radiated the same impression of reality, of what I

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thought of as gravity. Not in the sense of super-seriousness, although it felt serious enough—but in the sense of having a feel for how things are weighted, a sense of what was historically and personally important and what was less so, and a feel for what it’s like to move in the vicinity of such importance. Most mysteriously, the writing seemed in possession of some knowledge about how to weight its sentences in relation to those centers of gravity. (Later, I would come to feel that this sense of proportion has to do with Bolaño’s use of the paragraph, the building block of his narrative world, one that holds disparate materials in magical suspension.) In a way I couldn’t account for, those sentences felt, by the same token, suffused with compassion. This compassion enfolded the characters indiscriminately: the deterioration of structure meant that none of them were shoehorned into some narrative design. Indeed, it was hard to see what program this writing had, aside from paying attention, taking responsibility for what it recounted. Somehow those sentences also seemed to have factored the reader into their gravitational field. The writing was in no way showy, but it knew we were there. Probably the most efficient way to say this is that Bolaño saved my pointless vacation, took the ambient anxious nothingness out of a random Spanish month, and made me feel tied to the earth. At any rate, I kept reading him—slowly, in Spanish. I wasn’t sure that the almost literally riveting, grounding quality would survive in English. With a few exceptions (like the generically unclassifiable fever-dream of Amberes), the writing wasn’t particularly difficult: the syntax wasn’t tangled and the perspectival shifts were rarely disorienting. There was a lot of it, though, an  abundance for which I was grateful. Reading Bolaño was extracurricular, tangential to my job as a professor of nineteenthcentury English literature. And his work generated further

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reading lists: “Sensini” alone had been awash with names of writers, some familiar to me—Puig, Cortázar, Walsh—but many unknown and, for all I knew, fictional—Moyano, Conti, Gelman. I learned that these were real writers, that Sensini was a thin fictionalization of the novelist Antonio di Benedetto— and I had more to read. The privacy of this process was a large part of its appeal. I was alone with my ignorance and my interest, and I was learning a lot. But nobody was asking me to turn this reading to account, to be smart about it. I had embarked on this private project just as Bolaño was poised to become an unavoidable figure in the American literary world. Natasha Wimmer’s impressive translations of his major novels began appearing, it seemed, the minute I returned from Spain—The Savage Detectives in 2007 and 2666 in 2008. They were piled high in every bookstore, discussed in every newspaper. With superstitious avoidance, I refused to pay attention to any of it. I sensed both the massiveness of Bolaño’s popularity and the stirrings of the critique, but neither felt relevant to—in fact felt threatening to—what I cared about in this writer. The disjuncture was palpable even in the way the books looked in English, as if Bolaño’s American publishers had decided to invert whatever qualities the Spanish book-objects conveyed. When I finally got around to reading Anagrama’s 2666, the bookshops were filled with FSG’s beautiful box set, the novel split into three volumes splashed with Cy Twombly squiggles, a Gustave Moreau fantasia, and a set of vibrant corals painted by an eighteenth-century Dutch naturalist. All thematically appropriate, but hard to relate to the gray monster breathing in the Barcelona kitchen. The American edition of The Savage Detectives had a wan yellow cover, its title printed in a graffitiesque scrawl. The first page of the paperback featured the infamous “hippie” author photo. Nothing to do with my copy of Los

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detectives salvajes, an Anagrama Compacto in lurid red on which was centered a cheesy, sexy painting of three men dressed like Errol Flynn walking on a beach (the work of Jack Vettriano, a Scottish painter sometimes described as a soft-porn Norman Rockwell, who said the image was inspired by Reservoir Dogs). The kitschy image and its incorporation into the discreet and standardized Anagrama design gave the book a modest wryness I missed in the translated version, which I would only read and admire years later. I was aware of the sentimentality of this object fetishism, the snobbery of my attachment to what I thought of as the “originals” (themselves of course no innocent or pure products: by 2010, Anagrama, for decades a cultural power broker in the Spanish-language literary market, had been sold to the Italian giant Feltrinelli). But in the privacy of my Bolaño reading there was nobody I needed to tell about my vanity, and nobody to call me on it. So I kept reading, burrowing into my private encounter with an aesthetic object that, in some nearby realm I kept carefully outside my frame of vision, was apparently being talked to death. It was a curious experience of cultural parallax, and one that couldn’t last forever. Somewhere around 2010 I looked up from my reading and started to search out what had been said and written about Bolaño. Plenty of the commentary chimed with my experience of him, but just as much seemed to come from some other world. Myth, bubble, mania, Twitter: the very terms of the conversation felt off-key. Most disconcerting was the general tone of overfamiliarity, as if the work had been long ago absorbed, deciphered, depleted. We already know. We’re done here. We have enough. When had it all happened? My Barcelona roommate had intimated that whatever he thought about Bolaño would take a long time to figure out. In his expression of dismayed admiration, I had read the suggestion

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that I might have to take that time too. I’d just started reading him, and it was time to move on.

NONOPTIONAL When is the right time to read Bolaño? The question wasn’t mine alone. U.S. literary journalism, with its premium on knowing upto-dateness, had suggested that the Bolaño phenomenon could be rapidly assimilated and digested. A sector of the American academy had indicated, in its different way, that dwelling on his work was politically retrograde. But there were of course other voices willing to acknowledge that his career had posed a singular challenge to our sense of time—willing to say, for example, that the sheer pace at which Bolaño produced important work in the last years of his life was worth pausing over. The Chilean critic Leonidas Morales noted that “historically it has happened more often in poetry than in fiction” that a body of work has “managed to make use of such a brief span of time to come into being.” At Bolaño’s death, he continued, “it suddenly became apparent that nearly all of his narrative work . . . had been produced in the space of—barely a decade!” Morales was writing in 2008, five years after Bolaño’s death, and he still sounded startled. The pace was indeed almost unreal: Bolaño wrote fiction steadily from the end of the 1970s and published it sporadically. But between 1993 and 2003 two short-story collections and eight novels appeared—among them the gigantic The Savage Detectives. A year after his death, the even more daunting 2666 had arrived, along with another book of stories and a collection of his nonfiction. And the pace continued, with posthumous publication of works he’d produced in relative obscurity in the 1980s and unfinished work left at his death. Like Borges’s

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Aleph, infinity lodged in a Buenos Aires basement, Bolaño’s bibliography felt like a fantastical physics problem. Chris Andrews, the gifted translator of many of Bolaño’s shorter fictions, aptly likened this ever-burgeoning body of work to an “expanding universe.” Incredulity seemed the only appropriate response. This was only one of the ways Bolaño’s work seemed to make a fold in cultural space-time. If many American commentators mistrusted the marketing of Bolaño as the next big thing, for some prominent Latin American writers Bolaño’s work seemed not suspiciously new but strangely old-fashioned. In 1996, two years before the publication of The Savage Detectives, four young Mexican novelists had issued the “Crack Manifesto,” a document that lamented the sclerotic magical-realist aesthetic they claimed had prevailed in Latin American literature in the wake of the Boom. Jokey in tone, the manifesto nonetheless clearly meant to mark an event in literary-historical time (as had a parallel movement in Chile, named McOndo in facetious homage to García Márquez’s mythical city of Macondo). Jorge Volpi, a Crack cofounder who wrote a retrospective account of the movement in 2009, explained that the group had wanted to liberate itself not just from a particular aesthetic but from the burden of an outdated Latin Americanness. Younger Latin American writers— Volpi specified that he was thinking of “those born starting in the 1960s”—felt “no obligation to measure themselves against their Latin American parents or grandparents . . . and none felt that a  Latin American writer should appear, ay, Latin American.” Volpi’s rhetoric was one of negative liberty, a grateful catalogue of all the things younger writers didn’t have to worry about: they were “free of classifications, free of preconceptions, free of the heavy burden of being a Latin American writer,” “without the salvific or politicized tone of some of their precursors,” “without the aftertaste of romanticism and political commitment.”

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This chronology could make no sense at all of Bolaño’s work, or of his popularity. By 2009, when Volpi wrote this remembrance, it was clear that the most important writer to appear in Latin America in the previous twenty years just didn’t fit the image: Bolaño was obsessed with the idea of Latin America and with the residues of political romanticism. Nor did he fit the timeline: Bolaño, born in 1953, was indisputably the biggest “new” Latin American writer around, but he was a full fifteen years older than Volpi and his peers. And those dates mattered a lot to Bolaño: the phrases “Latin Americans of my generation” and “Latin Americans born in the 1950s” are a constant refrain in his nonfiction and interviews, and they refer not to a sense of freedom from but of fated to. His was the generation of defeated political idealism, exile, state violence: everything Volpi claimed was receding in the rearview mirror. Sensing the trouble Bolaño posed to his chronology, Volpi made the older writer into a gigantic, singular anachronism: Bolaño was “the last Latin American writer.” It was ambivalent praise, and it went with a now-standard condescension to Bolaño’s readers, whom Volpi claimed had been “infected” with a “delirium” that made them regard the writer as a “guru” and a “legend.” The rhetorical sulkiness clearly indexed Volpi’s resentment at having been lapped by an elder. Embarrassing enough to be upstaged in your bid to personify the cultural cutting edge—worse to suffer that fate at the hands of an emissary from what you’d thought was the past. For Volpi no less than for Bolaño’s knowing anglophone critics, Bolaño seemed to occupy time in some inconvenient or embarrassing way: weren’t we done with that? What Volpi said he wanted done with was, quite simply, Latin America, “that mythic territory” that he claimed “no longer exists.” Some commentators on the left, worried by the way the term “Latin America” collapsed national, linguistic, and ethnic

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difference, had been urging the retirement of the continental moniker for a while. But Volpi’s issue was different: what he meant by “Latin America” was something like obligation or determination, the sense that writers from this region should feel tied to some particular set of issues in an inescapable way. What Volpi wanted was freedom from precisely the gravity that I had come to feel was the most palpable feature of Bolaño’s work. In that desire for unfetteredness, Volpi could sound almost stereotypically American—and in fact his rhetoric resembled some of the most cringe-inducing U.S. commentary on Bolaño. Some of the blurbs that repeated across the backs of Bolaño’s translated books came to encapsulate this tone for me. A writer for Esquire, for example, likened The Savage Detectives to “John Coltrane jamming with the Sex Pistols.” It wasn’t particularly offensive—just the kind of offhand remark one finds in numberless magazine reviews, and I understood the qualities of improvisation and furious control the phrase was meant to capture. But it irritated me with its insouciant contextlessness, its fusion-cuisine vision of the cultural marketplace. In another blurb, this one for Nazi Literature of the Americas, the novelist Nicole Krauss offered this: “When I read Bolaño, I think: Everything is possible again.” I took it that the silent predicate of the sentence was “for fiction writers”— annoying in itself, with its assumption that every reader is an aspiring novelist. But what seemed most off was the notion that Bolaño could be assimilated to a vision of open-road optimism. Of course I knew what Krauss meant: the formal and tonal daring of his work is exhilarating. But it seemed exactly wrong to connect that exhilaration to a sense of unencumbered possibility. Nothing about Bolaño’s world felt optional. It’s hard to talk about this without sounding old-fashioned. The Mexico City–based critic Francisco Carrillo Martín reaches back to the Sartre-Barthes debates of the 1950s about “literary commitment” to account for the generational turbulence that

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Bolaño’s rise to prominence caused for younger Latin American writers. Barthes’s claims for the autonomy of literature sound more sophisticated to contemporary ears, and more in line with the kind of independence Volpi espoused. But, Carrillo Martín claims, “it’s the uncomfortable Sartrean argument that more strongly resonates with Bolaño’s work.” If Sartre’s littérature engagée sounds antiquated, the Spanish term for the phenomenon— literatura comprometida— captures better, at least to Anglo ears, the feeling-tone of Bolaño’s work, which is less about the artist’s heroic decision to commit to a historical situation than the acknowledgment that the commitment happens to you— compromises you—willy-nilly. The Spanish lets you hear the fullness of the past participle. It might seem peculiar that this fusty notion accounts so well for what feels contemporary about Bolaño. But then his work makes a lot of what had been self-announcingly new feel dated. Volpi’s notion that Latin America no longer existed was indebted to a Fukuyamaesque vision of the end of ideological strife and a coming era of geopolitical calm. Latin America, Volpi claimed, was undergoing a process of “normalization”— and thereby becoming essentially indistinguishable from the United States (with which, he fancifully predicted, Mexico would one day unite in a megastate). This was, of course, spectacularly bad as a description of and prophecy about Latin America: it ignored the marea rosa, or “pink tide,” which swept the region starting in the late nineties, and failed to predict the rightward reaction that followed in places like Brazil and Argentina. But it was also wrong about the United States, where both socialism and xenophobic populism would shortly have a resurgence. Neither region, it turned out, was going to be normal anytime soon. Nor were they going to melt imperceptibly into each other. The nature of the continuing difference between the United States and Latin America was of course at the root of those critiques of Bolaño’s

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anglophone popularity. That popularity, this argument went, was ultimately a way of insisting on the most stereotyped sense of that difference; American readers received Bolaño as an exotic commodity—violent, colorful, romantic, and, most importantly, securely elsewhere. But another interpretation seemed possible here: that for readers in both linguistic spaces, Bolaño represented an insistence on history as the ground of human action. That may sound like an uncontroversial position. But the American sense of dwelling in some unconditioned space of potential (“Everything is possible”) is justifiably famous for its stubbornness. That fantasy is, for obvious reasons, less robust in Latin America—but it has its supporters there, as Volpi’s aspirational claims about a coming “normality” made clear. In the face of this generalized will to deny history, wasn’t it possible that what readers experienced in Bolaño was a writing to which that fantasy had never occurred and for which it held no appeal? I had heard Bolaño’s voice as orienting itself with peculiar seriousness to what felt like a center of gravity. If it was tempting to employ a certain shorthand and name that source “Latin America,” it didn’t follow that doing so relegated this narrative world to some inaccessible or distant realm. Part of the gravity effect of his writing was, on the contrary, the sense that I too was positioned, geolocated in the world mapped by this imagination. Indeed, one of the excitements of reading Bolaño as an American was the sense that he knew all about Americans but wasn’t particularly interested in addressing us. Our ignorance and our curiosity, our literature and our imperialism, our Central Intelligence Agency and our Civil Rights Movement: all of it was part of the furniture of Bolaño’s world, uncontroversially given. There was a literary aspect to this familiarity. “Though Bolaño never went to the United States,” observes the critic Jeffrey Lawrence,

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“he read its authors obsessively”—so much so that when he sets the occasional scene in the United States, the effect is one of startling verisimilitude. As important, the United States was of course all over the history that mattered to Bolaño. Chile’s coup, state violence in Mexico, NAFTA’s reorganization of life on the border—the U.S. was a major, malignant player in all of it. But Bolaño’s writing didn’t have us in its sights, either to court us or to accuse us—the latter being a speech act that, in assuring Americans that they still occupy the center of attention, can feel like another form of flattery. “We need to cultivate a new kind of ‘national’ inferiority complex, the inferiority complex of the superstate,” the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson had written in 1993. He was addressing the ignorance that attends overweening power, and his recommendation that Americans pursue an education in humility seemed one that Bolaño’s writing— compelling in a way nothing produced in the United States quite matched—seemed perfectly suited for. In not addressing American readers directly, his writing issued a new kind of invitation to us. Here was a world— a world spoken into being with such conviction that it just felt like the world. To listen to that voice was to imagine taking one’s place in that world. It didn’t feel like escape; it felt like recognizing the lay of the land.

NORMAL PEOPLE The world Bolaño depicted, the world he asked us to acknowledge we inhabited, was not—the point seems important—a “normal” one. It was deeply marked by history, whose accidents and plots could be equally terrifying in their indifference to individual plans. Nor were the people who lived in that world “normal.” Volpi had strikingly used the word not just to predict the

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evaporation of Latin America under the sign of neoliberalism but as a lifestyle descriptor. In an aside in his essay on Bolaño, he complained about the mythical status Bolaño had been accorded by anglophone journalists. “In his final years,” Volpi claimed, Bolaño “had a more or less normal life.” Volpi meant that he was no poète maudit: he lived in relative comfort on the Catalonian coast; he had married and had two kids; he was publishing his work. The insistence on normality went along with a certain biographical moralism. One critic declared that The Savage Detectives was written by a “sober family man”; another claimed that Bolaño was “an excellent father,” and added with ambivalent approval that “if he took a lover at the end of his life, he did it in the most conservative Latin American style, without threatening the preservation of his family.” Many commentators were eager to debunk the idea that Bolaño’s final illness was the result of a heroin addiction—an idea the novelist Jonathan Lethem had repeated as fact in a New York Times review of 2666. The unstated assumption behind all of this was that it could only be the product of exoticism or prurience to imagine that Bolaño might possibly have done some of the things that are routine in his fiction. This solicitude on behalf of Bolaño’s bürgerlich correctness didn’t just correspond to a caricatured vision of what adult human lives are like. It also seemed not to have noticed that one powerful implication of Bolaño’s work is that foibles like a disorderly personal life and drug dependency are not usefully understood as scandals. (The piece that had given rise to the addiction speculation was a five-page prose fragment entitled “Beach,” whose first-person speaker has just kicked heroin and finds himself susceptible to wandering thoughts as he sits out his withdrawal in a seaside Spanish town: it’s the very opposite of lurid.) The normality-mongering seemed at bottom an attempt to deny the event-character of this life and writing—as if the only

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way to prove oneself a mature reader was to steel oneself against any challenge to one’s existing categories. But the inconvenient fact about the Bolaño “myth” is that all of its key components are true. He really did spend his youth in Mexico City among a strenuously marginal group of poets and would-be poets. He really did return to his native Chile in time for the 1973 coup and spend a few days in Pinochet’s jails. He really did traipse around Europe in a series of menial jobs before settling down, and enter a lot of regional short-story contests. He really did write with remarkable consistency and in relative obscurity for many years before beginning to publish regularly, and he really did create some of the most important fiction of the period in a fantastically concentrated burst of creative energy. In an increasingly fragmented literary public, he really did gain a readership throughout Latin America, what the critic Ricardo GutiérrezMouat calls a “feat of continental relevance.” The acclaim his work achieved almost overnight really did make a remarkable contrast with the marginality he knew well. He really did die too young. You could call this a myth, or you could say that this is an extraordinary set of real facts. That there are various ways to assemble those facts into a story is an insight that sits at the foundation of narrative theory, where the difference between what happened and how what happened is put into narrative goes by the names fabula and sjuzet, histoire and discours, story and plot. The point is that there is no naturally given relation between the two. If that contingency is something all fiction writers know in their bones, Bolaño’s work, as “Sensini” first showed me, is unusually attuned to it. “Sensini” understands the ways events do and (mostly) don’t fit the structures we try to place around them. More important, it understands the inevitability of the attempt to fit them anyway—to find significance

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in the relation between the short-story competition a short story narrates and the short-story competition that story wins, or to find meaning in the difference between a biological son and an artistic one, or in the gradations between twenty-two and “more than thirty.” Bolaño, says the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa, combined the “two primary instincts of the novelist: an attraction to the facts, and a desire to correct them”— a concise formulation of his fascination with this dialectic between aesthetic structure and the stuff of the world. The inescapability of the structural imagination was something that the idea of the Bolaño myth— call it the myth of the Bolaño myth—inadvertently embodied. With its pleasing symmetry (gullible readers seduced by canny marketers), its vision of Bolaño’s literary career testified to the will to see an order in things. But Bolaño’s work itself belies the neatness of the story.

THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY The Savage Detectives is the book that sponsored the story, with its semimiraculous appearance as if from nowhere, its sudden rearrangement of the literary field and literary history (Bolaño had enjoyed succès d’estime with his previous novels, but this time he swept two of the biggest prizes in Spanish-language literature, the Rómulo Gallegos and the Premio Herralde de Novela, and instantly became a best-seller). But for all the air of inevitability and immovability that its rapid canonization has given it, The Savage Detectives is a monument to contingency, an epic of structure and destructuration. The book radiates confidence: one senses as one reads that the writing has been born classic, that the author knows that what it relates will be the stuff of literary-historical legend. Yet it can be hard to specify where,

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precisely, that sense of certainty lives: any given page can feel almost random, and any number of episodes come close to meandering into shaggy-dog-ism. The book’s divergent interest in the mundane and the epochal is visible in the form of its three parts: the daily entries of Juan García Madero’s diary that frame the novel in its opening and closing sections minutely track a period of just over three months in late 1975 and early 1976, while the long central section cascades across twenty years and more than fifty speakers. But it’s not quite right to say that the bookends are about the everyday while the middle is about the movement of decades: Juan’s diary is constantly menaced or enlivened by a sense of imminent epochal change, and many of the episodes of the long second part get so caught up in the eddies of the everyday it’s easy to lose sight of the movement of the whole. The novel’s epic quality doesn’t so much sneak up on the reader as get assembled and disassembled on every page. We watch dailiness as it watches the transcendent. That sense of the proximity of the big structures—the inescapable feeling that history and meaning are always breathing down our necks—makes it tempting, probably inevitable, to talk about Bolaño’s work in large and general terms. But it’s his acute awareness of how those big structures get built up and decompose that make such terms finally inadequate to the experience of reading him. No writer easier to paraphrase, none who suffers more from that heresy. The tropes and moods that we associate with Bolaño are all real and central: we know that to read him is to enter a world of desperate poets and ambient dread, a world with lots of sex, literary conversation, marginal employment, memories of state terror, anticipations of thuggish violence. Nowhere is that expectation better met than in the intense atmospherics of The Savage Detectives. But the novel is also the most sustained example of the structuring impulse that undergirds

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Bolaño’s imagination, and it’s my stubborn sense that this endlessly lauded writer is in fact underappreciated for the subtlety of his management, passage to passage and scene to scene, of that interplay. More than anything else he wrote, The Savage Detectives weds an immersion in the waywardness of experience (sexual, literary, urban, emotional) to an unremitting sense of the containers (historical, political, geographical) into which that experience is sorted, often brutally. The shape of this book is an attempt to hold both moments— the immersion and the sorting, the forgetting of structure and the cruel reminders of it—in conceptual view. Because the qualities of Bolaño’s work can be paradoxically hard to keep in mind amid the proliferation of talk and writing about it, I wanted a structure that would stay as close as possible to the form of the novel: hence the three sections that correspond to the novel’s three parts. The first two of these are more or less straightforwardly “argumentative” in nature, and they seek to perform some of the duties of traditional literary analysis: to give a sense of the overarching and unavoidable themes of Bolaño’s novel, to make a set of claims about the book’s relation to literary tradition, form, history, and geopolitics. A persistent focus of these chapters is the relation between the shape of Bolaño’s writing—the contours of sentences and paragraphs— and the shape of those entities (cities, nations, continents, groups of friends, sexual configurations) that obsessed him. Bolaño makes the forms of prose feel preternaturally responsive to the contours of social and political collectives. It’s an aesthetic, I suggest, that hovers undecidably between formalism and vitalism, and that makes seemingly minor decisions like where to end a paragraph or how to pace a sentence resemble a kind of social engineering (Bolaño titled an early poem “Notes for Composing a Space,” and that socioformalism never deserted him).

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These chapters also explore the novel’s investment in the idea of Latin America and how that investment looks and feels for a reader in the United States—the nation that, if not the source of Bolaño’s renown, is now clearly one of its major theaters. Where others have seen The Savage Detectives as authorizing American ignorance and arrogance, I forward the claim that the book’s obsession with the dense particulars of Latin American cultural life places U.S. readers in space and time, a salutary experience if not a flattering one. In this, I depart from much of the commentary on Bolaño’s U.S. reception. “As we all know,” the literary scholar Ignacio Sánchez Prado writes, Bolaño has “replace[d] García Márquez as the stand-in for Latin American specificity.” I am not so sure we do all know what Bolaño represents for North American readers; more important, I think Bolaño’s work offers a vision of Latin America not as a “specificity” or a knowable locality but as a sublimely large and internally variegated political and cultural universe. Even readers immersed in hispanophone literature have professed bewilderment in the face of the lightly worn encyclopedism of The Savage Detectives: in 2008, the Spanish novelist Jorge Carrión looked forward to a moment when “a critical edition of the novel would reveal each literary allusion”; in 2003, the Chilean critic Camilo Marks confessed to being unclear whether the “infinity of minor writers” featured in the book are “obscure or perhaps invented by Bolaño”; Mexican journalists have tracked down the originals of certain characters while their readers debate the findings in the comments section. If Latin American readers have remarked on the novel’s rendering of their cultural space as an unknowably vast realm, the effect is magnified for anyone reading from a cultural distance. I write, to restate the obvious, not from a position of expertise about that universe but from a very incompletely mitigated

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ignorance—a mitigation carried out in part under the tutelage of Bolaño’s narrative world and its referential sprawl. My goal is less to decode the novel’s thick descriptions of Mexican and Latin American literary worlds (a task for which many writers are better qualified) than to think through the ways those descriptions reveal how such ignorances and knowledges are geopolitically conditioned. While Wimmer’s translation is the source of most of the quotations, I also look at the Spanish text, sometimes to its particularities of expression and sometimes to its visual presentation. The latter emphasis is born from a sense that the feel and layout and look and weight of a book are all key to its meaning, particularly its cultural meaning. But even hewing close to the major architectural divisions of The Savage Detectives, the form of the critical essay—precisely by focusing on the novel’s overarching structure and logic— seemed at times to depart from the texture of Bolaño’s writing, its air of improvisation and randomness and variety. For that reason, this book also includes a set of shorter and more impressionistic explorations of what I came to think of as the neighborhoods or microclimates of The Savage Detectives, those aspects of the book— sometimes stray details or formal effects, sometimes motifs that thread through the whole text—that can resonate with the narrative, tonal, and emotional complexity of entire novels. (The first two of these shorter sections follow the first two chapters of this book; by my third chapter, which corresponds to the deeply strange third part of Bolaño’s novel, the distinction between main plot and narrative neighborhood is so hard to ascertain that the structure of my own writing collapses accordingly.) The epic breadth of The Savage Detectives is unavoidable and compelling. But much of what is most important to me about the novel breathes in its moment-to-moment atmospherics, the subtle shifts in emotional or political temperature as

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someone enters a room, blurts out something crazy at a party, crosses a grand avenue, signs a petition, qualifies a judgment, waits for a lover. I found, for example, that it’s at the level of the narrative neighborhood that the novel does its most intriguing thinking about sex and sexism and sexuality. Bolaño has been criticized for the masculine slant of his literary canon, and for his interest in the dudeish tropes of the quest, the road trip, and the duel. This is obviously not my argument to decide, but it will become clear in what follows that I don’t buy this as the final take on the women in his novels, who may be outnumbered by the men but are in no way less interesting or powerful or complex. The novel’s male protagonists never undergo an explicit reckoning with feminist critique, but their more adolescent antics are thrown into ironic relief by the atmosphere in which they take place—an atmosphere unmistakably marked by women’s assertive social and artistic presence. Bolaño’s treatment of queer characters has been similarly and, I think, misguidedly arraigned. A recent piece in the New York Review of Books by the novelist Andrew Martin, for example, claims that Bolaño’s work betrays a “macho anxiety about homosexuality even when he writes with sympathy about gay characters.” The gay man who wrote the book you are holding just doesn’t perceive the anxiety (and is dubious about the easy attribution of Latin-flavored intolerance to Bolaño). On the contrary, I think Bolaño’s writing about gay characters is enlivened by his lack of piety about them. At any rate, it’s the atmospheric microclimates of the novel that make the best case for the liberatory nature of Bolaño’s salacious, civilized interest in sexual difference. Queers of various genders are fully in the mix in Bolaño’s world—palpably participants in building the neighborhoods of emotional turmoil and political change in which the novel transpires.

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I was drawn to the metaphor of the neighborhood when I came across an essay by the Argentine novelist César Aira— a writer Bolaño liked, and whose manically productive career (he has published over a hundred, mostly very short, novels) is an ongoing experiment in the related energies of gigantism and miniaturism. Aira speaks of the Wonderland quality of urban— and by implication novelistic— space. “For the foreigner the city is always miniature: photograph, postcard, map, souvenir,” he writes. “It’s only when one settles into the city that it begins to enlarge. . . . The postcard or map loses its utility: you’ve entered the miniature, and everything inflates, achieves gigantic proportions . . . until finally the city contains our entire life.” I feel that way about The Savage Detectives. I hope these sections provide an opportunity to lose sight of the novel’s conceptual organization, to get lost in its experiential eddies: to approach, in other words, the novel’s inexhaustibility.

= = = In the academic context in which I mostly work and write, such a phrase can only sound naïve. But this book is meant as a small vindication of the rights of readerly naïveté. Academics are also lay readers, and it was that part of my reading self that I was instinctively at pains to protect in avoiding for so long the critical conversation around Bolaño. The academic world has of course produced its own version of this writer. Certain themes recur in this frequently insightful body of work. Cosmopolitanism, exile, neoliberalism, globalization, world literature, sovereignty, biopower, necropolitics: even at its most rebarbative, the lexicon of contemporary academic research is clearly pertinent to Bolaño’s work. And yet, as all academics know and most will admit, there is often a moment in critical writing where you perceive the tonal

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distance between the feel of the work and the terminology you muster to analyze it, a moment that, if you give it space to breathe, can expose you to a mild sense of self-satire. The situation is particularly acute with Bolaño’s work, so topical yet so resistant to a lot of what we might want to say about it. It’s a dynamic that also provides the fiction with much of its distinctive texture: Bolaño is intensely concerned with the ways characters sidle up to the vocabularies that might capture their experience, and with how it feels when those vocabularies fail them or commit them to positions they might not have known they wanted to espouse. Academically specialized language is particularly vulnerable to this sense of nonfit. I haven’t left that language utterly behind here, but I hope the unsettled structure of the book allows the reader to dwell a bit in the comedy of its deployment. The Savage Detectives is, after all, a comic novel. Much of its humor derives from its focus on youth, where the gap between aspiration and reality is at its most exaggerated. That gap is fertile terrain for the proliferation of poetry and other language games that combine passion and a certain desperate aimlessness. As the novel’s action moves through time, that aimlessness is menaced with various forms of determinate meaning, various forms of definitive closure. But the novel honors youth’s fantasy of endlessness less by preserving it in the amber of nostalgia than by insisting that the comedy of youth never really leaves us. If growing up means closing the gap between language and life, the novel says, nobody really grows up. Time just makes the joke taste different. That The Savage Detectives has now been in the world for just about the same number of years that its action covers only makes the effect of lingering in its pockets of endlessness all the more uncanny. Two decades on, the novel should feel “dated.” But The Savage Detectives, rigorously time-stamped on every page, was born dated, and the novel seems utterly

34 = Introduction

unsurprised by the passage of time. The present book is, of course, in calendrical time way behind the curve. But The Savage Detectives knows that reading demands and deserves many different kinds of time. This book wants to claim the right to take the time that reading takes. The Savage Detectives is also the saddest book I know, aware as it is that the reprieve from calendrical time offered by reading is temporary, and an illusion. The book is written from and about the interregnum where time is briefly held at bay. Bolaño the person spent relatively little time enjoying the renown of Bolaño the phenomenon—hardly, one would think, enough time to settle into it. Another way to put it: he moved with remarkable speed from being an elegist to being a fit subject of elegy. Some of the friends of his youth who are depicted in the novel under fictional aliases experienced the book as a betrayal. Bolaño, it seemed to them, was the survivor who surveyed the wreckage from the safe perch of respectability and achievement. It was true, but only until it wasn’t. No survivor stays one.

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ho is this kid? Juan García Madero, the seventeenyear-old narrator of Part I of The Savage Detectives, seems a meager being on whom to hang an epic, more device than person. His voice will carry the novel through its first 150 pages, but he appears at first little more than a schematic brew of attributes: horny, intellectually ambitious, emotionally naïve. But most of all—and this is key to his ability to sustain us, and the novel—he is game; he is willing. The novel opens with an off handedly profound joke about the nature of openings—literary openings but also biographical and social ones. “I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists,” read the novel’s first words, immediately under the date November 2. “I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.” It’s not until the immediately following journal entry (dated November  3) that García Madero addresses the obvious question: “I’m not really sure what visceral realism is.” The two entries are a sly embodiment of the Sartrean postulate that existence precedes essence: join first, ask questions later. Only in retrospect will the joke disclose its ominous weight; only as the days and years click by will we realize how peculiarly

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resonant is that gap between the days, that space that yawns between the past participle that signals commitment (“He sido cordialmente invitado”) and the reckoning with what you’re committed to. It’s characteristic of The Savage Detectives that the philosophical question is handled so lightly, rippling nearly imperceptibly below the humor, and that it has to do with the book’s graphic layout: these first lines train the reader to see time, almost literally, on the page. If a willingness to join is Juan’s most salient trait, it also stands for a more general existential condition; what most characterizes him is a surrender to the movement of time that characterizes everybody. It’s the genius of the novel to make this essentially passive submission to historicity feel so dynamic. This is partly because Bolaño makes that submission feel like the result of appetites—for poetry, for sex—and therefore less like something consented to than something ardently pursued. The conflation of those two activities (striving, accepting) and the way it makes even the most directed activity look like passivity have been central to the historical novel at least since Henry James complained that the aimless and mediocre Frédéric Moreau was “too poor for his part, too scant for his charge” as the bearer of Flaubert’s portrait of a generation in Sentimental Education, or since Georg Lukács remarked the weird passivity of the heroes of Walter Scott’s historical fiction. Like those protagonists, Juan García Madero is notable less in himself than for the way his minimally delineated selfhood opens onto a host of others, as if he were a kind of transparency or portal more than a person proper. It will be the task of his diary first to make itself hospitable to a tumult of new names and characters and then to evaporate—as if exploded by the very force of all the places it records, people it depicts, bodies it incorporates.

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= = = For a while, though, it looks like that more conventional literary object, the record of a coming of age, with all the sexual and social initiations the genre promises. Juan’s invitation to join the visceral realists, he explains in a narrative flashback, was issued by the movement’s founders, a Chilean named Arturo Belano and a Mexican named Ulises Lima, after they disrupt a poetry workshop at UNAM, the Universidad Autónoma de México, where Juan is in his first semester as a law student. Juan has already clashed with the workshop leader, a poet named Julio César Álamo, over the latter’s ignorance of the poetic terms of art (pentapody, tetrastiches) on which Juan has quizzed him. When Arturo and Ulises crash the seminar, they gravitate to Juan and support his pretentious objections to the older poet: they like Juan’s dislike of Álamo, even if they don’t share his reason for it (they don’t, they admit, know the poetic jargon on which Juan prides himself). Within a few pages, Juan has joined the visceral realists, spent long hours “talking about poetry” with them at a bar called the Encrucijada Veracruzana, stopped going to class, and fumbled into sex with one of the bar’s waitresses and something more emotionally complicated (if equally sexual) with another . . . For all this freneticism, there is a curious air of contentlessness to the proceedings: the visceral realists appear to be united by no clearly articulated program save a hatred of Octavio Paz, who Juan tells us is “our great enemy” (without specifying the reasons for the animosity). The doctrines to which they subscribe, if any, are never revealed to us, although Álamo calls them “cutrate surrealists and fake Marxists.” We learn that they consider themselves a second iteration of the visceral realist movement that flourished in the 1920s under the leadership of a woman

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named Cesárea Tinajero, who was loosely connected to the (historically real) Stridentist movement that attempted to weld the energy of the Mexican Revolution to that of aesthetic experimentation. This tells us something about their avant-garde sympathies, as well as something about their sense of marginality: the critic Oswaldo Zavala has argued that Bolaño’s preoccupation with the pugnacious Stridentists is also an identification with the ways their grandiose program to remake modernity were frustrated and “neutralized” (among their born-to-fail ideas was the construction of a city to be called Estridentópolis). But even if we are alert to these nuances of the new visceral realists’ affiliations, the novel gives us no sense of what they talk about when they talk “about poetry.” We don’t get their poems, either: when Ulises Lima reads one of his pieces to the UNAM workshop, Juan tells us that what comes out of Ulises’s mouth is “the best poem I’d ever heard,” but offers no clue as to its style, content, tone—anything. The vehemence of the evaluative gesture is typical of Bolaño’s comedy, and the joke is only somewhat at Juan’s expense. In part, of course, he just sounds clueless, the embodiment of a certain youthful (and usually very male) will to categorize and hierarchize all cultural objects. But this fanboyism contains a structural insight into what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu termed “the rules of art”: in consuming and producing the aesthetic, the marking of difference can be more important than the differences themselves. In giving voice to a judgment shorn of any criteria of judgment, Juan has casually invented a purist program—we could call it l’évaluation pour l’évaluation—that may or may not have anything to do with aesthetic particulars but works quite well, and quite openly, as a socially binding agent. The critic Héctor Hoyos speaks of Bolaño’s fascination with the “hard-to-pinpoint libidinal energy of literature,” the phrase capturing both the obscurity of Juan’s

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motivations and their ardor. “The best poem I’d ever heard” means exactly nothing, and it means “I love Ulises Lima.” The contentlessness is of course a choice. Everybody knows that The Savage Detectives is based on real people: Arturo Belano is Robert Bolaño, Ulises Lima is Bolaño’s friend Mario Santiago (the pen name of the Mexican poet José Alfredo Zendejas Pineda), visceral realism is the novel’s name for the infrarrealismo that they founded in the 1970s (or helped found: there are conflicting accounts of all of this), and so on. The texts are available to be read: a quick internet search will pull up the various infrarealist manifestos, and they will no doubt soon be included in expanded editions of The Savage Detectives. Shortly after Bolaño’s novel was published, cartonera, or “cardboard,” presses in Mexico started reissuing Santiago’s work, and by 2008 Bolaño’s friend (who died in 1998, on the eve of the publication of the novel that immortalized him) posthumously reached the highest level of national literary consecration when his work was issued by the state-operated Fondo de Cultura Económica. Hard to imagine a deeper irony: infrarealism was born in hostility to the Mexican state’s superintendence of culture, which (in the words of Ignacio Sánchez Prado) reaches in Mexico “a degree unparalleled in Latin America.” When an English-language collection of Santiago’s work appeared in 2018, its publishers described it as “the first major collection of the great infrarealist poet, Mario Santiago Papasquiaro.” You can’t blame them for this piece of puffery, but of course the very notion of a “great infrarealist poet” would be laughable—or just incomprehensible— were it not for The Savage Detectives. But Bolaño isn’t suppressing these documents here out of a desire to avoid contaminating his novel with the embarrassing ravings of his youth, or the friends of his youth. The omission speaks rather to the formalist impulse underlying his work and his historical imagination.

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That impulse is visible in a loose page from Bolaño’s notes that has been reproduced at the back of the recent Alfaguara editions of the novel. On it Bolaño has written the following sentence: “Belano and Lima’s literary recommendations: when you’re young you should only read your contemporaries, when you’ve read all of them you start with the classics.” And then the words, “A list of readings:” followed by six stacked horizontal lines. It’s difficult to know how to read those graphic marks. The first line sits under the word “lista,” which suggests that the next five are simply an intensification of that emphasis. But when I first saw them, I thought the lines were Bolaño’s attempt to turn the blank page into a ruled one—as if they were the graphic slots in which the first five of the recommended texts would be filled in. Now it seems to me that both of these meanings, the emphasis and the emptiness, are implicit here. “A list,” emphatically . . . but a tantalizingly contentless one. That combined urgency and blankness point to a historical problem, a question about how best to inhabit tradition and the present. Is this empty list for the classics (and what does that mean: Sappho? Góngora? Darío? Pound?) or for the contemporaries? (And what does that mean: Paz? Belano and Lima themselves? The members of the UNAM workshop? If you really have to read all of your contemporaries, even Julio César Álamo will be on the syllabus.) And it matters that those questions provoke a shift from the semantic to the graphic—as if Bolaño’s impulse when approaching the question of how the present fits into the past is to turn his writing into a doodle, or a picture, or a kind of action painting. If every syllabus is a diagram of forces, Bolaño makes you feel that as more than a figure of speech. This is formalism, but it has none of the dryness or austerity or hauteur often associated with the concept. It’s agitated and exhortatory—moving in both senses of the term, as if Bolaño is

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trying to imbue the sensorily meager medium of written language with motion or dimensionality, get it up off the page. Often, one feels that his writing is asking readers to hold the book at a funny angle, to stop thinking of it as a languagedelivery device and start treating it as an object in space. Bolaño’s work is in fact filled with readers who do just this: the literature professor in 2666 who hangs a geometry textbook from a laundry line on his back patio, the aspiring writer in The Spirit of Science Fiction who makes a coffee table out of paperbacks in his Mexico City apartment. In such cases, as with Bolaño’s empty reading list or Juan’s blank devotion to his new friend’s work, the willful inattention to content can feel a little crazy. This fixation on the shape of texts, the patterns they trace in physical and social space, seems less like detached aestheticism than a kind of drive.

= = = This is only one of the ways literary enthusiasm resembles sex in Bolaño’s world. An acquaintance who abandoned The Savage Detectives after reading twenty pages told me it felt like a typical male fantasy of endlessly available women; she thought the novel should have been called History of My Blow Jobs. My sense of the sex was different, but I knew what she meant. We meet Juan as a virgin, but this status is short-lived: by his second visit to the Encrucijada Veracruzana, he is writing poems for a waitress named Rosario and being bluntly propositioned by another, Brígida—and on November 10, the latter bundles him into the bar’s storage room to make good on her offer. By the 14th, he’s been taken to the house where two beautiful sisters who may or may not be visceral realists, Angélica and María Font, live with their parents and little brother Jorgito. By the 18th, he starts

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sleeping with María, the older and more experienced of the sisters. But by the 26th, things have cooled with her, for reasons obscure to Juan, and he returns to the Encrucijada Veracruzana, where Rosario— as ardent as Brígida but more domestically oriented— declares that she wants to “help you, be good to you, I want to be with you when you become famous, darling.” Juan’s internal response to this is to think, “This woman must be crazy”—but he moves in with her nonetheless, and spends much of the next month in her tenement apartment, writing during the day and making love all night, minutely recording the barely credible number of couplings and orgasms they enjoy. He pines for María throughout. Juan’s amorous adventures do indeed have an air of adolescent wish fulfillment. After he moves in with Rosario, Brígida kindly tells him that she wished she’d had a real chance with him, in part because he has “a cock that’s worth its weight in gold” (a compliment to which he rather sweetly replies, “Thank you”). And right before his diary breaks off at the end of Part I, he seems to have sex with Lupe, a prostitute and friend of the Font sisters who has shown no previous interest in him whatsoever (the incident, like much else in the diary’s last days, is cloudy with confusion). But a summary of his exploits misrepresents how they feel in the telling. Juan is less Lothario than Candide, his “conquests” really an elaboration of his passivity. Indeed, he is always at the mercy of some form of female agency. Rosario’s slightly unhinged performance of quasi-maternal self-sacrifice bewilders him, even as he gratefully enjoys its dividends in sex and financial support. María’s hyperliterate sex-positive feminism— she is an intimidatingly articulate reader of Stein, de Beauvoir, Sor Juana, and de Sade, and, according to a visceral realist named Pancho, “she takes her reading seriously”— confuses Juan no less. Bolaño provides a nice sketch of the historical evolution of

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heterosexual mores in making Juan vastly more interested in María’s style of self-possession, even as he admits he has more fun with Rosario. If I’m making the opposition of the two women sound schematic, it’s my fault, not the novel’s. One strange effect of writing analytically about The Savage Detectives is to notice how amenable its social worlds are to structural analysis: Juan’s diary feels so artlessly notational— so much a catalogue of onrushing people and events—that it is startling to realize how readily its social situations fall into pattern. Indeed, it’s not just that the two women in Juan’s busy November and December stand in such stark semiotic opposition. Each of them is herself doubled: Rosario by her colleague and sometime rival Brígida, María by her little sister Angélica—less ferociously self-assured than María, but perhaps even more alluringly literary (she has, Juan reports, won a prize for young poets). And in fact Juan is something of a spontaneous structuralist, constantly trying to configure his new acquaintances and experiences into significant form. This is most comically vivid in his tallies of orgasms: on December  4, he records that over four hours of sex the previous night he came three times and Rosario fifteen times (whether the impressive count is the result of her self-report or Juan’s observation is not indicated). His ruminations result in a poem he calls “15/3,” although we of course do not see the poem’s content. The next day, the ratio holds—Rosario has, he claims, ten orgasms to his two—but the rate is worrying: they made love the second night for an extra thirty minutes, and “if you come fifteen times in four hours, in four and a half hours you should come eighteen times, not ten. The same ratio goes for me. Are we already in a rut?” This is the last time we see Juan’s sexual scorecard—if he continues his counting the diary doesn’t record it. Partly, this silence results from Bolaño’s instincts as a storyteller: he knows

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how easily a good joke can become a wearisome gag. But it also speaks to the ways our efforts toward structure are themselves fitful and intermittent, as given to whim or irrationality as sexual pursuits. The feeling one gets in Part I is of structure lurking—perhaps as menace, perhaps as a promise of transcendental insight. Even when Juan abandons his math problems, the ghost of pattern haunts his experience. So although Juan visits numerous Mexico City bookshops in the winter of 1975, we get detailed accounts of only two, the Rebeca Nodier Bookstore, presided over by Nodier herself, and the Batalla del Ebro, owned by a “little old Spaniard named Crispín Zamora.” Is it significant that these elderly store owners are associated with European exile? That each of them discusses the fate of poetry with him, or that each in so doing proceeds—more or less explicitly, more or less good-naturedly—to hit on him? (Rebeca Nodier, informed of his interest in poetry, tells Juan that “all poets were bums but that they weren’t bad in bed”; Don Crispín offers to pay Juan for sex and then dissolves into helpless apologetic laughter when Juan explains that he isn’t gay.) Does it matter that this crossing of the paternal and the sexual—played in these cases for laughs— recurs in a darker key with María and Angélica’s father, Joaquín (known as Quim), who at first seems a benign sponsor of the visceral realists’ plans and then appears to be involved in a sexual relationship with his daughters’ friend Lupe? Even when Juan isn’t making his diagrams and calculations, a geometry looms behind social relations, obscurely linking sex with affiliation, poetry with politics. These patterns flicker in and out of view. They’re rarely discussed overtly, but their presence changes everything for Juan and for his reader. They give what should be a shapeless picaresque an underlying tension—an almost literal suspense, as if

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these days are not just accumulating units of time but points strung tautly together to form some meaningful whole. That that tension is glancingly perceptible to the inhabitants of Juan’s diary is a source of uneasy comedy. At the end of his entry for November  21, Juan records that “at a certain point during the night María said to me: disaster is imminent.” Her comment derives its peculiar flavor from its indeterminacy: it might be apropos of absolutely nothing—all that’s happened that night, after all, is a party at a woman named Catalina O’Hara’s, of which Juan reports that “visceral realists were swarming everywhere”— or it might refer to any number of details: Juan has just that morning found María’s father, Quim, an architect by training, at work on the graphic design for a magazine that he madly claims will finally “show them, everyone who’s against me, yes sir”; the music at Catalina’s party has reminded Juan of the “sound track for a horror movie”; María’s friend—a bisexual dancer whom everyone calls Piel Divina (Luscious Skin)—may or may not be about to introduce trouble into Juan and María’s affair . . . is any of this what María means? Are these scraps gathering into storylines? Are these atmospherics hardening into structure?

= = = In this world menaced by meaning, one of the strangest sources of significance—at once omnipresent and easy to miss—is the urban grid itself. Readers who wish to praise the vibrancy of The Savage Detectives sometimes claim that its vision of Mexico City is densely realized; the comparison with Ulysses is common. But Bolaño’s city is something different from the surround-sound completism of Joyce’s Dublin. Here is urban phenomenology according to Juan’s diary of November 19:

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As we walked (in silence, through the Parque España, down Parras, through the Parque San Martín, and along Teotihuacán, where the only people out at that time of day were housewives, maids, and bums), I thought about what María had said about love and about the suffering that love would bring down on Pancho’s head. By the time we got to Insurgentes, Pancho was in a better mood, talking about literature and recommending authors to me, trying to forget about Angélica. Then we headed down Manzanillo, turned onto Aguascalientes, and turned south again onto Medellín, walking until we reached Calle Tepeji. We stopped in front of a five-story building and Pancho invited me to have lunch with his family.

If it’s not exactly a misperception to praise the vividness with which Bolaño recreates an experience of Mexico City’s streets, this passage shows that such vividness doesn’t derive from any abundance of reported detail. The “housewives, maids, and bums” suggest a neighborhood of some wealth, perhaps in the process of coming down in the world. But you’d be hard pressed to say what monuments or types of commerce or styles of architecture these characters are passing. “The space they traverse has an immaterial character,” the critic Laura Hernández Martínez says of the novel’s city dwellers. One can certainly map this path (and Bolaño’s fans have—there are websites devoted to tracing this and other journeys via Google Earth), but that’s about all you can do: the notation of streets is so unadorned that it makes diagrammatism into a felt aspect of the fictional world. Our bestknown accounts of the urban tend to oppose (on-the-ground) tactics to (orchestrated, long-term) strategies, experience to abstraction. But the map is of course part of the lived experience of the urban. If this is abundantly obvious in our post-GPS moment, in which it’s possible to move confidently through the

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streets of an unfamiliar city enclosed in a cybernetic bubble, Bolaño’s city— a series of street names strung together somewhere in the background of our attention—anticipates our halfabstracted condition. But is it Bolaño’s city or Mexico City itself that feels this way? When the Uruguayan scholar and critic Ángel Rama died in a plane crash in 1983, he left behind the almost completed manuscript for a now-classic study, The Lettered City. The book is an analysis of the enduring power of the Latin American letrados, the “wielders of pen and paper,” “administrators, educators, professionals, notaries, religious personnel”—and of course, poets and novelists—who have had an outsize influence in the region. Rama’s book is well known for its critical genealogy of Latin American intellectuals (among whom, of course, Rama numbered himself). But the “lettered city” is more than a metaphor: Rama is also talking about the urban landscapes that emerged from the Spanish empire’s “immense tasks of administration and evangelization.” The Spanish colonial system, Rama writes, was one in which “written documents seemed not to spring from social life but rather to be imposed upon it,” and this misprision is most evident for him in the colonial city, whose very layout embodied a primal clash between the order of things and the order of discourse. “The new continent afforded a propitious place for the dream of the ‘ordered city’ to become a reality,” he writes. In practical terms, this resulted in the “ubiquitous checkerboard grid that has endured practically until the present day” in Latin American city centers, and in a cityscape designed to be experienced as its own map: as Rama writes, “The cities of Latin America were thus absorbed into symbolic dioramas of themselves, then overgrown by an enchanted forest of literary signs.” In this account, the Latin American city is literally built atop a foundational abstraction.

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Is Bolaño thinking about this history? Is Juan? Not overtly, of course—but then, the question of overtness, of how meaningful structures assert themselves and retreat, is one of the central dramas of the novel. How closely are we meant to connect Juan’s scrupulous notations of his movements through the urban grid to the experiential vocabulary of moods and memory, of talk literary and sentimental, that he also records? “I thought about what María had said about love and about the suffering that love would bring down on Pancho’s head. By the time we got to Insurgentes, Pancho was in a better mood, talking about literature and recommending authors to me, trying to forget about Angélica.” Does it matter that Pancho cheers up as the friends cross Insurgentes, the eighteen-mile-long artery that cuts through the center of Mexico City and has been called the longest avenue in the Americas? Is there some obscure connection between the street’s name, which references the army that fought for Mexican independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, and this group of poet-insurgents? The questions would seem silly if it weren’t for the fact that Juan himself is so consistently and comically distracted by proper names, especially place names. The bar that employs Rosario and Brígida, the reader may recall, is named the Encrucijada Veracruzana. It’s highly unlikely that most of Bolaño’s readers initially linger on the fact that “Encrucijada Veracruzana” means “Veracruzan Crossroads,” and so probably indicates that the bar serves specialties from the state of Veracruz on Mexico’s Gulf Coast. Even less likely would they be to pause at the common name Rosario and think that it has anything to do with the small town of El Rosario in Baja California—that is, in Mexico’s northwest, at the opposite corner of the country. But the lines Bolaño gives Juan suggest that this register of geographical reference, improbable though it seems, is running in the back of his

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consciousness. On November 9, Juan confides to his diary that he’s “written a few lines for” Rosario: I talk about her eyes and the endless Mexican horizon, about abandoned churches and mirages over the roads that lead to the border. I don’t know why, but somehow I got the idea that Rosario is from Veracruz or Tabasco, possibly even Yucatán. Maybe she mentioned it, although I may have just made it up. Or maybe the name of the bar confused me, and Rosario isn’t from Veracruz or Yucatán at all. Maybe she’s from Mexico City. Anyway, I thought that some poetry evoking lands that are the diametric opposite of hers (assuming she is from Veracruz, which seems more and more unlikely) would be more promising, at least as far as my intentions are concerned.

Juan’s intention is to impress Rosario, to seduce her: but why erotic poetry should be conceived in terms of geographical contrast—why it would be a good move to give a woman from the southeast coast (Tabasco and Yucatán are also Gulf states) a poem about the northern deserts—is never explained. The suggestion lingers that the content of the erotic might inhere in those place names: that the ultimate meaning of Juan’s desire is bound up with that geographical span. His mind tends to these geographical limits as compulsively as it circles around sex: when Brígida confirms for him that Rosario is in fact from Veracruz and asks him where he’s from, Juan seems unable to let the northern border go: “I’m the cowboy from Sonora,” he says, absentmindedly quoting the title of a popular corrido. “In truth I’ve never been to Sonora,” he admits to the diary. A few days later, he lies to María about having lost his virginity to “a girl from Sonora who I met last year.” And when he gets into a conversation about Arturo Belano’s origins, Juan admits he’d noticed his

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new friend’s unusual accent but didn’t suspect he was Chilean: “I thought he might be from Tamaulipas or from Yucatán,” he explains—once again choosing an extreme northern state and an extreme southern one. “He doesn’t look like he’s from Yucatán, but he could be, I don’t know. Anyway, I’m not a specialist,” he unnecessarily concludes, “in Yucatecans.” What is happening here? In part, of course, Bolaño is deepening our sense of Juan’s naïveté. The friends to whom he’s talking take it this way: “You poor innocent child,” Ernesto San Epifanio says in campy response to Juan’s geographical confusion, provoking the laughter of the Font sisters. There’s a hint too that this form of innocence is connected to Juan’s poetic vocation, if not necessarily to a poetic gift. His tendency to a slightly too emphatic interest in proper names is a sort of negative capability; the world’s signs, which everyone else takes for granted, speak to him with troubling intensity. Bolaño’s translator Chris Andrews, meanwhile, argues that “overinterpretation”—the way “certain characters and narrators seize on minimal details, invest them with weighty significance, and invent stories to connect and explain them”—is one of the signal devices of Bolaño’s dilatory narrative-making machine. These are all plausible explanations. But what remains to be accounted for is why place names in particular so rivet this narrator. In strange ways, Juan’s obsession with proper names finds a phenomenological match in Bolaño’s city. Virtually every time Bolaño invents a place name, he chooses one that references another place: thus Juan eats at a Chinese restaurant called El Loto de Quintana Roo (Quintana Roo Lotus), a reference to another of Mexico’s southeastern states. Don Crispín’s bookstore, La Batalla del Ebro, is named after the Spanish Civil War’s longest, decisive battle, itself named for a Spanish river. Even the “gringo’s pizzeria” that Juan frequents with Rosario seems to

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fascinate him in some ineffable way. Is it because, as Juan somewhat cryptically says, “the gringo seemed nice,” or because he “never let go of his big knife”? Either way, a register of geopolitical meaning seems obscurely in play: good neighbor or yanqui imperialist? Perhaps the most important of such choices is Bolaño’s christening of the café where the visceral realists meet the Café Quito. The real-life establishment on which the Café Quito is based is the still-extant Café Habana (where Bolaño’s name has been added to a plaque commemorating illustrious patrons: García Márquez, Paz, Fidel and Che, the comic performer Jesús “Palillo” Martínez). Is it crazy to notice the way this renaming again heightens signifying energy around the question of geography and politics, as Cuba’s capital—in 1975 the epicenter of political vanguardism in the Americas—is doubled by Quito, the city that sits almost literally on the equator and so in a symbolic sense at the center of the American continent? If so, it’s a kind of crazy in which Juan has instructed us and in which the city seems to collude. And it seems less crazy if we notice how consistently Bolaño’s choices point us to the question of geopolitical totalization, its necessity and its difficulty. The places invoked by Bolaño’s choices are consistently those of geographic extremity on the one hand or of semantic concentration on the other: the Mexican states referred to are all in the distant south or the far north, and so together map the span of the national space; the cities named represent “Latin America” in different lexicons. Juan has of course himself alluded to this pattern when detailing the logic of his poem for Rosario—but apparently without registering that this preoccupation with the outer boundary, peculiar as a seduction device, serves intriguingly well as a poetics of totality. That poetics will prove central to the book that follows, in which characters are in a constant state of verbal and pedestrian traversal of the farthest-away. But

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if the result is a world in which everywhere seems to refer to somewhere else, the play of signification is not utterly random: because the names tend to delimit large-scale geopolitical entities, Mexico City becomes by turns a phantom version of the national space and of the entire American continent. In that sense, these opening pages provide an objective correlative for the project that Juan tells María is the goal of visceral realism: “to create a movement on a Latin American scale.” This continental aspiration too is written into the Latin American cityscape. In the postindependence period, national pride coincided with continental consciousness, so that in the grids at the center of many Latin American cities it is common to have one set of streets named after national provinces or states or cities crossing at perpendicular angles a set of streets named after the American republics—with the result that a peculiar scalar confusion between the local, the national, and the continental becomes an utterly mundane experience, if you care to pay attention to it. So in Quito, for example, one can turn from Guayaquil directly onto Chile (turning a phantasmatic corner that connects Ecuador’s largest and richest city to the elongated Southern Cone nation— all without in actual fact leaving the historic center of Ecuador’s capital). In Mexico City it takes about three minutes to walk from the spot where Brasil magically meets Honduras to the place where Ecuador turns abruptly into Costa Rica, and another ten minutes to take a cab or metro to the spot where Colima (named for the Mexican state on the Pacific coast) crosses Morelia (named for a city in the state of Michoacán that is itself named for the revolutionary hero Morelos): in all of which cases one is at once literally on a GPS-able spot in the urban grid and at a point of access to a national or continental imaginary. We might say that every point on this grid becomes a kind of border: not the line between sovereign governmental units but

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the frontier between the space of lived experience and some more elevated region of cartographic apprehension. If the possibility of that elevation inheres in the mundane details of the Latin American city, Juan’s preoccupation with place names—what we might call his acute case of toponymania— orients him unconsciously toward that continental scale. We have an odd sense that he is finding his way, locating himself not just on social terrain but also in national and continental space. Bolaño’s way of writing the Latin American city has a startling relation to what has become a term of art in literary and cultural studies. In those worlds, the idea of “cognitive mapping” is associated with Fredric Jameson. He borrowed it from the urban planner and theorist Kevin Lynch, who used the term in his 1960 study The Image of the City. That book analyzes the ways residents navigated three distinct North American urban environments— Lynch’s examples are Boston, Los Angeles, and Jersey City—via mental images. Jameson adapted the idea as a metaphor for ideological understanding: “the mental map of city space explored by Lynch can be extrapolated to that mental map of the social and global totality we all carry around in our heads in variously garbled forms.” The term has become ubiquitous in cultural analysis, but its origin in the experience of urban space is less frequently remembered. Doing so recalls us to the combination of experience and abstraction that—according to Lynch and Jameson—is built into everyday urban life: “the dialectic,” as Jameson puts it, “between the here and now of immediate perception and the imaginative or imaginary sense of the city as an absent totality.” The absent totality that most interests Jameson is global capitalism, but Juan, in his half-conscious fashion, is aiming at the subglobal but still ungraspable totality that is Latin America.

= = =

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The importance of this entity to Bolaño, as we saw, puts him at odds with his more self-avowedly up-to-date contemporaries. An air of tentative nostalgia, and ironic self-awareness about that nostalgia, haunt most invocations of the continental scale in his work. (María, on hearing Juan’s account of the scope of the visceral realists’ ambitions, snorts back: “a Latin American scale? Please.” Juan’s response restates the ambition and half-concedes its quixotic nature: “Well, that’s what we want in the long-term, if I understand it correctly.”) Juan’s toponymania, which provides a useful vehicle for such ironic continental musing, also characterized his creator. This emerges with particular comic clarity in the speech Bolaño delivered in Caracas in 1999 when he accepted the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for The Savage Detectives. The Gallegos, whose hundred-thousand-euro award makes it one of the world’s most remunerative literary prizes, is named for the author of Doña Bárbara, the 1928 novel that is perhaps the best-known twentieth-century exemplar of what the critic Doris Sommer calls the “foundational fictions” of Latin America—romance novels whose love plots allegorize the founding of the modern republics. In Gallegos’s novel, the titular heroine plays the “savage” Venezuela— corrupt, passionate, violent—to the progressive, rationalist lawyer Luzardo: sparks fly, but in the end he marries Bárbara’s pliant daughter Marisela. The speech Bolaño delivered on the occasion shows his mind, typically, running on just such Gallegan questions of allegory, although— equally typically—where the interpretive horizon in Doña Bárbara is the nation, Bolaño is thinking about the continent. His route into all of this (typically again) is a joke. “I’ve always had a problem with Venezuela,” he begins—a “verbal and geographic problem.” Bolaño claims to have a form of “undiagnosed dyslexia” that makes it hard for him to differentiate left from right; he briefly details the problems this caused him as an

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aspirant soccer champion on the fields of “Quilpué, or Cauquenes, or the province of Bío-Bío” (the locations in central Chile where he spent his childhood). Relatedly, he claims, his problem with Venezuela is a tendency to confuse its capital with that of its neighbor to the “left,” Colombia— and therefore to confuse the nations themselves: “For me it was only logical that the capital of Venezuela should be Bogotá. And that the capital of Colombia should be Caracas. Why? Well, on the basis of verbal or alphabetical logic. The v of Venezuela bears a resemblance, almost a family resemblance, to the b of Bogotá. And the c of Colombia is first cousin to the c of Caracas.” Rather than apologize for allowing these sonic cues to swap the two nations in his mind, Bolaño speculates that there is a “hidden method in my dyslexia”: after all, while the first consonant of “Bárbara” sounds like that of “Venezuela” (appropriately, since Doña Bárbara is a Venezuelan classic), Gallegos’s novels Cantaclaro and Canaima “could easily be Colombian.” Perhaps he was right the first time; perhaps “Caracas is the capital of Colombia just as Bogotá is the capital of Venezuela, in the same way that Bolívar, who is Venezuelan, died in Colombia.” And now the alphabetical pretext is left behind as a logic of continental interchangeability takes over: Bolaño tells us that Terra Nostra, the massive novel by the Mexican Carlos Fuentes that won the Gallegos in 1977, is an Argentine book; Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian, is the author of the Colombian-Venezuelan novel La casa verde (the first Gallegos winner, in 1967), and so on. “I don’t know whether you’re following me.” What we follow is that Bolaño wants to use the occasion of the Gallegos to rummage around in what by 1999 many claimed was a superannuated continental imaginary. (Indeed, as if in confirmation of Bolaño’s intimation of the old-fashioned nature of his investment, the next Gallegos would be awarded to the

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Spaniard Enrique Vila-Matas, only the second time it went to a non–Latin American author.) The “Caracas Address” makes clear why the paradigm of “world literature” that has occupied so much academic conversation has only limited purchase on Bolaño’s work: despite the international settings of his novels and their global popularity, it’s what Héctor Hoyos calls the “open totality” of Latin America that magnetizes his narrative and political imagination. If the world is a famously ambitious scale, Latin America is no less conducive to vainglory. In a move that might strike us for its self-importance, Bolaño connects this continental imaginary to his own peripatetic biography: Chileans, he says, think of him as Mexican, his Mexican friends consider him Spanish, and his Spanish friends might now want to think of him as Venezuelan, newly elevated to prominence as he has been by the nation of Don Rómulo. The speech verges on the megalomaniacal: Simón Bolívar, Bolaño notes, “wouldn’t have been displeased by a united Latin America, which is a sentiment I share.” There’s a perceptible suggestion that the initial letter that Bolaño’s surname shares with that of the Liberator is itself meaningful. The whole performance dances on the knife edge between grandiosity and self-mockery: on the one hand, he knows how crazy he sounds; on the other, he has just won one of the biggest literary prizes in the Spanish-language world, a prize whose name and history are entangled in grandiose political and artistic projects and the Great Men who have symbolized them. Is the Gallegos to be taken as the emblem of an evanescent political-aesthetic dream or as one of the biggerticket items in what the critic James English has termed the economy of world literary prestige? It is of course both: Bolaño’s “Caracas Address” is a report from that undecidability. The speech alerts us to how thoroughly an ambition to continental allegory saturates The Savage Detectives— and to the

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ambiguous, intermittent way the allegory works. Gallegos’s novels were secure in the coherence of their allegorical procedures. Doña Bárbara’s symbolization of an untamed and premodern Venezuela makes trouble for those around her, but the symbolization itself functions flawlessly: her very name heavy-handedly blazons forth her embodiment of what Gallegos hoped would be Venezuela’s barbaric past. In this, Gallegos follows any number of nineteenth-century national romances in Europe and Latin America: in Scott, Edgeworth, Galdós, and Mármol, protagonists may worry over how to align themselves historically and romantically—but they never worry about whether the characters they encounter really represent what they seem to. It’s a surprisingly tenacious novelistic device. La región más transparente, Carlos Fuentes’s formally experimental novel from 1958 that was translated into English as Where the Air Is Clear, is sometimes cited as the origin of the Boom (and its huge cast and many scenes of parties and ramblings through Mexico City neighborhoods make it a clear precursor to The Savage Detectives). Its allegorical underpinnings are blatant, most obviously in the character of Ixca Cienfuegos, an intellectual whose name, composed of a Nahuatl word meaning “potter” and a Spanish surname promising sacrifice and rebirth through fire, practically screams “duality”: indigenous/Spanish, premodern/modern, religious/ rational. Bolaño is playing on this allegorical field, but the rulebook has gone missing. One of the features of allegory, when it’s working, is its compactness—the way it makes the many visible in the one: Bárbara is just one woman, but she embodies a whole historical system; the “one hundred fires” of Ixca Cienfuegos’s surname assure us that he stands for multitudes. Bolaño’s bárbaros are different: his savages remain stubbornly plural, and it would be a mistake, and impossible, to associate any of them

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cleanly or exclusively with the historical processes they are living through. Bolaño’s savages, moreover, are also detectives: they are searching for the structure that would fit meaning to their lives, and part of what’s confounding about that search is the suspicion that that structure may not be waiting for them in the future but vanished in the past (students of narrative know that in detective stories, the decisive events have all occurred before the story gets started). But if the allegorical machinery isn’t working perfectly, it’s still visible, not any longer as a basic assumption of historical thinking but as a problem—a project, or dream, or desire: and a group project, a group dream, a group desire. You can’t exactly call Bolaño’s procedure here a demystification of allegory. He is elaborating a poetics that charts, intimately and from inside, the ways allegorical myths are made and unmade. As we’ve seen, one persistent name for the structure these detectives are looking for is “Latin America,” and it seems to hover as a mirage behind their most mundane activities, fleetingly but insistently present in the very layout and names of the streets they walk. But that mirage also inhabits the erotic and the interpersonal, as Juan’s cartographic love poetry and his geographical confusions indicate most clearly. Late in the Caracas speech, Bolaño declares that “everything that I’ve written is a love letter or a farewell letter to my own generation, those of us who were born in the 1950s.” His sentence winds on to say that this generation chose militancy and that it had “corrupt leaders, cowardly leaders.” It’s a remark that has caused some readers to cast this speech as a repudiation of the left and a “rejection of radical politics.” But the ideological intention of the sentiment (not as clear, at any rate, as some of Bolaño’s critics imagine) is less striking than its conceptual and formal and phenomenological implications: how, after all, do you write a love letter to a generation— especially if you’ve foresworn the easy solution of

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writing it to a single person who “stands for” that generation? How do you keep faith with the plurality, contingency, and turbulence that characterize a group of people moving through time under circumstances not of their choosing? And how do you make that project, already difficult, somehow double for an effort to assemble, even in the imagination, a political entity as sublimely huge and fractious as “Latin America”?

= = = The answer, whatever it is, will imbue that project of continental assembly with the urgency of a personal and interpersonal endeavor. This is one way to account for the obscure energy animating Juan’s diary, uncannily attuned as it is to how groups feel as they come in and out of formation. The diary’s opening moment of course concerns just such a moment of social fission and reconstitution. When Lima and Belano attack the poetry workshop, Juan notes that “the students supporting Álamo so fiercely were the same ones he’d been so hard on as a critic, and now they were revealing themselves to be his biggest defenders.” Juan’s abrupt affiliation with the visceral realists is an almost physical reaction to this social hardening—certainly more than the result of an affinity for their barely articulated poetic principles. The very obscurity of the visceral realist program turns out to make it a perfect container for Juan’s acutely attuned sense of social hydraulics. In a sense, visceral realism is nothing but a container, a group constituted almost wholly out of talk about its volatile boundaries. The drama of inclusion and exclusion reaches a parodic climax in early December, when rumors circulate that Belano has expelled certain members from the group, some of whom have featured prominently in Juan’s diary (Pancho, Piel Divina, Angélica), others of whom we’ve met

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only peripherally (Laura Jáuregui, Sofía Gálvez). The friends who convey the news aren’t even mildly concerned: they ridicule Belano for thinking he’s the Breton of Mexican poetry, reassuring Juan that the poets concerned don’t even know of their excommunication and wouldn’t care if they did. But Juan is incapable of adopting his friends’ casual tone. “He’s expelled three women!” he blurts out, his protest confusedly motivated both by a sense of gender equity and erotic disappointment. “And the people who are expelled, what are they saying?” he continues. The solution he immediately hits on— “Why don’t they form a new group?”—bespeaks a vision of endless social mitosis, schisms and affiliations alternating to produce an interminable series of ramifying groupuscules. Juan’s distress here is tinged with excitement: loyal as he is to the visceral realists, he is on a deeper level oriented toward the collective as such, and therefore galvanized by anything that tests and retests group boundaries. He is a perfect registrant—almost a human Geiger counter—of the energy that pulses through these variously scaled collectives. His entry for November 20, for example, consists entirely of lists of the political affiliations of his new friends: Trotskyites and former Trotskyites, Mexican Women on the Warpath, the Homosexual Communist Party of Mexico, and so on. The entry for the following day details a party—of the drinksand-dancing, not the political, variety. But the attention he brings to these group dynamics is just as minute. The account opens with the unpromising empiricism of a list of attendees. But Bolaño is adept at wringing poetry and a kind of suspense from the most colorless elements: “At Catalina O’Hara’s house were Ulises Lima, Belano, Müller, San Epifanio, Barrios, Barbara Patterson, Requena and his girlfriend Xóchitl, the Rodríguez brothers, Piel Divina, the woman painter who

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shared the studio with Catalina, plus lots of other people I didn’t know and hadn’t heard of, who came and went like a dark river.” Juan’s drily additive syntax belies a stranger set of energies. Even before it veers into its striking final image, the list is moving along a slide rule of intimacy, from Juan’s comrades Lima and Belano (we could call them the party’s known knowns) to the new acquaintances or half-remembered acquaintances of acquaintances who are this list’s known unknowns (Xóchitl, to whom Juan has evidently just been introduced, and the nameless painter-roommate occupy this midsentence zone) to the unknown unknowns, the people Juan doesn’t know and can hardly be said to know he doesn’t know, since their existence has until now been utterly unsuspected by him. The “dark river” that churns at the sentence’s end imbues this uncharted social territory with a nearly erotic allure (and in fact on November 8 Juan has, memorably, masturbated while reciting to himself “as many as ten or fifteen times” a poem by Efrén Rebolledo, an early twentieth-century Mexican author of overripe erotic verse and fiction, that likens a woman’s pubic hair to a “torrent” and a “curling flood”). That conflation of the erotic with other kinds of social binding is no accident. Just as Juan’s love poetry enacts an inadvertent libidinal mapping of geopolitical ground, his diary tends to put reasons for connecting two or more bodies into a confusing mix. Political affiliation, sexual attraction, friendship, filial or avuncular affection, artistic mentorship, aesthetic partisanship, even just mere physical copresence—these forms of sociability open onto one another in a bewildering number of ways. The effect is most disturbing in the ambiguous adventures of Quim Font, the patriarch who has inserted himself into his daughters’ social and artistic worlds with unnerving energy: designing the

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two issues of the visceral realist magazine Lee Harvey Oswald, plying Juan with cash when he learns he has been spending time with María, and, most confoundingly, spending a lot of time with his daughters’ friend Lupe, the prostitute whom Quim seems to have taken it on himself to protect from her brutal pimp Alberto. In one of the diary’s strangest scenes, Juan runs into Quim on a downtown street, “dragging a girl after him” (Juan’s first, natural, thought is that she must be one of the Font sisters). The older man, who seems both “nervous” and “extremely happy,” accosts Juan and solicits his help in locating a hotel where Lupe can safely be hidden. They find one, and Juan is surprised and relieved when Quim, having installed Lupe, leaves with him. But a couple weeks later, when Juan unthinkingly finds himself heading back to the Hotel Media Luna (to “check” on Lupe? to proposition her?), Font emerges from the shower, wrapped in a bathrobe and apparently quite at home. The category confusions here are overt: Font keeps up a conversational pose as benevolent elder that is utterly out of keeping with what appears to be the situation. The queasy comedy derives in part from Quim and Lupe’s failure to justify any of this to Juan, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for these particular people to arrange themselves in this particular way. And Juan’s diary does tend to see such confounding social relations in terms of literal spatial arrangements. On his second visit to the hotel, he reports that “the three of us sat on the bed, Quim and I on the edge and Lupe under the covers”—and then, after a paragraph break: “Really, the situation was untenable!” Is this because, as he goes on to note, “a stranger would have thought we were there to make love”? Or because the protection plan itself—which apparently involves an indefinite hotel stay for Lupe and an ambiguous cohabitation with this paterfamilias—is

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unclear both in its rationale and its mechanics? Here as elsewhere, the sexual points to more general problems of association. When, on November 24, Juan tells his journal, “I’d like to sleep with María. I’d like to sleep with Catalina O’Hara. I’d like to sleep with Laura Jáuregui,” it may sound like an unguarded expression of pure appetite. But by December 6 such erotic imaginings have detached themselves from any clear sense of Juan’s desire or even from a stable source in his own psychology: “I imagined María making love with Alberto. And Alberto smacking María on the buttocks. And Angélica making love with Pancho Rodríguez (ex-visceral realist, thank God!). And María making love with Piel Divina. And Alberto making love with Angélica and María. And Alberto making love with Catalina O’Hara. And Alberto making love with Quim Font.” It’s true that a few days earlier María and Lupe have told Juan vivid stories of Alberto’s folk-tale-like prowess, and that he has heard details of María’s Sade-derived interest in rough sex. But that only explains some of his vision, which is almost an omnium gatherum of the novel’s population— one that occurs via a fantasy of maximally modular sexual availability. The moment makes the social rosters that occupy so much of the diary look surreptitiously kinky, as if the mere fact of assembled names suggests to Juan the vision of those names linked in erotic combination. But it doesn’t seem right to say that the erotic is the ultimate truth of Juan’s (or anyone’s) motivations: the sexual seems instead a heightened version of the emotional glue that makes any group cohere, an X-ray dye that lights up the principle of affiliation in its purest form. More than scandal, the sexual indicates a certain undeniable core of almost metaphysical attraction between the most unlikely or disparate bodies. Even when the vision turns dark—Juan’s fantasy here quickly becomes a

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vision of Alberto striding implacably toward him “over a carpet of bodies”—the principle of centripetal magnetism holds. Even the evil pimp is “making love.” Perhaps this malleability of the erotic, its status as portal onto the collective as such, explains why Juan’s horniness so routinely abuts mournful distress—as if sex indicated a larger and desirable project of affiliation we mostly fail to make real. “The situation was untenable!”: isn’t there a suggestion here that, much as the idea of a threesome with Quim and Lupe repels him, that repulsion is somehow regrettable—that it would be better if the trajectory implicit in bodies and hotel rooms could play itself out? Isn’t there a hint that to fail in this is somehow to abandon his friends? The tone here resembles that of an entry for November 29, in which Juan, passing by the Encrucijada Veracruzana, glimpses Pancho reading at one of the tables, “his face twisted in an expression of intense pain” that Juan assumes derives from his bumpy romance with Angélica. And then Juan sees Brígida, in whose expression he detects “bitterness and resentment, but also the suffering of the rejected”: the cause of the pain this time is Juan himself, who has chosen Rosario over her colleague. Once again the nearly random copresence of bodies in an atmosphere of charged sexuality leads Juan to an expression of generalized anguish: “Honestly, I felt sorry for her! Everybody was suffering!” The poem he goes on immediately to write is entitled “Everybody Suffers,” and with the peculiar license of poetic language to refer to more than one thing, it’s hard to tell if the title points to Brígida’s and Pancho’s romantic misery or to a more general existential condition. There are no free seats at the Encrucijada Veracruzana, so Juan composes the poem standing at the bar, as if it matters to him to stay on the spot as he writes these words— as if the poem were an effort to hold everyone in the room, sustain everyone in the orbit of fellow-feeling.

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= = = Poems are of course composed of “rooms,” of “standing-places”: the Italian word stanza etymologically denotes both of these things. While there are few poems reproduced in the pages of the poetry-obsessed Savage Detectives, the book imparts some of this stanzaic containing quality to its paragraphs, which sometimes approach a quality of accidental prose poetry in their juxtaposition of odd elements. This becomes clearest toward the end of the first section, which counts down the bewildering final days of 1975 that Juan spends, along with much of the novel’s cast of characters, ambiguously ensconced in the Fonts’ house in Condesa. The reason for their claustration is, on the one hand, vivid enough: Lupe has been transferred to the house, and Alberto, having stationed his Camaro across the street, is keeping the family under round-the-clock siege. But in another sense, the motivation for this gathering is entirely unclear: why do Juan and Pancho need to be there? Ulises and Belano? What about Mrs. Font’s sister, or the father of Laura Damián, the recently deceased poet and friend of the Font girls? And the two painters, and the “peasant poet”? As with the smaller, equally odd grouping at the Hotel Media Luna, nobody thinks to justify the assembly; the mundane rationale of a New Year’s party has been overlaid with a tacit understanding that these people are huddled together against some apocalyptic threat. There is a feeling that with this possibly endless group quarantine, the Font home has achieved its real purpose—to house and protect an uneasy collectivity. It’s in these passages that Juan’s patient transcription of moods and tones and spatial movements achieves its most capacious effects, as if his prose has become a holding environment, accepting of whatever unfolds in these shapeless hours. The details feel at once random and utterly realistic. María and Lupe sit late into

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the night talking in the living room. Álvaro Damián bursts into tears (for his dead daughter?), as does Mrs.  Font (for her dying marriage?). Jorgito and Angélica watch a TV documentary about spiders; Juan wanders from kitchen to couch to bed. At times, Juan’s report takes on the flatness of microsociology, or a choreographer’s translation of movement into signs: “I went up to Jorgito’s room and from there I saw the peasant poet clapping his hands to his head.” “Quim looked out the half-open door and called for Lupe. Those of us in the living room looked as if we were at a funeral. María asked me to come with her to the courtyard.” “When I came out everyone was having coffee in the kitchen, some sitting and others standing.” What should be insipid is transformed by the quality of patient attention Juan brings to the proceedings, as if the mere tracking of the house’s collective moods—by turns tense, fearful, comic, languid—were a form of necessary service to this group of people. As with other exhaustively transcriptive works of art (the films of Chantal Akerman or Frederick Wiseman come to mind), there is an outlandish but powerful sense that some redemption or salvation is at stake in this level of detail. These people’s projects are almost certain not to turn out well. But at least, Juan’s prose seems to promise, they will have been paid attention to. Some such promise is most palpable in those paragraphstanzas, those stables or holding pens for disparate, potentially destructive emotions. The events recounted in these two paragraphs from December 30, for example, might lead in any number of narrative directions. But what seems important to Juan is less to follow out those trajectories than to hold their elements in a state of chemical solution. Pancho shut himself up with Angélica in the little house. The maid came late and started cleaning, getting in everyone’s way.

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Jorgito wanted to go visit some friends but his parents wouldn’t let him. María, Lupe, and I played cards in the corner of the garden where María and I had first talked. For a moment I had the impression that we were repeating the motions from when we’d first met, when Pancho and Angélica would shut themselves in the little house and order us out, but now everything was different. At lunchtime, at the kitchen table, Mrs.  Font said she wanted a divorce. Quim laughed and shrugged as if to say that his wife had gone crazy. Pancho started to cry.

Many generic templates might have made sense of these events: Juan’s semirequited love for María could have been treated with the cutesy angst of a teen romance. The Pancho/Angélica plot, with its sequestered lovemaking, slamming doors, and sudden outbursts, could easily be played as farce— or, more darkly, as a tale of amour fou. Whatever is happening to the Fonts’ marriage would be perfectly suited to a series of late-night recriminatory set pieces, à la Edward Albee. Or maybe the maid’s presence should be taken as a cue to read all of this activity as a satire on middle-class problems. None of these generic possibilities are exactly foresworn—you can perceive them running in the background of the action—but none emerges to nail this material down. Any of those plots, in hardening into shape, would have necessarily channeled narrative attention, claimed interpretive priority for itself. Juan’s refusal to settle into these narrative grooves won’t permit that partitioning of our attention; nor will it abandon any of these characters to the loneliness of those separate narrative courses. The situation is of course untenable!—both because Alberto and his thugs lie in wait across the street and because the state of togetherness may be just an artifact of Juan’s paragraphs, less

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a real feeling in the house than a possibility held out by our diarist’s way of framing these days in prose. It’s hard to tell. At any rate, the book is clearly heading for a crisis, and the brilliance of this last stretch of Juan’s journal is the way it brings its multifarious narrative energies to a culmination and then (literally) sets them in motion. The first section of The Savage Detectives comes to a close, along with 1975, in a series of rapid decisions that feel as inevitable as they do undermotivated. Indeed, it’s difficult even to specify who might be said to make the decisions. The “plan” that eventually emerges at first seems to be the brainchild of Quim Font and Álvaro Damián: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima will take Lupe in the Fonts’ Chevy Impala and speed off . . . somewhere, anywhere, to lift the siege of the house. Why these particular chaperones are selected for Lupe isn’t made clear, but we get hints that the plan, and perhaps especially the car that comes with it, suits Ulises and Arturo’s desire to chase down Cesárea Tinajero, the founder of the original visceral realist movement in the 1920s; their “investigation” has indicated that she might be in the northern state of Sonora, and Lupe’s remark to María (“I’m going north, mana”) suggests that her eminently practical need to escape is being combined with the men’s quixotic literary quest. In merging flight and pursuit—in making the difference between those activities imperceptible— this car trip will radicalize the combination of avidity and passivity that has characterized Juan’s diary. This might be one reason Juan joins them—jumping into the Impala at the last minute after knocking a drunken Alberto to the ground to prevent him from kicking in the car door. But Juan’s motive also, typically, seems to derive from his concern for the group’s coherence. His account of New Year’s Eve repeats his now-familiar habit of counting off the names of the participants like rosary beads. This time the holiday gives his in-gathering

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mentality an objective correlative in the shape of a group embrace: “After the countdown to midnight on TV we all hugged: María, Angélica, Jorgito, Quim, Mrs. Font, her sister, Laura Damián’s father, the architect, the painters, Quim’s cousin, Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima, Lupe, and I.” And then, as its own new paragraph, Juan gives us a sentence that comes as close as any to making explicit the modest utopian wish behind his every utterance: “There came a moment when none of us knew whom we were hugging anymore or whether we’d hugged the same person more than once.” In principle, such an embrace should go on forever, to ensure that everyone is eventually enfolded. Strictly speaking, that fantasy of endlessness is just what Juan renders impossible by jumping into the Impala— definitively ending the tensed togetherness in which they have been held. But in another sense, his crazy gesture keeps faith with the group. When he first learns of the escape plan, his first impulse is to ask Belano and Lima “what would happen to visceral realism.” That the movement’s founders issue no response to the question only increases the weird pathos of Juan’s loyalty— an allegiance less to visceral realism than to the energy of affiliation itself. As on that first day when he tore away from his seminar, Juan seems inevitably drawn into the slipstream created by the movement of the splinter group’s formation: of course he joins this torpedo of breakaway sociality. It’s more a question of physics than of rational decision. Juan remains game, in other words, even under these extreme and possibly dangerous circumstances. In doing so, he contrives to make his participation in a project he had no part in conceiving feel like it was the plan all along. This sweetly reckless embrace of the emergent, whatever form it takes, encapsulates a key aspect of Bolaño’s sense of history. To be sure, that sense has been criticized as fatalistic and apolitical, too ready to surrender

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to the idea that history is a force one can only surrender to. And it’s certainly true that these final moments of Juan’s diary give no guarantee that the project he is undertaking will fit into any progressive political program. This car trip’s very nature, poised undecidably between quest and flight, would seem to render impossible any such orientation toward politically agential action. But it seems equally wrong to call this a scene of defeatism. Juan’s fidelity to the moment here is lived as fidelity to his friends. And this is not, as in the classic liberal formulation of such fidelity, a consolatory or redemptive vision of escape from history; it promises no withdrawal into the sanctuary of privacy, home, romantic partnership. The very expansiveness of Juan’s conception of friendship, the formalism of his erotic proclivities, the generational nature of his love— all of it blocks any such retreat.

= = = The strangest thing about this final stretch of the diary is that Juan’s act of insane loyalty is narrated in prose tonally difficult to distinguish from the affectlessness of a recording device. The last paragraph of his entry for December 31 is filled with actionmovie derring-do. But the whole thing proceeds as if through a scrim: Juan’s “I” is the subject of most of the sentences, yet the effect is the opposite of self-assertion. He seems rather a surface for the reception of sensory impressions. “I heard voices . . . I saw the shape of Alberto . . . I saw María coming through the garden . . . I saw the faces of the thugs inside the Camaro . . . I saw Ulises’s face . . . I saw Belano’s face . . . I saw Lupe . . . I  saw . . . I heard . . . I saw . . . I saw . . . I heard . . .”: Juan is evaporating into a pure energy of witness. That this disappearance is also an emotional climax is one of the mysteries of

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The Savage Detectives. Juan’s annihilation—what it is hard not to think of as his self-annihilation—bequeaths to what follows an ambient quality of hopeless attentiveness, as if he has become an invisible power of guardianship dispersed among the novel’s paragraphs. With his disappearance the novel conjures itself into a dream state that Bolaño will sustain miraculously for the next four hundred pages. Those pages are stamped with Juan’s will to record, a will hard to distinguish from a desire to hold everything in a kind of impersonal love. That desire is also, the final lines again make clear, an effort to map Latin America. As the diary approaches its close, Juan looks through the “strict rectangle” of the Impala’s rear window and is overcome with a vision of “all the sadness of the world.” But his last words indicate that Bolaño’s toponymic preoccupation is still operating, so that this vision of well-nigh metaphysical loss is mapped onto a specific geopolitical space. “Our car leaped forward and left behind the Fonts’ house, the thugs’ Camaro, Calle Colima, and in less than two seconds we were on Avenida Oaxaca, heading north out of the city.” Once again the notation of urban geography can’t help sketching the national space, as these street names in the Condesa neighborhood point us to two of Mexico’s Pacific states. The Spanish of Bolaño’s final clause makes the map even more palpable, and suffuses it with feeling. “Nos perdíamos en dirección al norte del DF.” Literally: we got lost as we headed to the north of the Distrito Federal, or, more strangely: we lost ourselves, we lost track of ourselves. Or even, and weirder still: we were lost to view. In this reading of that final verbal clause, Juan records his own forward motion and records what that motion looks like from the perspective of those he leaves behind. It is as if he aspires to cancel the decisive act of social fission represented by the Impala’s departure: to stay impossibly in both spots at once or, failing that, to imagine a

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grammar that would hover in, or stretch to encompass, the space opening between them. The lines also return us to the “Mexicans lost in Mexico” that give this section its title. The word “México” is, in Mexico, a famously unstable signifier, denoting both the nation and its capital city, and Bolaño’s title plays on the ambiguity to resonant effect. How is getting lost in the streets of a city like getting lost in the national space? How does a generation lose a sense of having a place in the nation or become lost to the nation’s view? That a Chilean is numbered among the Mexicans who lose themselves in these lines signals that the referential reach of the word is more capacious still: “México” is not just this city or this nation but the span of Latin America. Portentous as they sound when spelled out thus didactically, these are the questions that have been bundled into that speeding Chevy. That car, whose engine hums in the background of the novel’s next several hundred pages, is a bearer of a collective and continental desire. It stands for the plurality of the lost. Or rather, it drives for that plurality. The Savage Detectives is a kind of epitaph, but it is in motion.

SOME NEIGHBORHOODS OF PART I

Fucking psychopaths Summary is powerful. “An extravagant cast of characters populates its pages,” says one critic about The Savage Detectives. “A bisexual poet named Luscious Skin, a Uruguayan exile who hides for a week in a bathroom stall during the 1968 police occupation of Mexico City’s national university, an institutionalized architect who communes with a dead poet, a pimp who regularly measures his phallus with a knife. These personages may not be born with pigs’ tails, but for many U.S. readers they certainly feel exotic and belong to a reality far removed from their own.” But the list colludes with the sensationalizing viewpoint it disavows. How “exotic” (to Americans, to anybody) is a bisexual poet, really? Or a mentally ill architect? And anyway, does Alberto measure his dick with a knife? Lupe says so, but María is dubious (“Ay, mana, how are you so sure about the knife thing?”), while Juan is of course made miserable by this talk of another man’s endowment (“Is it really that big?”). Lupe elaborates on the story, explaining that sometimes he cuts himself a bit, but “only when he’s nervous. Or fucked up. . . . He

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says it’s good for his manhood. He says it’s a habit he learned inside.” María’s response to all of this is sweet reasonableness itself: “He sounds like a fucking psychopath.” This, it seems not much of a stretch to say, is the anticipated reaction of the reader as well. María finds the phallus-measuring pimp as far removed from her reality as we do, whoever we are. The Savage Detectives has a sense of humor about its own outlandishness. And it knows that “reality” is multiple, and alarmingly composed of such violations of the contours of the given.

Poetesses “Are there a lot of poetesses?” It’s one of the first things, of course, that Juan wants to know about the visceral realist clan he’s joined. “It’s lame to call them poetesses,” Pancho responds. “You’re supposed to call them poets,” adds Rafael Barrios. (Juan’s word, poetisa, has exactly the trivializing connotations of its English equivalent.) Juan takes the note. Four days later, María treats him and Lupe to a capsule lecture on feminism and experimental art, with references to Gertrude Stein, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Alice B. Toklas, Unica Zürn, Joyce Mansour, Marianne Moore, “and a bunch of other names I don’t remember,” Juan reports. María concludes with a mention of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Juan speaks the following gloss: “She’s a Mexican poet.” Is this for Lupe’s edification? (If so, it’s unnecessary: “And a nun too,” she shoots back. “I know that much.”) It seems more likely that Juan simply wants to try out the sound of the gender-neutral term, wants to see how it feels to refrain from condescending to one of his country’s foundational literary artists. It’s a momentary thing— a little later, Juan reverts to the feminine form—but you can feel that the rules of gendered engagement are under active negotiation.

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Nobody in these exchanges mentions ’68, but the turbulence generated by the movement’s gender politics is nonetheless palpable. Women were central to the movement, even if that centrality was sidelined in the accounts that quickly sprang up around it. “The dominant machismo prevailed less in ’68 itself than in the later commemorations of the event,” writes Susana Draper in her book on the movement and its memorialization. The result, she says, is that women’s memories of the movement, even ones from soon after ’68, take on an air of “equality recollected from the inequality” of the present. Much of the humor of Juan’s diary derives from the accidental report it offers from this field of contestation. Toward the end of Part I, as everyone is gathered in the Fonts’ house, Juan wanders into the living room, where María and Lupe are huddled in conversation. “I soon realized that my presence was unwelcome,” he writes. “María and Lupe had a lot to say to each other and none of it made any sense to me.” The Bechdel Test (which asks whether, in a piece of fiction, two women talk to each other about something other than a man) won’t be named until 1985, and then in a North American lesbian comic strip; Juan of course doesn’t know about it, and his diary doesn’t quite pass. But its central question shapes the social and erotic field he’s navigating. You can perceive the novelty of this world’s sex and gender relations even in the silly moniker of the omnisexual poet Piel Divina. His name in the English translation, Luscious Skin, captures the outrageousness but slights its social inflection: divino is a high-femme term of approbation, one whose indicative speaker is a particular type of woman or gay man, and so to address or even mention Piel Divina is necessarily to inhabit that hyperfeminized position. Juan’s first instinct on hearing it is to wonder whether there is a family in Oaxaca with the surname “Divina.” But the truth is more interesting: Juan is traversing a

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world whose objects appear to have been named by some libidinous Eve or some camp Adam. He’s a latecomer to a public sphere furnished with the emblems of alien desire, and to make himself understood in it he has to speak its language.

Maricones What does Ernesto San Epifanio’s catalogue of world literary faggotry mean— and why does it work? The bravura performance, which occupies several pages of Juan’s diary entry for November 22, should be tiresome. Juan records that, toward the end of the previous night’s party at Catalina O’Hara’s, Ernesto began to hold forth about the “the vast ocean of poetry,” inside of which “he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers.” The list, which swells to encompass over seventy names, begins promisingly, at least as far as intelligibility goes: “Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet.” No arguments there. But when the indisputably heterosexual Pablo Neruda is labeled an exemplary “queer,” we move to shakier ground. The designations that immediately follow— Blake was a faggot, Paz a queer— confirm that Ernesto is using the terms in other than workaday ways. The pattern that emerges is easier to see in Spanish. Bolaño’s terms are maricón and marica, words whose very orthographic and semantic closeness is part of the joke. Slang dictionaries tend to say that the former is a derogatory term for a gay man, the latter a slur for an effeminate one. There’s of course plenty of room for overlap here: the border between homo- and effeminophobia is a heavily trafficked and shifting one. And at a semantic level the distinction is even more subtle. Marica is an insulting diminutive of the name María (not far, then, from the antiquated American gay slang term “Mary”). Add the suffix

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- ón, which indicates intensity or largeness, and you get something like “a real little Mary, a big little Mary.” So the distinction between maricón and marica might be a bit like the difference between “faggot” and “faggy,” where the former indicates the definite item and the latter something in the suspicious vicinity. And because the terms are so slippery, it’s just as reasonable to translate marica itself as “faggot”—in which case a maricón would have to be something like “a big faggot,” “a total faggot,” “a real fucking faggot.” In Ernesto’s view, at any rate, this latter category is the term of honor. Look again at the exemplary names and you see that the opposition is about access to cultural and state power: Whitman (the jobbing journalist, “one of the roughs,” the singer of the open road) is a maricón; Neruda (ambassador, Nobel winner) a marica; Blake (printmaker, Swedenborgian, possible lunatic) is a maricón; Paz (ambassador, Nobel winner) a marica. The maricones are the elect, the band apart, the true believers; the maricas are the cozy, the praised, the laureates. Thus does Ernesto translate Bolaño’s Sartrean theme of commitment into a sexual idiom: the operative distinction is between those who own their faggotry and those who keep its full implications at arm’s length. In Ernesto’s colorful terms, “maricas beg for a twelve-inch cock to plow and fertilize them, but at the moment of truth, mountains must be moved to get them into bed with the thugs they love.” Maricones, conversely, have no such qualms: they “live as if a stake is permanently churning their insides and when they look at themselves in the mirror (something they both love and hate to do with all their heart), they see the Thug of Death in their own sunken eyes.” Ernesto offers the commitment to art as the commitment to really getting fucked, getting so truly penetrated that one ultimately becomes identified with the object one lusts after. And of course the identification, if pursued rigorously enough, kills.

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The catalogue is funny on its own, but its novelistic charm also has to do with its placement in social space. Ernesto is doing his fagsplaining to a group of straight men, and it’s notable how quickly his auditors catch the rules of the game, how eager they are to ensure that their favorite writers (and by extension they themselves) will merit Ernesto’s gold star of mariconería. When Juan asks after the designation of Efrén Rebolledo (the author, we recall, to whose work he has been masturbating), he is disappointed to hear that Rebolledo is an “extremely minor marica”—“a diplomat, of course,” Ernesto adds damningly. Similarly, when Ernesto summarily categorizes the entire Mexican Contemporáneos group as maricas, Belano howls in protest, “No! Not Gilberto Owen!” On one level, of course, the list isn’t really about sex or gender at all: gay and straight male poets pop up in all categories, and Ernesto claims “our beloved Sophie Podolski” as one of the great maricones of the French tradition. But on another level, it inevitably is about sex and gender, and the humor of the scene derives not just from Ernesto’s inventiveness but from the fact that he has these straight dudes competing over which of them is most willing to bend over to take the murderous foot-long cock of poetry. Bolaño hasn’t just incorporated into his novel an exemplary instance of the “startling juicy displays of excess erudition” that Eve Sedgwick says characterizes “classic camp performance.” He’s also shown us that erudition claiming space in a shifting social field. The whole conversation feels unlikely, historically new, pleasurable. The boys are listening to this faggot.

Putas Lupe’s story runs in the background of Juan’s— at first quietly, then with an increasingly hard-to-ignore intensity. Indeed, as Part I progresses, it comes to seem as if two classic realist

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templates are running interference on each other: is this the Balzacian tale of a young man from the provinces discovering the mysteries of the big city, or a Zolaesque account of a woman’s descent into the social depths? In a particularly disturbing moment in Nana, Zola’s courtesan heroine chats with her colleague and sometime lover Sabine in front of their gentleman clients; Nana rattles on casually about her father’s drunken abusiveness, the sexual assaults she endured as a child, her parents’ death from starvation. Her wealthy paramour Muffat, plying her with truffles, intervenes: “What you’re telling us isn’t very cheerful.” Zola of course makes Nana his central figure just because she is a vehicle for such hard social facts, and the scene makes one wonder if it’s not ultimately Nana’s intense vulnerability that makes her so sexually electrifying to Muffat—whether he isn’t in some obscure way paying for access to just this social knowledge. Lupe too speaks some of the most openly upsetting details in The Savage Detectives: on November 16, she tells Juan and María with defiant casualness about the night she took some bad drugs and ended up in agony on a park bench. “That night I thought I was going to die. . . . I was fucked up and suddenly I felt sick and I was vomiting blood. Buckets of blood. Deep down, I don’t think I would have cared if I did die. I was just remembering my son and my broken promise and the Virgen de Guadalupe.” Asked for clarification, Lupe meets Juan’s eye and curtly explains her son is dead. Juan’s fateful New Year’s Eve decision to merge his story with hers can seem strangely undermotivated; he desires her, of course, but then he desires every woman he meets. But on some other than psychological level it obeys an implacable logic: if we don’t know exactly why Juan wants to follow Lupe, we know that the novel wants to suture Juan’s trajectory to hers, to open the antics of his young life to the precarity and danger

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of hers. As in Zola, a social structure looms into view, smuggled in under cover of desire.

“Octavio Paz” Is it Octavio Paz who is the visceral realists’ “great enemy” or the idea of him? Juan’s account is equivocal: “We were all in complete agreement that Mexican poetry must be transformed,” he reports on November 11. “Our situation (as far as I could understand) is unsustainable, trapped as we are between the reign of Octavio Paz and the reign of Pablo Neruda.” Paz and Neruda again: Ernesto’s maricas, the court poets of their respective countries. But the visceral realist disrespect for these icons can seem performed as much as felt. Carmen Boullosa, in a memorial piece on Bolaño, captures the intensity and absurdity characterizing the factions in Mexico City’s poetry world of the 1970s. The major divide was between Paz’s followers and those of the grittier Efraín Huerta. The split was also political: Huerta was a loyal supporter of the USSR and Cuba— affiliations Paz had left behind. The infrarealists were a particularly rabid subset of the efrainitas, but Boullosa notes that this was an intrafamilial dispute, in which the enemies were united by a shared history and internal tensions fractured each side: Huerta and Paz had been friends and collaborators as young men, after all, and Bolaño reportedly had shouting matches with his master Huerta, whose unrepentant Stalinism he could not abide. Boullosa, herself loosely aligned with the Paz team, ended up having children with Alejandro Aura, “one of the great efrainitas.” The circuslike aspect of the whole thing was clearly a part of what kept it going. Boullosa writes of one event where an infra threw a glass across a room at a smartly dressed Paz; the poet shook his tie dry and continued chatting with his friends.

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Paz’s inescapability is glanced at early in the novel when Juan, describing the tension in Álamo’s poetry workshop, writes that “the alternating current of tragedy was palpable in the air.” Alternating Current was the title of Paz’s 1967 essay collection, and Juan’s (unconscious?) citation points to Paz’s role as a pervasive atmospheric condition more than a writer one might meaningfully take a position on. In interviews, Bolaño expressed measured appreciation of some of Paz’s poetry and less ambivalent approval of his essays; the Mexican critic Fernando Saucedo Lastra notes, with audible national pride, that in documentary footage of Bolaño’s widow, Carolina López, going through a small bookshelf of the texts her husband consulted most often, Paz numbers among the treasured authors. Still, Bolaño couldn’t forgive Paz his “absence of humor.” Alternating Current’s first essay opens by declaring that “Poetry has been likened to mysticism and to eroticism.” If not for the term-paper manner, this could be a blurb for The Savage Detectives. That tonal divergence is a precise barometer of the gulf between Paz’s and Bolaño’s projects: the distance between a writing that takes for granted that the world of literature is there, just awaiting its elegant exegete, and one for which the most salient fact about literature is how irrelevant it is to most people’s lives, how steep the barriers to cultural participation. Poetry gets you to mysticism and eroticism in Bolaño, but you have to pass through the prose of the world to get there.

Literalism, or poetry Juan, as we’ve seen, is regularly tripped up by place names. But this habit is part of a larger linguistic weirdness. A few days after his memorable encounter with Brígida in the storeroom of the Encrucijada Veracruzana, he stops by the restaurant again—in

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search of Rosario, but prepared to be chivalrous to her colleague. Brígida takes his hand, presses it “to her heart,” and asks him, “Do you feel it?” The ensuing conversation might be taking place between an adult woman and a toddler. “What?” Juan asks. “My heart, you idiot,” is Brígida’s reply, “Can’t you feel it beating?” Juan touches her breasts more attentively but reports feeling “no trace of a heartbeat.” Brígida is losing patience: “My heart, bonehead, can’t you hear it beating, can’t you feel it slowly breaking?” Juan responds that he “can’t hear anything,” and Brígida asks the excellent, if rhetorical, question: “How do you expect to hear anything with your hand, lamebrain, I’m just asking whether you feel it?” Juan is trying to evade her meaning, of course, but this romantic shiftiness manifests as a more basic failure to countenance the figurative dimension of language. Elsewhere this failure accentuates Juan’s nearly ethnographic self-abstraction, as if he were a visitor to his native country or perhaps a stranger to the rules of sociability: on November 14, he notes that the twelveyear-old Jorgito Font has a habit of calling everyone in his middle-class family naco or naca, a derogatory term for an indigenous person that has a bit of the force of “yokel.” Juan’s pofaced comment on this reads as if he’s never heard of a racist appropriation of racist language, and as if he can’t imagine language being used in any but the most referentially direct way: “Nacos, as far as I know, are urban Indians, city Indians, but maybe Jorgito is using it in some other sense.” Juan’s is the literalism of someone who takes language very seriously, and perhaps its strangest effect is to back him into poetry. On November 10, he briefly fails to recognize Ulises and Arturo when he comes across them smoking dope in the bathroom of the Encrucijada Veracruzana, and ventures almost apologetically into simile. “Two pairs of bright eyes were watching me, like the eyes of wolves in a gale (poetic license: I’ve never

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seen a wolf; I have seen gales, though, and they didn’t really go with the mantle of smoke that enveloped the two strangers).” And during the New Year’s Eve siege of the Font home, Juan notes that Álvaro Damián’s face was “as people say literally bathed in tears, although the tears only made two furrows down his cheeks, two deep furrows that seemed to swallow up his whole face.” Juan’s seriocomic fidelity to the possibility of a literal language restores a sense of the outlandishness of metaphor, its riskiness and gratuitousness. It also explains the near-mad loyalty poetry commands in Juan: this language game clearly has particular allure for someone so morbidly sensitive to its violations of logic. That “dark river” at Catalina O’Hara’s party could, for a different person, be a throwaway phrase. But our knowledge of Juan’s scrupulousness makes us feel its dangerous glimmer with enhanced intensity. And when, at the end of the entry for December 30, he writes— out of the blue and without apology— that Lupe was “smiling like a spider,” it strikes almost with the shock of watching a teetotaler take a fatal first drink. Anything could happen now.

Los infra In the beginning was infrarrealismo, the movement Bolaño and Mario Santiago founded or helped found in Mexico City and that The Savage Detectives depicts under the name “real visceralism” or (Wimmer’s translation) “visceral realism.” There are at least two infrarealist manifestos in existence; one of them opens with an unattributed citation to a story by the Russian science fiction writer Georgij Gurevic. The story was called “La infra del dragón” in the 1968 paperback Lo mejor de la ciencia ficción rusa, in which Bolaño read it (an English version, “Infra Draconis,” had appeared in a 1962 American collection of

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Soviet SF). The sentences Bolaño and Santiago selected from Gurevic concern the possibility that there are low-wattage suns much closer to Earth than the visible stars of the night sky: the story’s uncredited Spanish translator calls these undetectable bodies infrasoles, or “infrasuns.” “Isn’t it possible,” Gurevic’s narrator asks, “that on the celestial maps, just like those of Earth, the star-cities are indicated and the star-villages are omitted?” It’s easy to see why the trippy possibility of proximate-but-invisible worlds would appeal to young countercultural types like Bolaño and Santiago, and the notion that those worlds were in fact close to home distilled the energy of some of the slogans of ’68— “Beneath the paving stones, the beach!” or “Be realistic, demand the impossible!”—which had similarly promised an imminent utopia. But the term has other resonances. José Ortega y Gasset’s 1925 book The Dehumanization of Art included a section called “Surrealism and Infrarealism.” Ortega clearly thought he was coining a term when he claimed that there was a new kind of art (“what may be called infrarealism”) that pays “unhuman attention to the micro-structures of sentiments, social relations, characters.” This art, he wrote, “dive[s] beneath the level marked by natural perspective.” Ortega is playing on the technical meaning of infra as “beneath.” Far more audibly than in English, the Spanish prefix denotes not just what is below the threshold of perception but what is below, period: inframundo is commonly used to refer to the underworlds of the Greeks, the Mayans, and the Aztecs, and sticking “infra” in front of any noun more generally denotes an infernal or inferior condition. In his 1996 book La contracultura en México, for example, the Mexican writer José Agustín includes an appendix on Philip K. Dick—a writer whose influence Agustín perceives on Latin American writers— and claims offhandedly that Dick’s sale of his 1958 novel Time out of

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Joint to J. P. Lippincott “liberated him from the infraeditoriales”: the pulp presses, the crappy publishing houses. Heard this way, infrarrealismo more or less means “basement realism” or “shitty realism”—ignored or precarious or barely survivable realism. Agustín’s book confirms the infras’ selfevaluation by failing to mention them: in a survey that catalogues scores of Mexican writers, movements, clubs, bands, and poets from the 1960s and 1970s and manages to discuss the Colombian nadaístas and Ecuadorian tzántzicos, the infras make literally no impression. If Agustín’s 1996 book had been written a few years later, the 1998 publication of The Savage Detectives would have made at least a glancing mention of Bolaño and his friends inevitable. But Agustín’s book is more accurate as it stands: only in the retrospect of Bolaño’s canonization does the infras’ utter marginality look cool or knowing or strategic. The name was a precise sociological self-portrait.

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ho is this old man? Amadeo Salvatierra seems no more likely an anchor for a sprawling “total novel” than was Juan García Madero. Are we supposed to register the allegorical connotations of his name, which speaks of the love of god and the earth’s salvation? He is sweet and hospitable—inviting Arturo and Ulises into his home for what turns out to be an all-night drunken conversation—but surely this doesn’t qualify him for such sacerdotal or even messianic status? This kind of double vision, this hesitation on the threshold between two conceptual registers, will be utterly typical of “The Savage Detectives (1976–1996),” the four-hundred-plus-page central section of The Savage Detectives that comprises a series of statements by over fifty characters—some familiar from Juan’s journal but many new to us—who speak from such disparate locations as San Diego, Mexico City, Paris, and Tel Aviv, and who speak of such far-flung spaces as the coast of Oaxaca, the Panama Canal, Nicaragua, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the mining regions of Spanish Galicia, the art galleries and hospital wards of New York City . . . (The relation between the from and the of

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will turn out to be important, as will the question of what precisely to call these statements. At various moments, such varied generic tags as interview, conversation, deposition, testimony, interior monologue, and soliloquy seem appropriate.) The statements span time as well as space: as its title indicates, the section traverses twenty years. Amadeo Salvatierra’s statement sits at the still center of this sprawl. Divided into thirteen separate sections interspersed throughout the novel’s middle section, Amadeo’s words always bear the same location and date stamp: “Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF, January  1976.” (What “calle” means here— and what “near” means, and what “1976” means—will turn out to be important.) That consistency provides a crucial anchor for the reader: disoriented and fatigued though we may become as we wander through this middle section’s labyrinthine stories (not infrequently related by people who don’t seem quite sane or trustworthy), the knowledge that we will come back to Amadeo provides reassurance that the novel is keeping track of itself, and of our experience of it. And strangely, the consolation Amadeo provides to the reader sometimes feels like it might apply to the novel’s cast of characters. Of course, the rules of chronology dictate that Amadeo, speaking in 1976, can have no knowledge of the future events narrated by the characters with whom he shares textual space. But Bolaño repeatedly insinuates— sometimes through shared imagistic motifs or situational echoes, sometimes just through the mere fact that Amadeo pops up when he does—that he is in some kind of communication with these multiple others. Like Juan’s journal, Amadeo’s words—if only because they are threaded so consistently through and around the other voices— convey the sense of an imperative to hold the sprawl together, to

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gather or contain or provide an integument for the collective. His hospitality is in this sense ample indeed. Perhaps love and salvation really are at stake here. That this middle section would radiate such energies is counterintuitive. This, after all, is where the “disaster” that María Font darkly intimated in Part I appears definitively to have arrived. Suicide and murder, imprisonment and institutionalization, wars and dirty wars: these are just some of the fates endured and discussed in these pages. And running below or behind all of this is the mere progress of time, with its less spectacular but still serious ravages. The relation between the dramatic events that happen to certain specific people and the temporal unfolding that happens to everyone is one of the key mysteries of this section of the novel— one that lies at the root of the confusions over how to characterize Bolaño’s writing generally: is he the chronicler of a particular Latin American generation’s fate or the advocate of an obscurantist vision of generalized doom? Is he a political and historical writer or a sentimental and mystical one? If you think, as I do, that the very oppositions miss the texture of Bolaño’s writing and of his historical imagination, you can still see why it gets asked this way. There is indeed a strange sense in Bolaño that the historical world opens onto some ontologically distinct terrain—a terrain where “normal” time is annulled, with effects that can feel both nightmarish and salvific. The treatment of temporality in the middle section of the novel is the source of some of its most devastating effects and some of its most consoling; it accounts for the doubled emotional tone of The Savage Detectives, which sets characters spinning off to various forms of suffering and abandonment even as it also seems to gather them together in some supratemporal domain.

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= = = The power and originality of the novel’s time scheme would reward the kind of attention Gérard Genette lavished on Proust in his book Narrative Discourse, a study of a single work that has doubled as one of the classic texts of narrative theory. (Bolaño invites the comparison to In Search of Lost Time by having more than one character speak casually of “tiempo perdido,” and by placing one of his speakers, a Peruvian writer named Hipólito Garcés, on Paris’s “Avenue Marcel Proust.”) Genette’s book coined a host of geeky-technical neologisms (“the iterative mode,” “anachrony,” “prolepsis”) to account for the twists of Proust’s narrative, but the surprise of Narrative Discourse is how fun it is, how powerfully—quite contrary to the caricatured reputation of literary theory—it enhances the pleasure of Proust’s text. Bolaño’s novel too makes one want to draw up diagrams to account for its temporal shape, invent terminology to capture its peculiar effects (how to say “change in the rate of temporalconversational stretchiness” in Greek?). As with Genette, the point of the exercise would be less to revel in Bolaño’s technical trickiness than to account for the emotional and philosophical subtlety of the novel’s organization, the way it makes every page, and sometimes individual sentences or clauses, radiate with shifting temporal effects. I lack the space and the skill to perform that kind of exhaustive analysis. But some effort toward a precise description of this section’s chronology is necessary not just to account for the complex pleasures it affords but to approach Bolaño’s idea of history— especially Latin American history— and his idea of how subjects live through it. Some of the most forceful effects are straightforward enough to delineate. A few numbers make clear the large patterns. The

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two decades covered in “The Savage Detectives: 1976–1996” occur over twenty-six chapters, but the years are not evenly distributed among the pages. The pace at first is slow, almost imperceptible: the end of chapter 13 brings us halfway through the chapters and roughly halfway through the section’s pages. But the two hundred pages we traverse to arrive there have only taken us through five and half years, to June 1981. We’ve crawled through sixtysix months at an average velocity of five and a half pages per month: most people’s diaries don’t manage to fill time so densely with verbiage. But the pace is about to pick up: the 186 months it takes to travel from here to December 1996 are allotted the same number of pages, for a breakneck speed of less than one page per month (.93, to be precise). It’s a truism that time moves more quickly as you get older, but The Savage Detectives specifies with cruel exactitude just how much: once you hit thirty, Bolaño says, the motion of the years accelerates by a factor of six. Stated thus baldly, the number seems cartoonishly exaggerated. But in revealing that exaggeration, the mathematical exercise shows that the crudest architectonic choices can have outsize emotional power. Nobody performs such calculations as they page through a novel. But the reading body feels them. Such an insistence on the quickening of time would risk a certain bathos were it the only temporal effect of this middle section. But the banality of tempus fugit is cross-cut throughout by a contrary principle of stasis. Because Amadeo’s thirteen testimonials (or his single testimonial divided by some mysterious agency into thirteen sections) are forever dated “January 1976,” he seems exempted not only from the acceleration of time’s movement but from its very directionality. The effects of this exemption become more multilayered the longer the pattern persists; the sheer dynamism of the interplay between Amadeo’s motionlessness and everyone else’s sped-up movement is hard to

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describe from the outside. Every time I have read the novel I have tried to settle on an image that would capture the elegance of this time scheme. Should we understand Amadeo as standing watch at the head of the years, as if stationed on a kind of promontory? The picture feels too simple, too . . . pictorial. Sometimes, inspired by the image of weaving secreted in the etymology of the word text, I have imagined this section as the creation of a knitter who follows a tight stitch with a slightly longer one, and then a tight one with one yet longer, continuing the pattern (short-long-short-longer-short-longer than that . . .) thirteen times. But the fabric that resulted would be an unsightly mess—nothing to do with the devastating grace of Bolaño’s design. Perhaps a better image, one that achieves the requisite combination of the stationary and the ever more distant, is of an angler who casts the line progressively farther from a pier? But in that case, you’d have to imagine somehow being both the angler and the bait on the hook: simultaneously on the pier and in the surf, on the pier and out in the bay, on the pier and adrift in mid-ocean . . . The problem with all of these images, of course, is that they are images. The effect of this middle section is tied to its temporal nature: it is an experience readers submit to rather than an object they can grasp or a picture they can look at or a room they can stand outside of. That reading experience thus welds a sense of repose to that of historical movement. By means of this dreamlike intercutting, the middle section of The Savage Detectives relays two narrative series to the reader. In one of them, Amadeo spends a long night drinking with Ulises and Arturo, telling them about his memories of the first visceral realists. What this mostly means is telling them his memories of Cesárea Tinajero, the movement’s founder: her work as a secretary and speechwriter for General Diego Carvajal, a hero of the Mexican Revolution who as a

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powerful bureaucrat in the 1920s became a patron of the arts and a friend of the (historically real) Stridentist movement; her friendship with Pablito Lezcano, a poet and talented translator from French; her friendship (or affair) with a beautiful young woman named Encarnación Guzman, also a poet—and her defense of her friend (or lover) against the sexist dismissals of the Stridentists Manuel Maples Arce and Germán List Arzubide; her love of Charlie Chaplin and dancing, which she imparts to Amadeo one memorable night at a dance hall near the Lagunilla market in the city center; her editorship of the visceral realist magazine Caborca (one issue); her inexplicably abrupt departure from Mexico City—sometime in the 1930s, not long after Encarnación marries, and not long after Pablito does—for Sonora, the state in which she was born but in which she has no living relatives. (The northern destination seems encrypted even in the fictional drink the men imbibe: Los Suicidas mezcal, distilled in the northern state of Chihuahua— as the critic Oswaldo Zavala points out, a profoundly unlikely origin for a liquor usually made at the other end of the country.) Although Amadeo never says so, we understand the desolation that Cesárea’s departure meant for him: the following decades, which we glancingly learn have included a wife and two sons, seem unreal by comparison with his memories of the friends of his youth. The second series spirals forward. As Amadeo unfolds for his young interlocutors what he knows of Cesárea’s story, the other speakers of “The Savage Detectives: 1976–1996” all in some way discuss the separate (and very occasionally overlapping) odysseys of Arturo and Ulises over two decades. The story, or what we can glean of it, picks up a few months into 1976—not long, that is, after the conclusion of whatever started with Lupe and Juan and the northbound Impala on the last day of 1975. Although we

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only see Arturo and Ulises together again once in all this stretch of narrative, the two men’s stories resemble each other in key respects: they are peripatetic and marginally employed for long stretches, especially in the first ten years; they are involved in a string of inconclusive and sometimes disastrous affairs and hopeless amorous pursuits; they remain obsessed with literature and the tournaments of prestige that surround it; they pursue, or are pursued by, violence of various kinds. The facts, roughly: shortly after their return from Sonora, Ulises and Arturo depart separately for Europe. Ulises spends time among the Latin American community in Paris, where he is often homeless or marginally housed (he schedules showers in the home of one acquaintance, and a friend who visits his tiny rented room in the Rue des Eaux in 1977 comes away with scabies). Arturo meanwhile heads to Barcelona, where his mother and sister are already installed, and works as a night watchman at a campground in the countryside nearby. The men’s paths cross around the beginning of 1978 in the South of France, where Arturo helps arrange a job for Ulises on a fishing rig. Ulises is utterly unqualified for the work, but it earns him enough to finance a trip to Tel Aviv, where he spends several weeks pressing a confused suit for a Mexican woman named Claudia before befriending an unbalanced Austrian thug in whose company he travels to Vienna. By 1980 he is back in Mexico, and in 1981 he disappears utterly from view during “a little field trip to the Revolution” in Nicaragua— a trip he makes as an unlikely member of an official writers’ delegation. By around 1983 he has returned to Mexico—traveling, he tells a friend, along a nonexistent “river that connects Mexico and Central America.” From then on, he stays in the capital. At some point he seems to have married a woman of Japanese or Chinese descent, possibly someone whose family owns a chain of Chinese restaurants. Other reports

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suggest he is dealing drugs, or addicted to them, or both. As one friend says, “It was all vague and depressing.” We last see him in 1994 or 1995 in the Parque Hundido, a lovely but dilapidated quarry-turned-park, having a meeting with the visceral realists’ archenemy, Octavio Paz. The encounter has elements of Noh theater and Buster Keaton films, as the two men first trace circular patterns around each other and then sit on a bench for a brief conversation whose words we cannot hear. It is impossible to know what the meeting signals for Ulises: a rapprochement, a final defeat, a joke, or nothing at all. Belano’s trajectory is possibly even more confounding—his appearances more irregular and the gaps between them longer. After he says goodbye to Ulises in France in February 1978, we have no definitive news of him for over a decade. In December 1988 we see him working as a dishwasher in a Barcelona bar owned by a Chilean immigrant named Andrés Ramírez. At some point in the intervening years he has contributed to a literary magazine, the vanity project of a pretentious Gallegan lawyer who becomes enraged when he learns that Belano (“that third-rate Julien Sorel”) is sleeping with his daughter. There are other lovers—in 1977 Belano has an intermittent affair with an English woman named Mary Watson who visits the campground where he works, and he lives briefly in Barcelona with Edith Oster, a Jewish Mexican woman who struggles with an eating disorder, in what is apparently the early 1980s. (“Dates,” Edith tells us, “aren’t my forte.”) But the liaisons on which the novel dwells feel almost randomly chosen: by the early nineties Arturo has acquired an ex-wife and at least one child, but we never meet them. We learn that he has become a published author only incidentally; the news reaches us when we witness him participate in a duel (a real one, with swords) on a Catalonian beach in 1993 or 1994 with a literary critic Belano believes is going to trash his

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forthcoming novel. Like Ulises’s meeting with Paz, the event teeters between farce and menace—and it fades out before we see its dénouement. By 1995, he has learned he is gravely ill, and departed suddenly for Africa. We see him working as a journalist in Angola and Rwanda before his story peters out terrifyingly in a village on the outskirts of Monrovia, Liberia: caught in an ambush in that country’s civil war, Belano chooses what is clearly the worst of two bad options, following a group of soldiers into a forest controlled by one of the more bloodthirsty teenage “generals” of the (historically real) rebel leader Roosevelt Johnson. The decision, like the move to Africa in the first place, baffles psychology and probability: is Arturo citing his namesake Arthur Rimbaud, who similarly decamped to that continent after a rebellious poetic youth? Does he simply not care whether he lives or dies? Shortly before he disappears, we hear Belano declare that “there’s something nice” about the spectacle of the teenage Liberian warriors: bonito is the word he uses, with its hint of aesthetic approval. Does he, insanely, perceive in these child warriors a distant echo of the insurgents of Avenida Insurgentes?

= = = To answer any of these questions, it’s necessary to note that the previous four paragraphs are riddled with inaccuracies. For starters, any summary of Arturo’s and Ulises’s distinct trajectories emphasizes their separateness in a way the novel as read refuses. Reconstructing these characters’ biographies demands that we ignore the cross-cutting of this information with the unfolding conversation with Amadeo, a conversation that insistently conveys the men’s sheer togetherness, even their disconcerting nondifferentiation. Amadeo sometimes registers that one of his interlocutors is Chilean and one Mexican, but more frequently

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he fails to notice any national and even physical or psychological distinction between them: “They looked at me and smiled, both at the same time, damn them, as if they were interconnected,” he says early on, and over the course of the evening they behave as a composite entity. The effect can be wholly unreal, as when Amadeo asks the boys to explicate Cesárea Tinajero’s single printed poem (a pictogram entitled “Sión”) and they conduct an entire exchange in an eerie synchrony reminiscent of the terrifying twins from The Shining: “they said, it’s a joke, Amadeo, the poem is a joke covering up something more serious. But what does it mean? I said. Let us think a little, Amadeo, they said . . .” But Bolaño’s narrative subtlety elsewhere makes the same device intensely moving. At the conclusion of chapter 8, we see Belano and Lima bidding each other goodbye in the South of France sometime in early 1978: “Well,” Belano says, “I get the feeling this is the last time we’ll see each other.” On the next page, at the head of chapter 9, we are back on the Calle República de Venezuela and immersed in the conversation with Amadeo, two years earlier: “Then I heard voices,” Amadeo reports. “They were talking to me, saying: Señor Salvatierra, Amadeo, are you all right?” Impossible not to feel that the men’s uncanny unison is compensating for— even in some mystical register canceling— that final separation. My first inaccuracy, then, is in pretending that the men’s fates can be differentiated at all. In the pages of The Savage Detectives, they can’t. But my summary is wrong in another, more technical but ultimately more serious, way. I’ve used the conventional language of literary-critical description—“we last see Ulises in 1994 or 1995,” “we hear Belano declare,” “we witness him participate in a duel.” But the truth is that in these four hundred pages we never see Ulises, never hear Belano speak, witness no duel. The novel contains no third-person narrator who gives us unmediated

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access to these events. The book’s midsection consists of ninetyfour separate speech-acts by fifty-three distinct speakers; all the information I have relayed, every scene I have described, is conveyed to us not as something seen by a narrative omniscience but as something remembered and related by a character. One obvious thing to say about this is that the events are thus colored by the personality of the speaker, the narration inflected by his or her idiolect. This is abundantly true of The Savage Detectives, which is wondrously alert to subtleties of character and expression. The blistering profanity and essential sweetness of the American student Barbara Patterson, the mildly officious pride of Paz’s private secretary Clara Cabeza and the mexicanismos with which she conveys them, Luis Sebastián Rosado’s romanticism and his slightly sniffy erudition, the compassion and insight of the bodybuilder Teresa Solsona Ribot and her penchant for selfhelp platitudes: Bolaño inhabits all of this with an effortless tonal dexterity. The weirder effect of Bolaño’s method, though, has less to do with personality than temporality. We are reading what appear to be transcripts of recorded speech, and Bolaño is rigorously consistent in affixing date stamps—month and year—to each character’s statement. These are, of course, the dates of the utterance. But the relation between the time of the statement and the time of the events the statement describes is variable and strange. As if to draw attention to this perplexity, Bolaño dates the statement of Perla Avilés—the very first speaker to follow Amadeo— “January 1976,” and then opens her speech with the following sentence: “I’m going to talk about 1970.” This is clear enough: Perla’s narration concerns her high school friendship with Belano, shortly after he arrives in Mexico from Chile, and it is shot through with an air of reminiscence appropriate to a young woman speaking of a period six years prior. The little performative

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hiccup with which she begins suggests that her remarks have been mentally prepared, as if someone has asked her to recount her memories of Belano; you can almost hear the tape recorder being switched on. But things will never be quite this clear again. From here on, the relation of every utterance to whatever has solicited it, and the relation of the time of speech to the time of the story, will be fully strange. For example: Laura Jáuregui, a former girlfriend of Belano who speaks next, will also make her statement in “January 1976,” and she will also speak of the past—specifically, Arturo’s trip to Chile in 1973 to support the newly elected government of Salvador Allende. But she troubles the certainty this well-known event would seem to lend to her story’s chronology: “This was at the end of 1973, I can’t say exactly when.” If it’s plausible that three year’s distance would introduce some vagueness, the tone of retrospection suffusing the rest of her speech is harder to parse. Laura’s opinion is that Belano cooked up his poetic movement as a way to impress her into rekindling their brief affair. “The whole visceral realist thing was a love letter,” she claims. Her tone is so distant that the reader recalls only with effort that the January 1976 in which she speaks is mere weeks after what Juan’s diary records as the height of visceral realist activity. The effect continues when, a few pages later, Piel Divina speaks in May 1976 of his acquaintances of December 1975 as if they were figures from a previous life: “Arturo Belano never liked me. Ulises Lima did . . . María Font liked me. Angélica Font didn’t.” This distancing of the very recent past is introduced so subtly that it can be hard to register how odd it is—until, further on, the effect becomes frankly bizarre. In January 1978, Felipe Müller informs us that he shacked up with his girlfriend the previous year employing the tone of someone cobbling together his life story from a distance of decades: “1977 was the year I moved in with

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my girlfriend.” For Mary Watson, who offers her statement in May 1978, the summer of 1977 is not “last summer” but “the summer of 1977.” These people seem to inhabit time in a noncontinuous fashion— even to be narrating their lives as if from some posthumous position. The effect is strangest where it is easiest to overlook, in Amadeo Salvatierra’s thirteen statements. Here we reach my third inaccuracy: “Amadeo,” I wrote, “spends a long night drinking with Ulises and Arturo and telling them about his memories of the first visceral realists.” But this is not what readers see. What we see—more precisely, what we hear—is Amadeo’s recounting of this all-night conversation to a silent and invisible interlocutor. This triangulated structure of address is posited in Amadeo’s first words: “My dear boys, I said to them, I’m so glad to see you, come right in . . .” That I said to them signals unmistakably that we are listening not to the men’s exchange but to Amadeo’s account of his recollection of it. But the two speech situations mimic each other so uncannily that the second discursive layer can be easy to lose track of. Amadeo is, after all, having a long conversation about another long conversation, and he recounts his night with Arturo and Ulises in such detail that his report approaches the condition of a durational theater piece in which the real time of the performance corresponds to the time elapsing in the dramatic action. In such performances, the presence of a functioning on-stage clock often focuses the audience’s attention on the theatrical feat, and the temporal effects are no less powerful here. The evidence points to the conversation with Arturo and Ulises happening just before they depart for Sonora. It is during this conversation that Ulises and Arturo learn that the northern state was Cesárea’s last-known destination—and so the meeting with Amadeo provides the final clue in the investigation into her whereabouts they have conducted all through

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Part I. In other words, the conversation happens in late December 1975. And so Amadeo’s January 1976 recounting of the conversation occurs at most a few weeks, maybe just a few days— and possibly just one day—later. It is almost impossible to keep this chronological fact in mind as one moves through Part II of The Savage Detectives. This is partly because, as in the other statements comprising this section, the tone of reminiscence suffusing Amadeo’s speech effectively pushes the conversation with the young men back in phenomenological time: it feels like his night with them is being dredged up from distant memory. And the draping of Amadeo’s statement across four hundred pages also elongates it temporally, lending it an elasticity that makes it seem to encompass the two decades covered in those pages. The technical account of the structure belies the extraordinary variety of ways we might describe its effects. Here is one: Bolaño makes a twelve-hour conversation last twenty years. Or another: Amadeo remembers forward, to a time that outstrips his own mortality (an old man in 1976, he is surely long dead by the 1996 in which “his” section ends). Another still: the boys who are paying homage to an elder have been aged by this long night, by the end of which they have somehow become the middle-aged men they will be in the mid1990s. Or another, yet stranger version of this point: Amadeo’s report, in conflating his memory of his conversation with the boys with his recollections of the 1930s, has forcibly put Arturo and Ulises into history, pushed them onto the same distant plane with Cesárea and Pablito and Encarnación and General Carvajal and the Stridentists and the first visceral realists—precisely as if he were the young man and they the visitants from the past. All of these effects cluster around New Year’s Eve 1975, that moment when one year ticks over into the next. This is the only temporal unit we know with certainty separates Amadeo’s

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conversation with the boys from his account of it. In an unavoidably literal sense, that instant is threaded through his utterance: it is the primary gap across which he speaks, an elementary temporal particle that is as easy for the reader to forget intellectually as it is impossible not to hear. Because Amadeo’s speech spans the huge midsection of the novel, we can say that most of The Savage Detectives “takes place” in that single point in time—that a primary goal of the novel is to expand that instant and dwell in it, to stop the clock just there and pour years and words and experience into the smallest possible unit of temporal unfolding. But why the last moment of 1975? What does the date signify? If we take the question as directed at the level of biographical myth, plenty of answers come to mind: for one, the conversation with Amadeo gives the young men’s hunt for a literary heritage definitive shape in the clue to Cesárea’s whereabouts. But the same stretch of the novel shows us that their search results not in vocational certainty but in an aimless and increasingly desperate wandering. With the benefit of hindsight, we see that 1975 inevitably marks the last moment of Arturo and Ulises’s youth, the dissolution of their circle of friends and the end of their illusions about a collective and revolutionary poetic project. That the two men mistake this harbinger of the end as the opening of a quest only accentuates the ironic conflation of activity and passivity that characterizes the novel generally. But that conflation also suggests that the end of 1975 has more than personal significance. As we saw in Part I, Bolaño repeatedly figures his characters’ most private preoccupations as pointing to the shape of Latin America and its historical destiny. Given this traffic between the personal and the geopolitical, it’s not hard to respond to the question What does the last moment of 1975 signify? in some other ways. One possibility, less incoherent than it at

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first sounds: the “last moment of 1975” is September 11, 1973. The Chilean coup—at which Belano and Bolaño were both present— remains a shorthand in Latin America for a whole host of epochal political and economic changes. Pinochet’s CIAbacked removal of the government of Salvador Allende didn’t just inaugurate the seventeen-year dictatorship that briefly imprisoned Bolaño and murdered many of his generation; it also installed the market policies that made Chile, in David Harvey’s words, “the first great experiment with neoliberal state formation” and thus the model for the economic regime that now dominates both American continents. The year 1973 is as good a moment as any from which to date what the historian Robert Brenner describes as the “long downturn” that began in the 1970s—a period of desperate economic adjustments, financialization chief among them, secured by the covert and overt deployment of U.S. state power. (This is just one of the ways Bolaño’s Latin American story is necessarily also a U.S.American one.) Such historical shifts are as undeniable as they are difficult to date punctually; harder still to specify when they come home to consciousness. The temporal gap between the world-historical tragedy of September 1973 and the coterie dramas the visceral realists invent for themselves in December 1975 captures this haziness of historical awareness with curious precision. That the seismic significance of the Chilean coup would only make itself fully felt after a lag of two years— and then not as a clear-eyed historicopolitical diagnosis but via the ginned-up frenzy of an opaquely motivated “quest”— consorts quite well with the blurry temporalities of historical emergence. When Amadeo asks the younger men why they want to find Cesárea Tinajero, their reply—“We’re doing it for Mexico, for Latin America, for the Third World, for our girlfriends”—is farcically imprecise as to

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timing, strategy, scale, and purpose. But the very arbitrariness of December 1975 becomes a way of marking the opacity of historical forces. Once you allow this range of reference, the last moment of 1975 might represent any number of generationmarking events whose dates have become indices of trauma: December 1975 means October 1968, when the Mexican army opened fire on protesters at the Tlatelolco housing development not far from the city center in which Amadeo speaks, killing upward of four hundred people; or June 1971, when CIA-trained special forces known as Los Halcones murdered 120 marchers at the Normal metro station a few miles to the west . . . These events are now recognized as two of the more spectacular moments in the twenty-year Dirty War estimated to have “disappeared” more than a thousand Mexican citizens; the very iconicity of these dates is an attempt to lend shape to an unthinkably long and opaque brutality. The mystical hinge between 1975–1976 in which The Savage Detectives takes up residence is an argument that dates are always theaters for political feeling.

= = = The totemic quality of dates is the burden of one of the more extraordinary statements in Part II, that of Auxilio Lacouture, the Uruguayan exile and university hanger-on whose testimony occupies the entirety of chapter 4. Her statement touches on her friendship with Belano and offers insight into his family and his political commitments, but it is more memorable for the claims it makes for Auxilio’s own quasi-mythic importance. Her chapter comprises a single ten-page-long paragraph, at the center of which is the Mexican army’s occupation of UNAM in September 1968 and Auxilio’s claim to have spent fifteen days hiding in the women’s room on the fourth floor of the university’s

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Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. The story is fantastical in its own right, but it becomes more so through Auxilio’s hallucinatory account of those days as extracting her from the normal movement of time: whether we think of her as elevated above the flow of years or immersed in some subterranean realm below it, her bathroom-stall prison has liberated her, in the words of the critic Celina Manzoni, from the “rigidity imposed by Cronos.” On the page, this is signaled by a pileup of dates. Auxilio’s opening lines are awash in numbers that interrupt and blur into one another. “I came to Mexico City, Distrito Federal, in 1967, or maybe it was 1965 or 1962.” Over the next sentences she tries to straighten her chronology with reference to the deaths of the (historically real) poets León Felipe and Pedro Garfias, exiles from fascist Spain for whom she worked in some unspecified capacity: she has been the kind of flattering, charming, semihelpful presence at the periphery of many well-known people’s lives. These men’s lifespans seem to promise chronological certainty: Felipe died in 1968, so Auxilio must have been in Mexico by then. And if Garfias died in 1967, she reasons, “I must have gotten here before 1967.” But it’s hard to tell if Auxilio wants to fix dates or recite them: “So let’s say I came to Mexico in 1965,” she continues. “I think it must have been 1965.” As the chapter goes on, Auxilio’s obsessive references to time’s markers conflate her personal milestones with political ones. Mexico’s 1968, Chile’s 1973, Uruguay’s 1973 (the year that Southern Cone nation also saw the installation of a military dictatorship): all are gathered into her bathroom-stall hallucinations of “airplanes crossing Latin America from end to end in a cold, bright, blue sky.” Such a totalizing vision of a terrorized continent might seem the essence of fatalistic passivity. But Auxilio understands her vision of being adrift in this stretch of time as a strange form of agency: “And then I hit 1968. Or 1968 hit me. Now I can say that I felt it

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coming, that I smelled it in bars, in February or March of ’68 but before ’68 really became ’68.” Or, as she puts it elsewhere, even more strangely: “I lived in the time I’d chosen and that surrounded me, aquiver, in flux, brimming over, happy.” Auxilio’s sense of the years’ interchangeability and her ritualistic invocation of these magnetic dates become a way to understand her relation to history as something other than pure submission— a relation according to which it makes sense to speak of choosing one’s time. Her testimony thereby illuminates The Savage Detectives’s own date fixation as a form of trauma management, a way to claim a minimal sense of control over the large-scale catastrophes through which one is living. This is one way Auxilio’s story provides a kind of key to the novel as a whole. Another is her curious self-awareness. If the characters of Part II seem to speak as if from beyond the grave, Auxilio embodies this condition in a redoubled sense; her story has given her a kind of posthumous fame even in life by making her into an urban legend. Toward the end of the chapter, she recounts that she’s “heard others tell the story many times,” almost always inaccurately: sometimes she appears not as “a Uruguayan with no papers or work or place to lay her head” but as a medical student or university secretary; sometimes the experience is attributed to a man, a Maoist student activist “with gastrointestinal troubles.” Auxilio says she never corrects these accounts, never asserts ownership over her story. Prodigally permitting its circulation, she seems to understand that the function of urban legend is to capture some dimension of collective experience through a scrim of outlandish comedy or horror. Her terrified sojourn in the women’s room is, after all, an excellent metaphor for being mugged by history—a condition common to all the speakers of Part II. Auxilio’s celebrity in Mexico City, like her singular importance to The Savage Detectives, is a function of her interchangeability.

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= = = Taking the measure of Auxilio’s centrality requires acknowledging a final inaccuracy in my summary of this section: namely, the claim that Part II tracks the fates of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. The notion that The Savage Detectives is “about” these two men has been useful for the authors of book-jacket copy, and it’s a difficult idea to avoid in attempting to grasp the novel’s form. But it is only superficially true. The book is so determined in its characterological sprawl that to lay too much rhetorical emphasis on these men falsifies its central energy. While one of the founders of visceral realism is mentioned in some form in each of the testimonials, this section becomes most interesting for the way it veers from that narrative axis: you could call it digressive if this waywardness didn’t feel so programmatic, if this drift didn’t so consistently reveal its own compelling logics. Consider the testimonial of Edith Oster. Her 1990 statement, given from a bench in Mexico City’s Alameda park, occupies more than twenty pages of chapter 19 and opens with the following words: “In Mexico, in Mexico City, I only saw him once, outside the María Morillo gallery. . . .” It soon becomes clear that she’s talking about Belano, and her easy use of that pronoun “him” suggests that Edith is aware of herself as picking up the thread of the investigation into his whereabouts. But she soon forgets about this justification for her words, embarking on a winding, chronologically confusing set of stories about her affluent background (her grandfather was the “Mexican underwear king”), her Trotskyite activism; her psychoanalysis, her erratic movements among Mexico, Spain, and Italy, her struggles with eating disorders and mental illness, her stays at clinics in Cuernavaca and southern California. Belano figures here—he is briefly her lover in Spain—but he is most interesting for how he

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fades out of her story. In one long and upsetting paragraph about her time living with Belano in Barcelona, Edith recounts a night in which an assortment of unremarkable facts—sweltering heat, a spicy meal, soccer fans celebrating in the streets— coalesce to precipitate what sounds like a panic attack. Edith begins to hit herself in the chest, and an alarmed Arturo convinces her to take a walk. But the rowdy streets don’t help: “The sound of breaking glass. We started to run. I think it was then that everything ended between Arturo and me. At night we used to write. He was writing a novel and I was writing my journal and poetry and a movie script. . . .” In a more conventional narrative, of course, the news of “everything end[ing]” would occupy prime textual real estate: at the head or end of a section or even, melodramatically, its own paragraph. Edith’s sequencing almost qualifies as a secreting of this information, so quickly do the sentences rush by. Arturo thus evaporates from Edith’s life in the midst of a paragraph that is heading elsewhere: Edith’s testimony is not even half completed when he disappears. The remaining pages of her statement are imbued with a disquieting picaresque aimlessness. Where is she going, and why are we following her? Her story approaches the pure seriality of one-thing-after-another: she returns to Mexico; she spends time in a clinic in Cuernavaca where her weight stabilizes; shortly afterward she moves to Los Angeles with her mother; the women rent a small house in “a town called Silverado, like in the movie,” where they befriend an elderly couple named Schwartz. The Jewishness the two families share is the occasion of quiet sympathy, and serves for Edith as a small emotional counterweight to the Schwartzes’ American ignorance: they have vacationed in Mexico, but their idea of the country, Edith remarks flatly, “couldn’t have been more wrong or superficial.” But the Schwartzes disappear too:

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“When we’d been living there for over a year, Mr. Schwartz died and my mother and I went with Mrs. Schwartz to the burial at the Jewish cemetery in Los Angeles.” Mrs. Schwartz dies a year later. We are two pages from the end of Edith’s testimony, and the distress of these accumulated losses—if they are distressing— is redoubled by the shapelessness of her narrative, her failure to flag her reactions with any of the usual narrative devices. But Bolaño’s aimlessness, here as elsewhere, belies a deeper formalism. The last paragraph of Edith’s statement, like what’s gone before, is replete with seemingly random data: hours listening to classical music in the house in Silverado, a brief affair with a guy who works in the Forest Service, her mother’s move to Guadalajara, Edith’s own return to Mexico City. But certain lines pulse among the stray details: “Mrs. Schwartz’s house was empty for a while,” and then, ten sentences on, “One afternoon a car stopped in front of it and a man in a jacket and tie got out. He had keys.” Soon a young couple appears: “I knew immediately that they would buy the house and right there in the yard, without taking off my gloves, standing there like a pillar of salt, I decided that the time had come for me to leave too.” Like the breakup with Arturo, the moment is nearly swallowed in the rush of events (in the following lines Edith tells us she listens to Debussy, thinks about her cat, and so on: back, it seems, to randomness). Only the fleeting reference to Lot’s wife highlights the moment for our attention, sending us back over the preceding words to trace the paragraph’s emotional spine. Doing so, we see that Edith has been standing guard over the Schwartzes’ house, waiting for their earthly residence to pass into new ownership before she abandons the spot. We realize with a jolt that her apparently self-absorbed narrative has also been tracking the fate of others, like a tiny boat whose powerful sonar records a huge emotional circumference. This has been a tale of mourning, one

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made more powerful for inhering (as mourning does) in the flow of the everyday. We have drifted far from Belano and Ulises— first to Edith and then, through her, to someone else again. “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere”: hard to imagine a writer more distant from Bolaño than Henry James—but the latter’s famous dictum might be the secret motto of Edith’s testimony and of Part II generally.

= = = Every time I have read the novel I have been tempted to generalize this experiment: the speakers of The Savage Detectives feel at once so individuated and so mysteriously connected that it seems it might be possible to specify the formal or ethical principles that each represents on behalf of the group—the way Catholic saints superintend certain trades or the zodiac correlates personality traits to planets. Thus we might say that Auxilio is the patroness of the political fetishism of the date that characterizes so many of Bolaño’s speakers, and that she stands guard too over the characterological fungibility that so many of them sense. Edith, in turn, represents two of the formal rules that shape Bolaño’s paragraphs: call them the principles of lateral characterological drift and of the submerged emotional climax. If this hunch is right, any of the speakers of Part II might be thus analyzed for the aspect of the group they embody. A selection—illustrative but not exhaustive—from Bolaño’s gallery of saints and sinners might then be the best way to anatomize the novel’s sprawl. The statement of Norman Bolzman, for example, who speaks in 1979 from Edith Wolfson Park in Tel Aviv, has the mysterious compactness of a psychological novella. It showcases Bolaño’s alertness to the phenomenological subtleties of emotion, the

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way it moves among bodies and sometimes breathes in space itself. “Everything began last February,” Norman recounts, specifying the interval between the narration and the events with unusual clarity. He is a graduate student in philosophy, living with his Argentine-Mexican girlfriend Claudia and another friend, Daniel Grossman, also students. Ulises turns up at their door—fresh from his stint on a fishing rig in the French Mediterranean—and promptly declares his love for Claudia. She responds brusquely that he might have written a letter. But she doesn’t ask him to leave, and Ulises settles in for an indefinite stay. By day he tramps the city; at night he makes strange noises from the living room sofa—masturbating, Norman thinks at first, until he realizes that the rhythmic gasps are those of a man sobbing. Typically, Bolaño takes none of the obvious narrative paths with the setup: Norman is not jealous of or angry at Ulises but pained by his pain, and by Claudia’s apparent lack of sympathy for her rejected suitor. Claudia is exasperated with Ulises— but her failure to eject him suggests that she is inclined to tolerate the demand he is making on her and the group. Ulises meanwhile cries every night but seems childishly thrilled just to be there: when Claudia berates him for not finding work, Norman realizes Ulises is “smiling out of sheer happiness,” visibly content to be briefly inhabiting a fantasized marriage (even a miserable, recriminatory one) with Claudia. And Daniel watches all of it. The most curious thing, and the most moving, is the way Bolaño choreographs it all. The divisions and groupings permitted by the layout of a two-bedroom apartment of course become fraught, and the foursome navigates the space in a dreamlike atmosphere of mutual care, as if in a shared effort to make the impossible emotion Ulises has brought into their midst collectively survivable: at nights we see Claudia and Norman in their room, sometimes making love and sometimes whispering about

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Ulises, who weeps just outside their door. A few nights later, Daniel retreats to his room while Norman goes for a walk, leaving Claudia alone with Ulises; on his return, he finds them reading poems to each other and joins them on the sofa—the theater, of course, of Ulises’s nightly pain. Around the table at lunch one day, Ulises announces he has a poem to read to Claudia, and when Norman gets up in embarrassment, she and Daniel both request that he stay seated. Against all odds, the reading is not an excruciation: the poem, “a collection of fragments about a Mediterranean city,” is, they all agree, very beautiful. We hear nothing of the poem, of course, and so this “beauty” seems mysteriously to attach to the very co-presence of these characters around the table. There is an echo here of Juan García Madero’s instinct to compose his poem “Everybody Suffers” on the very spot where the suffering is gathered; like that earlier moment, Norman’s testimony anticipates and literalizes the pop-psychological mandate to “stay in the room” with difficult emotions. Such intricate, emotionally charged navigation of living quarters animates many of the statements in Part II: one thinks of the tidal movements of desire and friendship flowing between María Font’s apartment on Calle Montes and that of Xóchitl and Jacinto, immediately downstairs; or the way Barbara Patterson and Rafael Barrios speak from their shared home in San Diego, but always as if inhabiting ontologically separate spaces— Barbara’s statements labeled “in the kitchen of her house,” Rafael’s “in the bathroom of his house.” But Norman’s testimony offers the most developed treatment of the motif, and makes clearest that its underlying fantasy is toward an impossible, endless cohabitation. For this reason he seems to me The Savage Detectives’s patron saint of the architectonics of emotion. Or perhaps, better, the architectonics of politics. “I’ve always been sensitive to the pain of others,” Norman’s statement begins,

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“always tried to feel a part of everyone else’s suffering.” His verb—solidarizarme—imparts a political shade to the emotional point, and the political indeed haunts this quartet’s movements over the chapter. A few days after Ulises disappears (a postcard says he’s waiting tables on the Red Sea), Norman, sitting at the kitchen table with his remaining roommates, starts to cry: “I knew that traveling aimlessly around Israel without a cent in your pocket could be dangerous.” Claudia is unmoved, and when Norman accuses her of insensitivity she erupts: She said that it wasn’t a sign of insensitivity not to worry excessively over Ulises Lima’s escapades. She said her older brother had died in Argentina, possibly tortured by the police or the army, and that really was serious. She said that her older brother had fought in the ranks of the ERP and had believed in a continent-wide American Revolution, and that was serious. She said that if she or her family had been in Argentina during the crackdown they might be dead now.

Claudia’s tirade moves from her martyred brother’s militancy in Argentina’s People’s Revolutionary Army to her own case of simply having been lucky not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Political fate, her words acknowledge, is sometimes a question of one’s commitments and sometimes a question of how bodies happen to be positioned in space at a given time—an intuition also suggested when Norman tells us that “the whole room shook when Claudia began to speak”: not, we sense, because she is shouting but because what she has to say involves the contours of the space that holds them, the question of how many people, and how much and what kind of feeling, it can contain. Viewed this way, it’s unclear that Ulises’s pain can be cleanly distinguished from Claudia’s grief. As if in recognition

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of this ambiguity, by the time she is done speaking, Claudia herself starts to cry. “Ya somos dos,” Norman says, grasping her hand under the table around which all three roommates are gathered. “That’s two of us now,” in Wimmer’s translation, but also “Now we are two”: a kind of perverse marriage vow, consecrated by shared sorrow for Ulises and for Claudia’s brother and witnessed by a fourth friend. Thus does Norman Bolzman also come to stand for the affective traffic between the personal and the political. That Israel itself is no neutral political container is not overtly flagged here. But the political context haunts Norman’s oblique comment about the country’s dangerousness, and his remark that Ulises’s epic nocturnal walks in Mexico City (he routinely traipsed from UNAM to his home in the Satélite suburb fifteen miles away) were comparable to hiking “from one end of Israel to another.” Israel’s smallness was of course much invoked in its 1967 and 1973 wars with its Arab neighbors, and Norman may be thinking of the aftermath of these conflicts—including the Israeli “settling” of the newly occupied West Bank that the Likud government began promoting in the late 1970s. The fraught geopolitical surround becomes vivid two chapters later in the statement of Heimito Künst, an Austrian Ulises meets in a jail in the Negev Desert. Nothing is clear in Heimito’s repetitive and impressionistic statement. He appears to have been picked up for vagrancy, and he and Ulises share a cell with Arabic-speaking men who may be political prisoners, but Heimito’s narration is too cloudy to make anything coherent of this: his very terms for the people he encounters—“Arabs” and “Jews”— gesture to a political schema but indicate no awareness of the realities of occupation and citizenship status that inflect those categories: rather than clarify the power differentials between these social groups in this time and place, Heimito’s labels lump them

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together in Orientalizing disdain. He is also, it emerges once he and Ulises travel together to Vienna, some kind of neofascist, or at least hangs with neofascists: people like “Julius the policeman,” who regales Ulises and Heimito with talk about “dignity, evolution, the great Darwin and the great Nietzsche,” the “virtue of danger,” the “tenacity of the forgotten,” “home, native land, homeland.” But Bolaño won’t let us simply write off Heimito as a deranged Nazi. His love for Ulises—whom he always refers to with the antiquated honorific “el buen Ulises”—is as undeniable as it is inexplicable. Should his devotion to his dark-skinned Mexican friend be taken as mitigating his commitment to white supremacism or as an indication that he is too muddled to comprehend his own hateful ideology? During Julius’s harangue, Heimito dimly perceives that his Austrian buddies are looking askance at his friend, and when one of them pulls out brass knuckles, Heimito’s instinct is to fight alongside Ulises. The scene is a nightmarish repetition of the novel’s originary moment of sidetaking at the UNAM poetry workshop, where Juan aligned himself intuitively with the visceral realist outsiders: the echo imbues this episode in nighttime Vienna with a queasy comedy, even as it makes the conformist eagerness of Julio César Álamo’s students seem retrospectively sinister. The key to Heimito’s role in the novel is made quietly clear in a moment just before the fight erupts. He and Ulises have been listening to Julius’s speech along with several thuggish acquaintances, and the group emerges onto the street “together,” Heimito says, “like a cluster. Like the fingers of a steel hand. Like a gauntlet in the wind.” Heimito’s chilling image of cohesion is almost a pictogram of the etymology of the word “fascism,” the tightly gathered bundle of sticks (or “fasces”) here represented by the tight knot of friends. That togetherness is tenuous: the components of this fist-like

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cluster are about to break apart in a fistfight; the energy of cohesion is about to transform into one of division. But in noticing Heimito’s investment in the group, and his hint of distress at its dissolution, we recognize him as a dark embodiment of the energies of affiliation that Bolaño elsewhere celebrates. The moment returns us to the close of Part I and the perspectival twists with which Juan attempted to cancel the dispersal of the collective huddled at the Font house. Bolaño clearly endorses Juan’s fantasy that everyone might stay together forever. But he is rigorously aware of the dangers of such togetherness, and it is in this awareness that we can locate the unsettling meaning of Heimito’s baffling testimony: Heimito Künst is the novel’s avatar of the political indeterminacy of the will to collectivity, an acknowledgment that “togetherness” can be terrifying as well as consoling. The derangement of his narrative may make him feel like an anomaly in the pages of The Savage Detectives, but there’s hardly a character here whose story cannot be viewed through the dangerous energies he brings to the forefront. In light of Heimito’s testimony, one cannot avoid asking, for example, about the Zionist colonization that has allowed the thoughtful and considerate members of the Tel Aviv household to gather there, or, in a widely different register, about the less literal violence that informs the making of the anthology of younger Mexican poets that, Luis Sebastián Rosado tells us in March 1979, gathers two hundred poets but not a single visceral realist. Heimito’s testimony makes us perceive how obsessively The Savage Detectives repeats the scenario of a group coalescing by ejecting a member. Think of Alain Lebert, the fisherman who in December 1978 recalls a night when his shipmates consider throwing a fellow crew member overboard because they have drunkenly decided he is the cause of a streak of bad catches. Think of Hugo Montero, who in May 1982 tells us of a writers’ delegation to Nicaragua

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during which Ulises vanishes from the streets of Managua, leaving his seat on the return flight ominously empty. There is no group, Heimito’s statement tells us, whose togetherness cannot be viewed from the viewpoint of its exclusions, no cluster without its constitutive boundary. We might think here even of the hugely appealing Xóchitl García, whose post–visceral realist career we follow between July 1982 and January 1986. We last see her giggling with her friends in her apartment as a spurned lover howls to her from the street below, in yet another repetition of the group-formed-in-exclusion. But Xóchitl’s story also embodies its own set of principles. She emerges over the course of Part II as one of the novel’s most fully realized figures, one of the characters most believably placed in time. We learn about Xóchitl first from others: she is a background presence in Juan’s diary of 1975, and it’s her partner Jacinto Requena who informs us in November 1976 that their child Franz was born earlier that year (nobody has to tell us for whom these self-dramatizing writer-parents have named the baby). We learn here too that the couple has been living in an apartment on the Calle Montes. In 1981, María Font tells us she has moved into the apartment upstairs; once, when Xóchitl is at a visceral realist “reunion” convened by a recently reappeared Ulises, María and Jacinto (who agree that the movement is long dead) have sex— an experiment that doesn’t interfere with the growing friendship between the two women. We don’t hear from Xóchitl directly until July 1982—the first of three statements she offers over four years. Through them we learn of her breakup with Jacinto, her renewed immersion in reading and writing, her job working checkout at a Gigante supermarket where she dashes off poems between customers. Of the original visceral realists, Xóchitl is the least addicted to failure. She tells us of talking her way into an internship at Tamal, a tiny magazine whose

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ridiculous name signals its outdated nationalist aesthetics (its editors, she claims, have read nothing published since the Mexican Revolution). She starts dating one of them, gradually takes over the magazine’s cultural pages (into which she slips the odd poem by her old comrades), discovers a talent for penning crónicas about city life and begins publishing in other magazines, eventually landing a job as a copy editor, a coup that lets her quit the Gigante. The keynote of everything she tells us is sheer practicality, a beguiling will to keep doing things and to do her best to enjoy them. Xóchitl is, in other words, the novel’s emblem of ongoingness, and in that capacity she illuminates a key aspect of Bolaño’s achievement. The ambition of The Savage Detectives has often been compared to that of Ulysses: both are total novels built around hallucinatorily rich recreations of life in cities the authors had not seen in decades. But Xóchitl’s trajectory underlines a key difference. Joyce’s novel, published in book form in 1922, is famously set on a single day, June 16, 1904: a day on which Joyce himself was still in the city. The Dublin of Ulysses is the city Joyce knew well, and part of the novel’s power derives from this memory-palace aspect of its project; we marvel that the past can be revived in such resplendent detail. Bolaño provides something akin to this effect in Juan’s diary, which similarly sets a disappeared world in vivid motion. But Bolaño’s Mexico City keeps going: if Ulysses suggests a city that vanishes after the departure of Joyce’s alter ego, The Savage Detectives imagines from afar the contemporaneity of the world Belano and Bolaño have left behind; it embodies a startling awareness that one’s own trajectory is only one’s one trajectory, that history happens as well to places you don’t live in. Like Juan looking out the back window of the Impala, Bolaño has devised a formal strategy to continue living—in imagination at least—in the place he has abandoned.

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In outline, Xóchitl’s story can sound simple, a tale of steady upward mobility or maturation, but in the telling it is as thrillingly contingent as everyone else’s. In reading it, we hear of the shifting publication landscape in Mexico City over the course of the 1980s—as well as the vicissitudes of Xóchitl’s messy but survivable emotional life, her commitment to her creativity, her doubts about “selling out” and her pleasure in doing so. Xóchitl García stands not just for sheer persistence but for the vividness of that persistence no matter where it happens: call it the ongoingness of others. She performs a crucial correction to the myopia and the fixation on the past that is one common feature of exilic consciousness.

= = = Like Xóchitl, I could go on. The novel’s ambition tempts one to catalogue all of its characters as attentively as Bolaño wrote them, to distill the particular narrative tactic or ethical principle they seem to embody. But I’ll bring this abbreviated gallery of Part II’s hugely various range of speakers to a close with the one whose emblematic status is most telling. Among the visceral realists, Piel Divina is the poorest in cultural and financial capital. Back in Part I, in the November 20, 1975, entry in which Juan catalogued his friends’ political affiliations, we learn only that his parents are from Oaxaca, one of Mexico’s poorest and more indigenous states, and that “according to Piel Divina himself, they starved to death”— as if, in place of a politics, Piel Divina has a foot in the Real of absolute suffering. He speaks early in Part II, offering his statement in May 1976 from the rooftop on the Calle Tepeji he shares with the Rodríguez brothers. He tells us that he has “no money, no job, no family,” and that even Belano, leader of the programmatically shiftless visceral realists,

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holds him in apparent contempt as a result. This is Piel Divina’s only statement in the novel. But he appears as an elusive object of desire in the five testimonials of the critic Luis Sebastián Rosado. Ensconced in the literary establishment, Luis Sebastián is emphatically not a visceral realist (he calls them “ignoramuses”). But in the mid-’70s he falls into bed, and then disastrously in love, with Piel Divina: “Why do I have to like the worst ones?” he asks himself. Their affair is painfully off and on, and it revolves unavoidably around the steep differences of privilege separating the men: Luis Sebastián tries quixotically to get his lover into an anthology a friend is editing, longs for Piel Divina to spend more than a few nights with him, longs sometimes just for his phone calls to be returned—always aware that Piel Divina is sleeping with other men and women, usually in exchange for food or cash or a bed for the night. The emotional ebb and flow of the relationship, and the way Bolaño distributes it over Luis Sebastián’s testimonials, give the affair a dense verisimilitude: through two hundred pages, the reader lives intermittently with their intermittent liaison, in a stunning mimesis of a long, complicated association that gains in emotional power precisely by never jelling into an official romance. In the last of his testimonials, from February 1984, Luis Sebastián numbly recounts a phone call in which his friend Alberto Moore reveals with cruel casualness that Piel Divina has been killed in a shootout—caught, Alberto says, in a police raid of a suspected drug dealer’s hideout. But the details are vague, and Piel Divina, marked from the first for his social expendability, will clearly not be the subject of any official investigation. Luis Sebastián has not revealed to anyone the depth of his attachment to Piel Divina—his middle-class discretion about his sexuality doubled by his middle-class discomfort about introducing his hustler lover to his snobby friends. Still, a catch in Alberto’s voice

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at the start of the phone call signals to Luis Sebastián that his friend knows how much his news will hurt: “For a moment I thought [Alberto] was going to cry,” Luis Sebastián recalls, “but suddenly, before he said anything, I realized that the one who was going to cry, the one who was going to cry irreparably, was going to be me.” This devastatingly self-alienated sentence is the closest the novel comes to an expression of grief at this loss. Thus does Piel Divina become the first of Part II’s speakers to die before Part II concludes. The condition becomes increasingly common as the novel proceeds. Norman Bolzman, whose compassionate voice relates Ulises’s Israeli sojourn in 1979, is killed in a car crash on the Oaxacan coast recounted by his former roommate Daniel Grossman in 1993. Ernesto San Epifanio, whose erudite and dirty-minded talk held a group of visceral realists rapt in 1976, disappears from the novel in 1979, having disappeared from the world some time before: Angélica Font, his closest friend in the group, tells us of Ernesto’s hospitalization for a brain aneurysm and of the surgeries that leave him severely cognitively impaired—living his last few months in the house of his parents, who have decided that his new condition has effected a miraculous “cure” of his homosexuality. (“Ernesto isn’t a fairy anymore,” his mother tells a skeptical Angélica, her words a faint, canceling echo of her son’s exuberant catalogue of world-literary fairydom.) These dramatic silencings point us to the novel’s other casualties: Manuel Maples Arce, the (historically real) Stridentist whom we hear in May 1976 badmouthing Barbara Patterson and who, Luis Sebastián Rosado mentions in passing in February 1984, “died in 1981”; or Álvaro Damián, the gregarious father of Laura Damián who kills himself shortly before a deranged Quim Font tells us about it in April 1980; or indeed Laura herself, the gifted poet dead before the age of twenty in the novel’s prehistory . . . in the face of this catalogue, Piel Divina emerges

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as the novel’s emblem of the evanescent voice: one member of a large and ever-growing club—the biggest club there is— composed of those who speak and then disappear into the silence of death.

= = = It’s just this air of enveloping doom that, according to some of Bolaño’s critics, risks imbuing his work with a glib pessimism and a corresponding political irresponsibility. Piel Divina and Norman Bolzman are both assuredly mortal, this argument might go, but too much emphasis on that fact mystifies the stark differences that shape their experiences: the former’s precarious life and violent death are the result of centuries-old patterns of racialized poverty, while the latter is a highly educated white man—“middle class” in a country where that category signifies extreme privilege—who loses control of the wheel in a moment of emotional agitation. Dwelling on the equalizing death that overtakes them both could reasonably be said to distract from the inequality that informs everything that precedes that final moment. But persuasive as the argument sounds, I don’t think it captures the way Bolaño’s novel handles the question of difference, or of death. Explaining why has something unavoidably to do with the status of the speeches that make up Part II: what genre they occupy, how we are to understand their place and date labels, even the more basic question of whether they are to be understood as representing spoken words at all or something quite different. The terms I have been using for these blocks of text— statement, speech, testimony—have begged rather than answered these questions. And all of these words—particularly the last one—have fraught relations to Latin American political and literary history.

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Testimonio emerged as a recognizably distinct genre in the 1960s, and its prominence is usually traced to books like Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte, Jesús mío, a 1969 novel based on a series of interviews Poniatowska conducted with an illiterate Oaxacan washerwoman, or Miguel Barnet’s 1966 Biografía de un cimarrón, which derived from conversations Barnet, then an anthropologist in his twenties, had with Esteban Montejo, a 103-year-old man born into slavery who had escaped into Cuba’s mountains and participated in the 1898 War of Independence. As these iconic cases make clear, the genre is shaped by sharp power discrepancies between speaker and listener—the latter serving not as neutral recorder but frequently as editor, writer, patron, publisher. The declared politics of the genre were progressive, a fact officialized in 1970 when Casa de las Américas, the major cultural organ of the Cuban Revolution, began awarding an annual literary prize in the testimonio category. In the words of John Beverly, an American scholar of the genre, testimonio by definition addresses issues of social justice: its necessary topics are “repression, poverty, subalternity, imprisonment, struggle for survival.” A corollary of this political commitment is a stance against the category of the literary. In the words of one theorist, testimonio is “literature that does not want to be literature.” The tradition obviously informs The Savage Detectives, even as the novel clearly departs from these defining conditions: despite what looks like the artlessness of many of his speakers’ utterances, Bolaño’s novel is an overtly patterned verbal artifact, and of course a fictional one. Hardly any of its characters would qualify as classic subjects of testimonio; while that genre traditionally gives voice to those left out of literacy’s privileges, Bolaño’s witnesses mostly inhabit the peripheries not of literacy but of literary prestige (and a few of them are perfectly comfortable in the world republic of letters).

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The social texture of Bolaño’s novel more closely recalls two landmark Mexican books with an obliquely stylized relation to testimonio. In 1971, Poniatowska published La noche de Tlatelolco (translated into English in 1975 as Massacre in Mexico), which retells the events of 1968 largely through transcripts of interviews with student and labor activists. In many ways, Bolaño’s book borrows its feeling of collective history from Poniatowska—as well as its sense of historical fatality. Near the opening of La noche, the writer Luis González de Alba is quoted as saying that “there’s a Mexico before the student movement and another after 1968. Tlateloclo is the cleavage between the two Mexicos”— and his words anticipate Auxilio Lacouture’s more overtly chiliastic sense of dates as quasi-metaphysical puncta. But Poniatowska’s speakers are mostly presented in brief paragraphs, and there is no sense that they might drift, as in Bolaño, into telling their own life stories. Nor is there any trace of an interviewer’s shaping influence on what Poniatowska’s witnesses have to say— nothing like the haunting sense of interlocution that subtends Bolaño’s testimonials. That sense owes more to another Mexican book from the same period, Luis Zapata’s classic gay novel of 1979, El vampiro de la colonia Roma. The novel is written in what Zapata’s author’s note calls a “ forma conversada.” Spoken in the first person by the protagonist—a hustler whose life on the social margins of Mexico City resembles that of Piel Divina— El vampiro is divided not into chapters but cintas, or tape reels, and the speaker’s sentences are riddled with blank spaces that sometimes represent pauses in his thought and sometimes the places where an invisible interviewer-recorder prompts him. “Tell you my life story? Why?” the hero asks near the novel’s opening, responding to a questioner who remains inaudible to readers. We never learn if the questioner’s motives are sexual, anthropological, or some combination thereof, but we know that our

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night-walker narrator only tells his life because someone wants to extract it. In Bolaño’s book, too, a mysterious pressure seems to elicit the testimonials. But that very mystery makes the fit between The Savage Detectives and the narrative experiments of Poniatowska and Zapata inexact. Poniatowska’s speakers know the name and date of the historical tragedy to which their testimony pertains; that clarity is inscribed in the very title of the book. But Bolaño’s witnesses, as we’ve seen, invoke and conflate a whole host of such events (Tlatelolco is the Chilean coup is the invasion of UNAM). For Spanish-language readers especially, this range of reference is audible in the insistent repetition of the infinitive desaparecer and its relatives. The number of times that Arturo, Ulises, and Cesárea are referred to as having “disappeared” inevitably calls to mind the extrajudicial murders committed by the Southern Cone’s military dictatorships, a phenomenon registered by the sinister use of “to disappear” as a transitive verb. But the semantic echo is ambiguous: as Claudia clarifies in her outburst in Tel Aviv, there is a political difference that matters between being secretly murdered by your country’s military rulers and wandering off the social map on a self-directed quixotic adventure. In the face of that difference, the invocation of testimonio in relation to Bolaño’s speakers can seem tone-deaf. His speakers have witnessed no singular, nameable crime, and their speech has no immediately clear political orientation. How to account for the lingering sense that they are indeed testifying to something? How to explain the urgency and gravity that palpably informs their words?

= = = The answer is connected to the curious sense of posthumousness described near this chapter’s opening, the feeling that these

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characters speak from beyond their own deaths. There are literary antecedents for this ghostly effect. In one of the classics of modern Mexican literature, Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel Pedro Páramo, the narrator wanders through a town he gradually understands is populated by the dead. For obvious reasons, Rulfo’s novel is frequently characterized as Dantean or “infernal,” and while Pedro Páramo is clearly a reference point for Bolaño (Rulfo is in fact the subject of Barbara Patterson’s research), The Divine Comedy may be the more pertinent influence on Bolaño. The Dantean resonances in The Savage Detectives are plentiful and unmissable: the tripartite structure, the bitter facts of political defeat and exile, the youthful affiliation to an esoteric poetic creed (Dante’s dolce stil nuovo, the “sweet new style,” derived its recondite features from the Provençal troubadours whom Bolaño also idolized and whose coterie ethos serves as one model for the confraternities of infra- and visceral realism). Finally, the dark forest in which the Comedy opens provides a constant imagistic backdrop for Bolaño’s novel, from Mexico City’s Bosque de Chapultepec (through which we frequently see the poets wandering), to the forest surrounding the Catalonian campground at which Belano works, to the Liberian underbrush into which he disappears: impossible to know as Belano vanishes whether the forty-something poet is seeking to end his journey through life at what should be its midpoint or to meet up with his Florentine precursor in the obscure woods. Thematic echoes aside, the deeper resemblance has to do with how the texts present the phenomenon of the human voice. In Dante’s poem, the dead appear to speak only when solicited by the presence of the poet himself as he makes his Virgil-guided tour of the afterworld, like animatronic creatures held in suspension until the arrival of a witness rouses them into performance. But this strangely refrigerated condition does nothing to lessen the intensity of their testimony, which if anything feels

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vivified by their liminal ontological status. The paradox is well captured by Erich Auerbach, one of Dante’s most powerfully appreciative critics. In a 1921 essay, he wrote that Dante’s shades “have forfeited none of their earthly sense of self. On the contrary, everything particular about them is heightened to a supernatural degree.” Auerbach elaborated on this “miraculous” feature of The Divine Comedy in his 1929 book on the poet: “the situation and attitude of the souls in the other world is . . . a continuation, intensification, and definitive fixation of their situation on earth.” The originality of Auerbach’s vision of Dante lies in that repeated and surprising epithet “earthly”—in the notion that this poem of elaborate metaphysical conceits (the nine circles of hell, the endlessly weird punishments) is chiefly interested in the conditions of life on earth. It’s this paradox that installs Dante in one of the central chapters of Auerbach’s 1946 book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, where The Divine Comedy—this poem of talking ghosts arrayed in a Dungeons and Dragons–style virtual world—is claimed as one of the landmark texts of realism, a document of the poet’s “contact with real life.” That realism is established not by an elaborate furnishing of the fictional environment but by the concentrated quality of the characters’ speech: for all of them, Auerbach writes, Dante’s visit offers “an occasion and a need to state what they are and to explain in clear and tangible terms how they came to their ultimate destination.” The claim is startlingly resonant with the sound of the testimonies in Bolaño’s book. To be sure, the speakers of The Savage Detectives explicitly invoke the presence of an interlocutor only a handful of times, and inconsistently: at times the addressee is indicated as singular, while at others the speakers use the plural ustedes. Once, in the statement of Andrés Ramírez, the Chilean bar-owner in Barcelona, the addressee is

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indicated, bizarrely, as “Belano,” but, mostly, the rules of time and space dictate that the interlocutor cannot be Arturo or Ulises. The inconsistencies are striking enough that it may be best to speak not of any imagined person or people but of an interlocutory position— or, even more abstractly, of a formal pressure of witness, a pressure felt by the denizens of The Savage Detectives with the same force that the querying Dante exerts on the denizens of the afterworld. In both texts, testimony is evoked—and gathered into a focused intensity—by the weight of that attention. All of Bolaño’s speakers convey a mysterious sense of occasion (Perla Avilés: “I’m going to talk about 1970”), an awareness that someone or something is listening and that their testimony, however trivial or digressive, matters to a larger recording project. That sense of occasion stylizes these utterances, imbuing them with an atmosphere of heightened self-presentation. We could say that Bolaño’s speakers feel like abstracts of themselves—if we understand abstraction not as a bloodless thinning-out but as the intensification that results when the inessential is eliminated. Bolaño has been justly praised for his ear—his attunement to slang and idiom, his minutely graded management of shifts in the registers of spoken language. But his speakers do not quite speak the way people really speak. There are no “ums,” no stammering or sentence fragments, none of the repetitions or hesitations that characterize oral communication. In places the speakers adopt the tones of operatic aria or lyric poetry. Take the series of statements that occupy chapter 23, most of them set at the 1994 Feria del Libro in Madrid. This is one of the most tonally peculiar stretches of The Savage Detectives. The statements are offered by a succession of writers milling around the shark tank of this international book fair, and Bolaño appears singularly out of sympathy with most of these men (they are all men), who waver

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between buffoonish egotism and ruthless cynicism about their literary careers. The interview format that organizes this section of the book comes under surreal strain here. Can these men possibly be saying these things? “I’m going to tell you something about the honor of poets as I stroll now around the Feria del Libro,” begins Julio Martínez Morales. Iñaki Echevarne starts off in even more hieratic tones (“For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it’s the Readers who keep pace . . .”) before ending on a cryptic claim that “everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy.” In fact, all of the chapter’s speakers conclude their testimony with some variation on Echevarne’s variation on Marx’s dictum about history’s tragedies repeating as farce. It is nearly impossible to imagine these incantations being offered up among the display booths and circulating canapé trays. In many ways, the model for the chapter seems to be Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves, where six characters embedded in a realist plot offer up lyrical monologues labeled with the perplexing tagline “she said” or “he said.” “Speech” here is a figure of speech, a metaphor to describe a personality disclosing itself. A similar stylization characterizes the location tags affixed to each statement. These can feel utterly unremarkable, flatly denotative, as when we are told that Manuel Maples Arce is “walking along the Calzada del Cerro, Chapultepec Park, Mexico City” in August 1976: nothing easier than to imagine this man speaking in this specific place. But elsewhere the case is more ambiguous. When María Font, whose February 1981 testimonial is tagged “Calle Montes, near the Monumento a la Revolución, Mexico City,” tells us about “the first and then the second week of my new life on Calle Montes,” a little static intervenes into the scene’s spatiality: why doesn’t she just say “here”? She seems to be not quite where we have been told she is, or to be there in

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an unusual way. Relatedly, while it makes a kind of spiritual sense that Auxilio Lacouture would tell her story of being locked in the bathroom at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras while (Bolaño’s location stamp insists) actually in the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, it doesn’t really make literal sense. And why would Clara Cabeza tell her story of Octavio Paz meeting Ulises in the Parque Hundido—a place Clara describes as “a jungle swarming with thieves, rapists, drunks, and disreputable women”— while (Bolaño’s label says) herself in the Parque Hundido? (For an instant we are visited with the notion that someone or something has dragged these women back to these spaces of trauma to make site-specific recordings, like the informants in Lanzmann’s Shoah who recount their memories as they wander the overgrown camps.) Once you start asking the question, none of these “locations” seems straightforward. Luis Sebastián Rosado’s earliest speeches are offered at a party in the exclusive neighborhood of Las Lomas and a cafeteria in the (also very comfortable) district of Coyoacán, both plausible locales for late-night confessions. His last three statements, increasingly grim in subject matter, are offered in his “dark office” in the latter neighborhood. It sounds plain enough in English, but Bolaño’s phrase—“estudio en penumbras”— has a derealizingly pictorial quality: A Study in Shadows could be the title of a Whistler canvas. Heard that way, the location seems less denotative than symbolic, imbued with Luis Sebastián’s slightly fustian personality. Amadeo Salvatierra, meanwhile, is always situated in a single spot in downtown Mexico City, on the “Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición.” But where is that? It’s never clear whether he speaks from his book-filled apartment (the location of the latenight conversation with the boys that he is telling us about) or from literally on the street; he plies his trade as a public scribe in

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the Plaza Santo Domingo, which is in fact on the “Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición,” so it’s entirely possible he’s not inside and at home but outside and at work. Despite the apparent precision of his geolocation, then, Amadeo is situated at an intersection of the real and the mythic: at once on the street and in his home (a conflation that in its superimposition of the private and the public emblematizes his nearly unhinged willingness to speak, apparently, to anyone, forever—what we could think of as his urbane domesticity or his domestic urbanism), and “near” the Palace of the Inquisition not most importantly in the sense that he is physically proximate to the colonial building that once housed the Inquisition in New Spain but because he is (in a well-nigh ontological sense) an answerer of questions, a witness to the past who spends a long night being interrogated by Ulises and Arturo before answering a few days later to us— or rather to the formal principle of interrogation that undergirds Part II. Amadeo does indeed “live” near the palace of inquisition, in a sense at once literal and metaphysical. These real places thus have a dramaturgical function: they are scenographies of the self, environments for the elaboration of personality and of destiny. These characters are “in” these places the way Saint Francis stands in his clearing in the woods, the Virgin of Guadalupe hovers in her golden mandorla, or Marilyn Monroe perches atop her subway grate. This iconic quality touches even the novel’s blandest locations: Jacinto Requena, whom we always encounter sitting in the Café Quito, is on the one hand someone who has a favorite coffee shop and on the other an emblem of mourning, a statue standing guard over the visceral realists’ gathering spot. Like so many of these locations, this one breathes an atmosphere of finality; it seems to partake of the essential meaning of the character’s life. Here too the

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resonance with Dante’s poem is revealing. In The Divine Comedy the sense of destiny and permanence is built into the poem’s theology. Christian belief provides an overarching structure for the individual self-portraits; it offers a dimension of absolute verticality that fixes in place the proliferating diversity of stories. But in Auerbach’s account of Dante, this transcendental imperative does not annul the meaning of the single life but sets it in proper relief. The “earthly entelechy of each person” is the real subject of this eternity-obsessed poem. Moreover, The Divine Comedy’s combination of structure and openness is, Auerbach claims, the result not only of Dante’s genius but of his historical situation. The political events of Dante’s life— Guelphs and Ghibellines, Black factions and White, the Papal Party and its enemies— are all but impossible for modern readers to keep in mind, but Auerbach points out that these details are symptoms of a large-scale historical movement, “the shift of power from the feudal nobility to the great financial and commercial bourgeoisie.” Early capitalism, in other words, was in the process of effecting “the disintegration of the ideological world order” that had structured Dante’s belief, and his poem was an effort to assert a principle of order in defiance of that disintegration. As Auerbach puts it, “turbulent new forces were confined within an eschatological frame.” Set in this long arc, Dante’s epic looks less like a model for Bolaño’s novel than a report from the other end of the same historical process. The political catastrophes that marked Bolaño’s generation were also bound up in tectonic economic shifts—the arrival of the neoliberalism that shaped the Chilean coup and the NAFTA-assisted dissolution of civil society on the U.S.Mexico border. It is certainly possible to see Bolaño’s intensely formalizing novelistic imagination as a Dantean attempt to find structure in the face of these traumatic dissolutions. And if

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Bolaño obviously does not share Dante’s religious convictions, there is a sense in which The Savage Detectives has a theology— a sense in which the teeming lateral spread of its character-world is ordered and organized by a transcendentalizing force. To call this force “history” may sound as mystical to certain ears as does Dante’s notion that Purgatory is situated on a mountain rising out of a great ocean covering the southern hemisphere. But the mythical or unreal edge in Bolaño’s work turns out to be a precise mechanism (even, unlikely though it sounds, a realistic mechanism) for capturing the way history intrudes on individual lives as an unappeasable cognitive scandal—an affront to the pretension to order and manage one’s time on earth. If Dante’s speakers offer their self-portraits in eternal view of God’s final judgment, Bolaño’s witnesses are always eyeing the historical scaffolding on which they are arrayed; that structure looms into view through the bare mention of talismanic dates or iconic geographies (“1973,” “Latin America”) but also through the stylizations of their speech and surroundings. Attune yourself to these characters’ habit of speaking like visitants from the afterlife, or to the way their environments resemble scenes of a haunting, and all of them can sound like ghosts in training. In bearing their mortality so visibly and audibly, these characters are always announcing their imminent placement in history’s structures. Bolaño was not shy about invoking mystical or religious language in pursuit of these secular themes. Shortly before Bolaño’s death, an interviewer for the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio asked if he had ever considered renouncing his atheism. Bolaño invoked Pascal’s wager (which argued that since faith is the safer option, it’s best to hedge one’s bets by believing) and pointed out that it should also work in reverse: “If God exists, he believes in me even if I don’t believe in him, since I am his creature and he will

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not allow me to be lost.” Bolaño’s inversion of Pascal’s postulate posits a salvation that happens willy-nilly, a God who keeps track of his children whether they heed him or not. “God” here seems less an omnipotent deity than an energy of attention, even a recording device: precisely, that is, the sort of entity toward which the statements of Part II are directed. It is as if those characters’ orientation toward the structures that determine their life trajectories also inscribed them on some cosmic scroll, as if their mortality were also a guarantee of memorialization.

= = = My talk of the implacable structures of history, of characters who resemble a calendar of saints, of speech that inscribes itself on some celestial roster—all of it sounds solemn and pretentious, as if The Savage Detectives were some self-serious museum piece. But these would-be portentous effects are encoded in the humblest, most realistic, most vividly contingent moments. One of the earliest of the section’s testimonials, Laura Jáuregui’s statement from January 1976, contains a few utterly forgettable sentences that I have never been able to forget, so deftly do they inscribe Bolaño’s vision of history and fate. Laura has been telling us how she first met Arturo at the Font house, how she spent a long day talking with him and a group of other poets (“none of them visceral realists,” Laura clarifies, “among other reasons because visceral realism didn’t exist yet”), how the unusually clear night made the stars visible, how Arturo told her that he wanted to see her poems, that “he loved the stars of both hemispheres, north and south,” that he wanted her phone number. She gives it to him, he calls, and they agree to meet the following day. But Laura lives in Tlalpan, fifteen miles to the south, and she has to stay near home that day, so he’ll have to take the metro and then

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a bus and then another one . . . Arturo agrees, of course, and she says she’ll meet him at the end of the metro line. “I don’t know why but I was sure he’d get lost and I said wait for me at the metro stop and when I went to meet him I found him sitting on some crates of fruit, leaning against a tree, really, the best place possible. You’re lucky, I said. Yes, he said, I’m extremely lucky.” Typically, these slightly cryptic lines are embedded in a long paragraph, and they flash by without calling particular attention to themselves. Laura never tells us in what sense Arturo’s perch on the fruit crates is “the best place possible.” But we know what she means, as does Arturo: she means he is comfortable, that he commands a good view of the area around the metro stop, that he is visible to her, that she is happy to see him, that he is happy to see her, that the night before was a nice night and today might be a nice day: she means, in short, that he is not lost. The philosophical richness of the episode opens and opens without ever surrendering its air of chance and of lightness. Arturo’s comment about the stars is of course a line, the attempt of a horny teenager to romance a new acquaintance, even as it is also a precise sketch of that teenager’s geopolitically conditioned movements between hemispheres. Laura’s vision of Arturo on his fruit crates approaches the sheer meaninglessness of the everyday, and it is a vision of salvation. Arturo has after all just emerged from the infernal regions of the subway system, a mundane detail, yet one that points us to the Chilean maelstrom he has visited and escaped— as if Bolaño wants to plot this quiet and utterly ordinary meeting between friends in the vicinity of the intense verticality of history’s catastrophes. Most of all, and most movingly, this is a vision of contingency. Arturo has “the best place.” But it is not assigned to him for eternity; it is as subject to chance and alteration as everything else. Laura’s vision is a  kind of blessing, a rescuing of happiness out of the sheer

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contingent motion of time. She has invented a tiny competition for him to win, right now and just for now. In the sheer quality of her attention to Arturo’s position and to the precarity of that position, Laura is for this moment the exemplary figure of Part II, the patron saint of specificity and contingency. Seeing him where he is and recognizing the provisionality of where he is, Laura also recognizes that what we call fate is the hardening of a series of contingencies: none of them necessary, all of them cumulatively determining. The moment might stand for the collectivity in difference that is Part II of The Savage Detectives. Claudia’s brother really is disappeared by the Argentine military, Piel Divina really has been born in unimaginable want and will die in unthinkable violence. And yet Claudia will not turn her personal grief against Ulises— she will not exclude him from the cohort of those who suffer— and Luis Sebastián will try to get Piel Divina into the anthology, and Ernesto García Grajales, the provincial academic and (lone) expert on visceral realism whose 1996 testimony opens Part II’s final chapter, will recall Piel Divina as one of the movement’s members in good standing. Singularity is intensified here without singling anyone out. One’s fate is one’s own, and like everyone’s fate, it is the result of factors not of one’s devising. It’s hard to imagine a literary architecture that would better honor both sides of this postulate.

SOME MICROCLIMATES OF PA RT II

Maybe this, maybe that Juan García Madero is gone, but he has imparted to the speakers of Part II his apologetic stance toward his poetic impulses. Luis Sebastián Rosado admits that calling his eyes “icy lakes” is a “bad metaphor” but says he can think of no better way to describe how his held-back tears glaze his vision. Angélica Font compares the end of her relationship with Pancho to an office building’s lights shutting down at the end of the day, as if “eager to blend into the anonymity of night.” No sooner is the picture offered than it’s half-retracted: “It’s a contrived image,” she says. Such explicit apologies are frequent in Part II, but even more common is a qualification of an image that takes the form of offering an alternative. Thus Barbara Patterson on the dawn in Mexico City: “Daylight came down along Niño Perdido, like something swooning or something struck by lightning, dawn is so weird in this fucking city.” Or Amadeo, recalling how, deeply drunk, he retrieved snacks from his kitchen to fuel the allnighter with Arturo and Ulises: he moved down his hallway, he says, “at the speed of a World War I cruiser, a cruiser lost in the

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mists of some river or the mouth of some river.” Or Angélica again, on the street people hanging around Ernesto’s neighborhood: they were “like zombies (or messengers with no message or an untranslatable message).” Sometimes the doubled characterization abandons the realm of simile, making all perceptible reality appear forked in this way. Daniel Grossman, waking in a Puebla hospital after the crash that has killed Norman Bolzman, reports that “my parents or the shadows of my parents were moving across the walls of the room.” This hesitation on the threshold of figurative language insinuates into the tiniest clauses a sense of the tenuous nature of language’s hold on the world. The intense awareness of contingency (maybe I saw this, maybe I saw that; maybe this image works, but probably not: I’ll offer two more just in case) expresses an intense doubt about the availability of experience to poeticization. The global effect on the novel is itself double. On the one hand, the whole perceptual field is bathed in poetry. The aestheticizing habit is always there, illuminating the most prosaic accounts with tiny strings of light: these speakers are alert to the infinite junctures where poetic agency might intervene. But the incessant doubling also asserts the vulnerable nature of poetic agency, its smallness and modesty: a linguistic precarity that corresponds to these speakers’ social marginalization.

The clown car and the ark “A bus full of visceral realists!” Jacinto Requena is recalling, in November 1976, a night a few years earlier in which the group headed “to a party or a play or somebody’s reading.” Jacinto remembers that bus ride because on it he watched Arturo attempt to charm, perhaps to seduce, his partner, Xóchitl. But the vehicle asserts itself as more important than the romantic triangle:

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“It isn’t normal for the fucking bus to be circling the city like a ghost, it isn’t normal that no one’s getting on it,” he reports thinking. It’s an early instance of a motif Bolaño repeats incessantly: a group—large enough for the reader to lose track of who’s included— crams into a vehicle that wanders worryingly. Mary Watson’s 1978 recollection of a summer bumming around the South of France is given social shape by the van, owned by the German Hans and his French wife, Monique, in which she travels along with a shifting group of hitchhikers: “John, from London,” “Steve, from Leicester,” “a slightly chubby blond girl from Paris called Erica . . .” Hans’s imperious group management takes the consistent form of talk about the van’s limited capacity: “Hans gathered us all inside the van and explained the situation,” Mary recalls. In this case, Hans’s decree is that the group shouldn’t split up, but a few days later he announces that “once Erica joined us, there was no more space in the van.” Years later, Hugo Montero’s account of a disastrous 1982 expedition of Mexican writers to revolutionary Nicaragua culminates in another scene of an overcrowded vehicle. Montero is panicking because Ulises has disappeared, but his anxiety is displaced onto a mundane question of who will fit in the shuttle to the Managua airport: “There was more chaos in the van, which was too small for all of us who were leaving and those who were seeing us off.” These vehicles vibrate with a weird narrative intensity. Sometimes they are stage sets for struggles of inclusion and exclusion, sometimes for an ominous sense of a group in dangerous motion. Both conditions are heightened when the vessel is at sea. Andrés Ramírez smuggling himself from Chile to Spain as a stowaway, Ulises joining a fishing rig with zero experience as a sailor—these episodes make one suspect that the storm-tossed ship is the prototypical form this chronotope takes in Bolaño’s imagination. The hunch is confirmed when Amadeo Salvatierra shows Arturo and Ulises a copy of the sole issue of Caborca, which contains

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Cesárea Tinajero’s only published poem. Entitled “Sión,” the poem is a pictogram consisting of a straight horizontal line, a wavy line, and a jagged one; on each of them is perched a tiny rectangle. Amadeo confesses bafflement: plains followed by rolling hills followed by a mountain range? Is the title a reference to Mount Zion in Jerusalem or the Swiss city of Sion? But the boys profess to find the poem’s interpretation laughably easy: drawing little sails on each rectangle, they declare it obvious that the images represent a boat on an increasingly rough sea. They even claim, with dubiously founded confidence, that the poem’s title is meant to call to mind the final syllable of the word navegación. The interpretation hovers between silliness and undeniability. Its primary function, startlingly, is not to impart a sense of foreboding to the men’s conversation—that sense was installed hours, and hundreds of pages, earlier—but to suggest a kind of grim comfort in the midst of this foreboding. In the conversation following the boys’ “reading” of the poem, Amadeo sinks deeper into abstracted drunkenness. He thinks he hears Arturo and Ulises say that the rectangle of “Sión” is a “ship without a sail that might also be a coffin.” And then he proposes a toast to Cesárea: “And I saw their eyes, those damn boys were so happy, and the three of us raised our glasses as our little ship was tossed by the gale.” In suddenly positing his Mexico City apartment as the interior of the poem’s rectangle, Amadeo rearranges our sense of the poem’s meaning. The coffin—the rectangle that contains the mortal remains of a single person—becomes an ark, a space of overcrowded, dark camaraderie, possibly of salvation.

Poetesses II The camaraderie in Amadeo’s ark-apartment happens between men, and is summoned into being by the vision of a lost female poet. The homosocial bonding over the body of a vulnerable

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woman is possibly the oldest story in the poetic tradition. But it’s not the only story Bolaño tells. Xóchitl García’s last testimonial, from January 1986, concludes with what is maybe a random night and maybe the most significant night of her life. It’s hard to say, so casually do epiphanies flare up and recede in her narration. Her ex-partner Jacinto has come by the apartment on Calle Montes to hang out with her and their son Franz, now about ten or eleven. María Font, who lives upstairs, is over too. Xóchitl’s ex-lover Fernando is on the street below, howling for admission, while Franz and Jacinto laugh at him from the window. “María and I,” Xóchitl reports, didn’t want to look and we pretended (though maybe we weren’t quite pretending) to be in hysterics. What we were really doing was staring into each other’s eyes and saying everything we had to say without speaking a word. I remember that we had the lights off and that Fernando’s shouts drifted up muffled from outside, they were desperate shouts, and that then we didn’t hear anything, he’s leaving, said Franz, they’re taking him away, and that then María and I looked at each other, not pretending anymore but serious, tired but ready to go on, and that after a few seconds I got up and turned on the light.

A mundanely realistic scene that is also one of a group’s passage from darkness into illumination: a different ark containing a different collective, this one founded on a different exclusion and cemented by a communion between women. There are many moments of mysterious connection in The Savage Detectives. But in its combination of familiarity and transcendence, this one feels like their template: because we know these women so well, this staging of their bond comes at once as a revelation and a nonevent. Here as elsewhere, Bolaño’s vision of communion is

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remarkable less for its masculine bias than for its queer one: in demographic terms his character population is mostly straight, but they settle into heterosexual coupledom only temporarily and as it were accidentally. María and Xóchitl too are visceral realists. Their mysterious friendship (the only thing we really know about it is that it will “go on”) may be the most durable product of the ill-fated movement.

Maricones II I often misremember The Savage Detectives as containing an AIDS death. In my mind this notion attaches to one of the gay or gay-adjacent characters. Ernesto San Epifanio’s death after a brain aneurysm, his hospital bed attended only by his mother and Angélica Font; Piel Divina’s death at the hands of the police: one or both of these are transmuted in my memory into that more “typical” form of late-twentieth-century gay mortality. The confusion is partly occasioned by other parts of Bolaño’s corpus. In the posthumously published Woes of the True Policeman, a young gay poet is given attributes of each of these men from The Savage Detectives: he delivers an almost verbatim version of Ernesto’s maricas/maricones harangue, and we learn of his HIV diagnosis from an older and more established man who frets over his wild young lover’s fate in ways reminiscent of Luis Sebastián’s anguish about Piel Divina. Woes also features a woman who is dying of AIDS, an avatar of a character who in 2666 suffers not from an immune disorder but from mental illness. Under other circumstances, with a different writer, I would be the first to denounce this fungibility, to insist on the specificity of this disease and the people who mostly die from it, to argue that a novelist shouldn’t switch out causes of death so casually. But Bolaño’s treatment of gayness and “the gay disease” doesn’t

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just fail to irritate or offend; it moves me. Partly this is because, here as elsewhere, Bolaño pays such close attention to the texture of his characters’ experience. My mistaken memory of The Savage Detectives of course derives from how closely Ernesto’s and Piel Divina’s deaths resonate with tropes in the history of AIDS: the “life of the party” lying mute in a hospital bed, attended only by a loving, homophobic family and a single devoted friend; the closeted relationship that must be mourned from within the closet. These are recognizably gay deaths of their time and place, and Bolaño’s attention to that gayness seems more important than whatever cause of death he assigns. More than this: his willingness to see the etiology of gay death as contingent while maintaining total fidelity to the experience of gay death is a profound manifestation of his loyalty to his generation, a loyalty that demands that every member be seen in the separateness of their fate and that every member be seen also, flatly but unquestioningly, as a member. “Many of my friends have died,” Bolaño told an interviewer in 1999, “whether in armed revolutions or from overdoses or from AIDS.” It’s just a list, a string of options. Bolaño makes it feel like the only adequate syntax of memorialization.

Vaya nombrecito Ulises, explaining to his Tel Aviv friends a pet theory about a translation error in the Gospels, refers to the work of a certain “Herr Professor Pinchas Lapide of the University of Frankfurt” (Ulises may be deranged, but he cites his sources). “Vaya nombrecito,” Claudia interjects: “what a name.” It’s a mild, almost imperceptible joke: the professor’s Hebrew first name sounds like pinche, a profane intensifier in Mexican Spanish, while his Ashkenazi surname happens to be the imperative for a Spanish verb meaning “to beat with a rock.” Claudia probably also hears in the

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surname the third-person-singular of the verb pedir (to request), and the first syllable of Lapide makes the name sound like a piece of albur, the highly sexualized Mexican wordplay that seizes on any instance of the article la as indicating la verga, slang for the male genitals. So the Herr Professor’s name suggests some combination of “bloody murder,” “Fucking stone them,” and “Christ, he’s begging for cock.” Vaya nombrecito indeed. Impossible to say whether, beyond these profane possibilities, Claudia is registering the historical questions the name evokes. Ulises doesn’t say whether this evidently Jewish scholar’s association with the University of Frankfurt is past or present, but the whole story of Germany’s Jews is raised anyway—and its violence signaled in the pogrom-like vision of a medieval stoning that the name seems to summon for Claudia. “Pinchas Lapide” is a peculiarly dense semantic pileup. But it’s far from the only name that gives pause in The Savage Detectives. The characters seem collectively seized by onomastic wonder, so frequently do they remark the suggestive qualities of proper names. Juan, recording his encounter with some female visceral realists on November 10, 1975, has set the tone: “María Font, Catalina O’Hara, those names evoke something in me, but I don’t know what it is.” “Such a funny name,” remarks Simone Darrieux, recalling in 1977 that Ulises smoked a brand of cigarettes called “Balis.” Andrés Ramírez’s 1988 testimonial refers to two Barcelona hostels—the Pensión Conchi (“What a name!”) and the Pensión Amelia (“such a nice, pretty name”)—and when Alain Lebert reports in 1978 that he lives in a cave near a settlement called El Borrado, he adds that he has “no idea why it’s called that, I never bothered to ask.” And Amadeo, reading aloud from Maples Arce’s Directory of the Avant Garde, keeps interrupting himself to savor names whose beauty or oddity strike him: “Juan Las. What a name . . . Luciano Folgore. What a pretty name, don’t you think?. . . Mme. Ghy Lohem. Bloody hell.”

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“The mystery of place-names, like those of proper names more generally, lies in their coordination of a general cultural system . . . with the unique deictic of the here-and-now, the named individual who is incomparable and presumably not systematizable.” Thus Fredric Jameson (who should know: the Marxist critic’s surname has led to a long-standing academic rumor that he is heir to a whiskey fortune, while his oft-misspelled first name imparts a Mitteleuropean glamour to a man Wikipedia says was born in Cleveland). Proper names, in this account, promise absolute particularity even as they ask us to determine what cultural system makes them intelligible. The name, we might say, is a condensed emblem of the interplay between structure and destructuration at play throughout The Savage Detectives. The novel’s speakers seem detained by exactly this question of what interpretative scaffolding makes sense of these odd names: is tobacco grown on Bali? Or is this cigarette brand meant to direct us not to the origin of the commodity but to a touristic fantasy of how it makes you feel? When we hear “Catalina O’Hara,” should we think of Gone with the Wind or of Irish immigration to Latin America—Scarlett O’Hara or Bernardo O’Higgins? But even as they set spinning such questions of system, these speakers are also remarking quidditas, underlining the sheer weirdness of this person or place being called this particular, unappealable thing.

Ulises continental Amid such hyperalertness to the peculiarity of proper names, it’s striking that none of Bolaño’s characters comments on one of the novel’s oddest. “Ulises” is of course the Spanish version of the Latin name for the Greek hero Odysseus. Like his namesake, Ulises is a wanderer, at one point literalizing the connection by joining a ship’s crew on the Mediterranean. Equally overt is the

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modern literary system in which the name places the novel. Joyce’s Ulysses, as we’ve seen, hovers in the background of Bolaño’s book, a model for its ambition and for its immersion in urban experience. But the name also sets the novel in a specifically Latin American literary tradition. José Vasconcelos, the Mexican intellectual who as rector of UNAM in the 1920s would be responsible for the university’s much-prized “autonomy” (the violation of which Auxilio Lacouture laments so vividly), titled his autobiography Ulises criollo, thereby nominating himself as a mythic representative of a spiritually refined Latin America, “creole” in the sense that it would install the best values of Iberian culture as a counterweight to “Anglo-Saxon” pragmatism and scientific positivism. As José Joaquín Blanco points out in his study of Vasconcelos, Ulises criollo was one in a string of books by major early-twentieth-century intellectuals implicitly claiming antiquity as the basis for a regenerated Latin American culture, including Alfonso Reyes’s Iphigenia the Cruel, Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s Birth of Dionysus, and Vasconcelos’s own Prometheus Victorious. Odysseus wasn’t just a metaphor for Vasconcelos: “What the country needs is to read The Iliad,” he proclaimed, and he announced his intention as minister of public education to “distribute a hundred thousand Homers in the national schools and public libraries.” If Bolaño’s Ulises is heir to this grand vision, it’s in an ambling, mock-heroic way. One key to that low-keyness is again to be found in the proper name. Bolaño’s notes show that he considered giving Ulises the surnames “Kito” or “Quito.” Those options insert the name he did choose, Lima, into a geographical system of reference: Ulises Lima is named for the capital of Peru in the way he was almost named for the capital of Ecuador. The “original” for Ulises, Bolaño’s friend José Alfredo Zendejas, had christened himself Mario Santiago. Viewed in this context, that fairly common surname emerges as yet another element in a

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toponymic system. Santiago-Lima-Quito: these are steps on a continental itinerary (the very one, in fact, Bolaño made overland when he hitchhiked back to Mexico in 1974 after his disastrous visit to the last days of Allende’s regime). Did Zendejas choose to christen himself after Chile’s capital before or after he met Bolaño? Was this self-naming an act of fealty to a Chilean friend, or a preternatural summons to one he hadn’t yet met? Or did Bolaño just “hear” his friend’s adopted surname that way, as a reference to his homeland and so to their fated alliance? Either way, “Ulises Lima” condenses the dream of continental regeneration into the space of a friendship, as if Vasconcelos’s vision of Latin America reborn were being broken into its smallest social units: this friend and that one, knitting the continent together with pit stops on a road trip, a truly infrastructural approach to the fantasy of a Latin American totality. This is a joke, of course, but not only one. Vasconcelos’s ideal of continental renaissance was always tinged with vainglory, narcissism, and elitism. Bolaño offers a perambulatory, lumpen afterimage of that fantasy: the name “Ulises Lima” is a monument to the continental vision that would have made sense of it.

(Historically real) The roman-à-clef aspect of the novel has been well documented: at least one website is devoted to listing the real-life people who correspond to the book’s characters. But Part II also includes statements by literary figures appearing under their own names: Verónica Volkow (Mexican poet and granddaughter of Leon Trotsky), Carlos Monsiváis (the legendary cultural commentator), Manuel Maples Arce (a founder of Stridentism), Joaquín Vázquez Amaral (critic and translator of Pound’s Cantos). Humor is the most consistent note of these testimonies—the

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humor that attends Bolaño’s audacity in including them at all, and the humor that attaches to the scene of these well-known people talking about very obscure ones. These characters seem mildly surprised to find themselves testifying about Arturo and Ulises, figures they dimly remember from their crowded lives. And as the critic Antonio Córdoba notes, these characters’ conversational environments differ from those of Part II’s other speakers: they all give their testimony in transit. Volkow sits in the departure lounge of the Mexico City airport; Maples Arce walks through Chapultepec Park; Monsiváis strolls through the city’s colonial center. They are clearly not speaking by appointment, and we can imagine the “interviewer” (however we picture him or her or them) seizing the chance to grab a few minutes’ chat with these celebrities glimpsed in their daily lives. The charge that Bolaño distracts Anglo readers from paying attention to other Latin American writers feels particularly odd in light of the densely populated sense of the cultural scene provided by these cameos. These scenes precisely calibrate the grades of importance in the Mexican literary world. They make even the most clueless reader into an apprentice: like the provincial hero of a Balzac novel navigating the metropolis’s social labyrinths, we may not yet know the rules of the game, but we sense the subtle shades of hierarchy.

An atlas of the novel Spanish-language readers of Bolaño’s novel find a table of contents at the back of the book. This índice lists the names, geographical coordinates, and dates for each of the statements in Part II, and in my Anagrama paperback it runs to six pages. The index, absent from the English version, is a significant aspect of one’s experience of the novel. You find yourself consulting it as

GEOLOCATION IN THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES .

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a navigational tool, precisely like a street index at the back of an atlas. This back-and-forth movement in the book-object is profoundly orienting: it mitigates the reader’s experience of the novel’s parataxis, its additive narrative grammar, with an awareness of its structural principles. It makes The Savage Detectives into a classic example of what the critic Joseph Frank called “spatial form” in a landmark 1945 essay. Frank was mostly talking in metaphors: “spatialization” for him primarily pointed to the ways literary texts ask to be experienced less as an unfolding story than as a structure apprehensible “in a moment in time.” But The Savage Detectives’s obsession with geography turns the notion of the spatialized text into something closer to a conceptual pun: our sense of the novel as a structured “spatial” object is connected to our sense of it as a book about real urban and geopolitical space. In places, the book seems to want us to perceive a parallel between blocks of text and blocks of real-world territory. So when Jacinto Requena’s interview of November 1976 ends with his recollection of a conversation in which he told a friend he has no plans to follow his fellow visceral realists abroad—“I’m not leaving Mexico, I said”—we cannot know whether that phrase was where Requena himself chose to end the conversation or whether his invisible interlocutor has edited a random comment into an ominous position of finality. What we do know is that some agency has created this rhyme— almost a visual one, as if the novel has become a map before our eyes—between the textual border and the geopolitical one: the white space that follows that place name suddenly looks like a kind of national boundary. Thus does the novel’s obsession with borders and cartographic vision texture the experience of characters and readers at the most intricate levels. Andrés Ramírez, hidden in the hold of a cargo ship traveling from Chile to Spain, reports that crossing the Panama Canal made him think about things—in particular

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“my childhood” and “my continent”—in an “organized way”: the passage from Pacific to Atlantic has encouraged him to experience the times and spaces of his life as falling into discrete conceptual territories. Mary Watson, crossing the border between France and Spain, notes that the conversation among her traveling companions has abruptly shifted from literature (“which is a subject I find fascinating”) to politics (“which always ends up boring me”)—an observation she makes just as her narration moves into a new paragraph. The paragraphs of The Savage Detectives have hitherto functioned as holding pens of emotional and social energy. In becoming visible as territory, they find a new vocation. The variously scaled wholes we can literally see in those paragraphs— neighborhoods, nations, groups of friends— are, Bolaño’s typography says, made of a single fungible material: the same emotional stuff binds or frays them. The effect moves in two conceptual directions. On the one hand, an energy of abstraction suffuses the most mundane experiences: in moving across these paragraphs, the novel’s characters intuit the geographical and social boundaries over which they move, and all of these lines can become agents of conceptual or spiritual or political totalization. On the other, the paragraphs, precisely in gathering so many disparate energies, reveal the artifactual nature of those totalities: every whole is a made, historical thing, a temporary corralling of fractious energies.

A space odyssey What may be the most momentous paragraph in The Savage Detectives isn’t exactly in The Savage Detectives. It’s another border-crossing episode, and it belongs to Auxilio Lacouture, if not strictly speaking to the novel in which her character was

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born. Immediately after publishing The Savage Detectives, Bolaño wrote Amulet, a first-person novella in Auxilio’s voice that expands her ten pages of testimony in the earlier book. Amulet is thus a kind of postscript, and it employs The Savage Detectives’s schematic notation of physical space to particularly uncanny effect. In the novella’s most striking scene, Auxilio is walking with some of the visceral realists on an ill-considered excursion to confront a violent pimp (shades of Alberto and Lupe— except that here, with Bolaño’s typical heteroflexibility, the pimp runs a stable of young men). The group crosses a street that Auxilio suddenly perceives as a frontier to a region of pure terror. I followed them: I saw them go down Bucareli to Reforma with a spring in their step and then cross Reforma without waiting for the lights to change, their long hair blowing in the excess wind that funnels down Reforma at that hour of the night, turning it into a transparent tube or an elongated lung exhaling the city’s imaginary breath. Then we walked down the Avenida Guerrero; they weren’t stepping so lightly any more, and I wasn’t feeling too enthusiastic either. Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under a dead or unborn eyelid, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.

The difficult final image moves into the realm of the surreal—in an almost technical literary-historical sense, so forcefully does the superimposition of the dead watery eye on the nocturnal cityscape recall the inaugural surrealist image, from Buñuel’s film Un chien andalou, of a gooey pierced eyeball spliced into

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footage of the night sky. But the image also encodes a reference to the central enigma of The Savage Detectives. Bolaño’s word for “unborn child” is nonato, which also has the meaning of “a child born by Cesarean section”: thus does Amulet’s oddest moment obliquely summon the ghost of Cesárea Tinajero, the childless mother of visceral realism. And the episode also points forward: this is where the terrifying number “2666” first enters Bolaño’s narrative universe. It will become the title of his massive final book, set largely on the U.S.-Mexico border and obsessed with the unsolved murders of vulnerable women there that became a global and ongoing scandal in the 1990s. The crossing of a street thus conjures other kinds of crossings— between novels, between time periods, between forms and scales of male violence. Reforma is one of Mexico City’s central arteries, built in the nineteenth century in imitation of Haussmann’s Parisian boulevards. It is a self-abstracting geographical marker, a street that, in just walking along or across, you feel yourself seeing as if from a great height. It’s this boundary marking that makes 2666 feel not just like a diabolical number or a science-fictionally high one but a literally tall one: as if a vertiginous quality were inherent in the abstraction one intimates when crossing a big avenue. And in fact the vast traffic circle these characters have just traversed is as impressive along its vertical axis as the horizontal one. The scene Auxilio narrates is taking place in 1974, at which point this intersection was home not only to the lovely art deco Edificio el Moro (350 feet high, built in 1936, originally the offices of the national lottery) but to the silver rectangle of the recently opened Torre Prisma (400 feet high, completed in 1971). A couple years later, in 1976, ground was broken here for a Holiday Inn that, at a projected 720 feet, would have been the tallest skyscraper in Latin America. Construction delays and the 1985 earthquake scrapped those plans, but by the

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turn of the century in which Bolaño was writing Amulet, the site had become the Torre del Caballito, a 420-foot gleaming black monolith (completed in 1993) that resembles nothing so much as the stele from the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bolaño, an avid SF fan, would no doubt have thought of Arthur C. Clarke’s book and Kubrick’s film when, surfing the early internet in the late 1990s from his writing desk in Catalonia in search of images of Mexico City, he came across photos of the Torre del Caballito. If so, the building’s suggestion of Clarke’s iconic date-title would be one of the prime inspirations for the now equally iconic 2666. Auxilio, of course, can’t literally see this third tower, which postdates her walk by almost two decades. But it doesn’t seem farfetched to say that she senses its presence, that her pileup of increasingly far-flung dates also opens a glimpse of the piles of steel and glass that will crop up here. “Vertical metaphors of social power,” the geographer Stephen Graham calls the skyscrapers of the long downturn: cashboxes in the sky, representations of the obscene abstraction of capital from lived experience. The crossroads Auxilio is traversing, with its collection of past and future towers, is pregnant with this hyperfinancialized future—a future already gathering itself into being in 1976, already looming over this group of friends. This moment of heightened spatial awareness thus provides a link between the vitality and camaraderie of The Savage Detectives and 2666’s death-strewn landscapes of globalization. And it also makes Auxilio’s words an offhand assertion of the secret identity of surrealism, science fiction, and realism. Three of the twentieth century’s preeminent cultural modes for representing the scandal of modernity, congealed in the unborn image of an utterly real and totally unreal graveyard of too-tall buildings.

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ho are these kids, and why are they together, and where are they going? We know the answers to these questions, more or less, but we may have to dredge up the details (Lupe, Alberto, those languorous days in the Font house, Juan’s decision to jump into the Impala with his friends) from distant memory. After the intervening sprawl of Part II, its years and its parade of characters, those last days of 1975 are not just chronologically but tonally distant. Since we left Juan García Madero, the book has taken us to the Nicaraguan revolution and the Liberian civil war and a prison in southern Israel, explored mental breakdowns and failed marriages and middle-aged ennui, cast a jaundiced eye on literary festivals and literary celebrity and literary feuds. Turning the page to begin Part III, we realize with a jolt that we have been thrust back into the first days of 1976, as Lupe and Juan and Arturo and Ulises speed away from the Font home on their ambiguously motivated journey to Mexico’s northern reaches. The shift can’t help feeling like an absurd reduction, as we find ourselves abruptly confined not only to Quim’s Impala but to

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the space of Juan’s first-person narration. After the novel’s torrent of voices and events and decades, these mental and physical compartments feel bathetically tiny. Is the book really going to end this way? The sparseness of Part III’s setting and cast, the meandering quality of the characters’ movements, the inconclusiveness of what is nonetheless the novel’s conclusion: all of this gives this section a peculiar weightlessness, as if the novel has been reduced to an abstract of itself. It’s hard not to want to read the events allegorically, as if the characters have stepped out of an illuminated manuscript: Youth, on a quest for Poetry, accidentally murders it; Goodness, attempting to outrun Evil, deals out senseless violence; Innocence gains Experience; the Sacred Order is disbanded. And all of it against the hyperbolically symbolic backdrop of the desert, a real space that also feels like a movie set of itself. But why should Bolaño’s stunningly elaborated fictional world bottom out in allegory? In moving into this unreal territory, the novel risks not just bathos but a certain hermeneutic redundancy. Where everything feels so explicitly meaningful, such a commentary on itself, interpretation can seem beside the point. Put differently: every diary entry in Part III is a suggestive neighborhood of meaning that won’t quite congeal into a coherent novelistic story—which is to say that the structure that has organized the book you are holding needs to fall apart to do justice to The Savage Detectives. Where there is no difference between event and significance, where it’s impossible to differentiate the randomness of realist detail from a world irradiated with meaning, the analytic distinction between argument and atmosphere itself breaks down. From here on, everything is microclimate.

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Fading Signals The shortest of the novel’s sections, Part III can be summarized with deceptive ease. The group is headed to Sonora, the northern Mexican state that was Cesárea’s destination when she left Mexico City in the late 1920s. But their search is also a flight: Alberto the pimp is on their trail, accompanied by a corrupt policeman who acts as his sidekick. The foursome spends most of January wandering the desert, seeking signs of Cesárea’s whereabouts in Sonora’s libraries, municipal archives, and newspaper offices. On a ranch near a town called Trincheras they meet a man who knew Cesárea when she was the companion of a matador who was killed in the ring. A few miles north, in Agua Prieta, they find a tombstone with the inscription “José Avellaneda Tinajero, matador, Nogales 1903–Agua Prieta 1930”: aside from the pictogram “Sión,” this is the only writing attributable to Cesárea (her surname affixed to Avellaneda’s, which makes no sense according to the rules of patronymics, demands to be read as her final signature). At the Records Office in Hermosillo they learn that she worked as a teacher in the 1930s in the border city of Santa Teresa. A woman who was her colleague there informs the group that after Cesárea quit teaching she worked in a canning factory, spending her evenings filling notebooks with obscure jottings concerning plans for mass literacy, making odd diagrams of her workplace and muttering about epochal changes that will arrive “around the year 2600.” The last this colleague knew, Cesárea was selling herbs in a street market and living in Villaviciosa, a small town outside Santa Teresa. It is there that the group finally encounters Cesárea, washing clothes in a public trough. The woman Amadeo recalled as a tall and lithe beauty has grown enormously fat, and now

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resembles “a rock or an elephant.” The group spends a long, odd afternoon at Cesárea’s house. Arturo and Ulises speak intently to her, but Juan records none of it: he and Lupe have retreated to the bedroom and into a deep sleep, as if too exhausted by the culmination of the search to record its result. The meeting with the foundress of visceral realism is cut abruptly short when Alberto and his goon arrive on the scene. In the dreamlike scuffle that ensues, Arturo plunges a knife into Alberto’s chest, while Cesárea and the dirty cop, wrestling on the ground in an unholy tangle with Ulises, are both mortally wounded by the cop’s pistol. “I heard Belano say that we’d fucked up,” Juan reports, “that we’d found Cesárea only to bring her death.” The survivors split up: Arturo and Ulises take Alberto’s car, promising to bury the corpses in the desert. Juan and Lupe drive off in the Impala, and Juan’s diary moves into an increasingly spare notation of their aimless itinerary through desert towns. The last entries are opaque, riddling pictograms, as if Juan is following Cesárea into a place beyond articulate language. The book ends on February 15, 1976. Over the 106 days we have known him, Juan’s vivid record of erotic and intellectual adventure has descended into runic babble. What began as Bildung has become Morse code.

An Invisible Day In truth, though, Juan’s coherence as a character has felt glitchy from the very opening of Part III. His first entry is marked “January  1,” but the words he records under that heading are nouveau-romanishly confounding: “Today I realized that what I wrote yesterday I really wrote today: everything from December  31 I wrote on January  1, i.e., today, and what I wrote on December 30 I wrote on the 31st, i.e., yesterday.” We know what

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he’s trying to say, sort of: the long entry labeled “December 31,” which detailed the last day at the Fonts’ house and the hair’sbreadth escape at its end, could hardly have itself been written on December 31, unless we imagine Juan immediately getting his notebook out and writing out his memories in the backseat of the speeding Impala. But this observation leads to a more troubling question: when does he write this journal—any of it? Readers of epistolary and diary-based fiction have always known that the supposed transcription of ongoing events can approach ridiculousness. But rarely has this absurdity been more concisely stated, and its destabilizing philosophical implications so openly embraced. Juan’s next sentences make this diary entry into a riddle of the fictional self: “What I write today I’m really writing tomorrow, which for me will be today and yesterday, and also, in some sense, tomorrow: an invisible day.” Whatever else these cryptic words mean, that “invisible day” seems to stand for the twenty years that have spiraled forward in Part II. Juan’s words convey a suspicion that he senses that future, that some knowledge of 1976–1996 has insinuated itself into a fold in his consciousness. It’s tempting to imagine this filmically, as a sped-up montage of those decades playing across the screen before we return to a shot of Juan looking through the window of the Impala onto the Mexican highways of 1976, quizzical and dazed as he snaps out of this dreaming-forward. But that possibility, fantastic as it is, is not as dangerous to the fictional contract as is the sense that Juan is announcing his own inventedness, confessing that his diary is an impossible object. The effect is of our narrator’s body going transparent before our eyes. And Juan’s exploded fictional condition is also the novel’s: the desert through which the characters move in Part III feels oneiric, unreal. As the critic Fernando Saucedo Lastra puts it, the Mexico of The Savage Detectives is divided between “the city

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and the desert”: the chaotic urban realism of Part I versus the dreamlike sketchiness of Part III. The Sonora of The Savage Detectives, Saucedo Lastra concludes, needs to be analyzed “not from a social and historical perspective” but with a “metaphorical and symbolic approach.” In this account, Bolaño’s Mexican desert is not a real place at all but “a vision of emptiness and nothingness,” an emblem of sheer senselessness and death.

Myth and Demystification The critical literature on Bolaño is replete with such mythic— some would say mystifying—figures for absence and darkness: abysses, voids, black holes. This is understandable; the terms feature frequently in Bolaño’s work, often in the mouths of characters who are trying to account for a foreboding that can feel supernatural in nature. Yet the critical rehearsal of this vocabulary misses an essential tonal aspect of his work. Rarely is this lexicon of dark fatality spoken without a skeptical nod to its air of melodrama or magical thinking. Abel Romero, a Chilean exile in France who speaks to us in Part II, recalls that he met Belano in Paris on September 11, 1983, at a gathering of their compatriots marking the tenth anniversary of Pinochet’s coup. “Suddenly someone, I don’t know who, started to talk about evil, about the crime that had spread its enormous black wing over us.” Romero’s exasperated reaction to the image is instructive: “Please! Its enormous black wing! It’s clear we Chileans will never learn.” The moment is typical of Bolaño’s work, which repeatedly deploys the heavy symbol only to undercut it and— crucially—to place it sociologically and historically. Romero’s contempt is also national self-contempt, a frustration with the kind of fatalistic poeticizing that Bolaño’s work is sometimes accused of indulging—and that is here designated as a peculiar temptation of exile. Set in

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their fictional context, such symbols of death and menace emerge not as Bolaño’s final word on the movement of history and politics but as markers of how characters gesture toward those forces. “Fatalism” in Bolaño’s work is really a sociology of fatalism. Certain social conditions, his work says, conduce to such myth making. As do certain landscapes. The characterization of the desert of Part III as a symbolic location slights Bolaño’s attention to the self-symbolizing aspect of real spaces, the ways they incorporate an abstract or mythical dimension. As we saw, such energies of abstraction inform Bolaño’s phenomenology of the city in Part I. If we keep the novel’s opening in mind, the abstraction of Part III feels less like a break with what’s come before than a culmination of its logic, as if the desert of Sonora provided an X-ray of the novel’s world. That earlier form of urban abstraction was historically and geopolitically specific: a concrete feature of the Latin American city’s inscription of a continental imaginary. And it is striking that the desert to which Bolaño sends his characters is poised just at the northern edge of Latin America. The motivations that have brought them here are so odd and so mixed that it is hard to resist the suspicion that the real object of this journey is this limit condition itself, as if Juan and Lupe and Arturo and Ulises have become literal surveyors of the boundaries of the Latin American territory that their steps unconsciously traced in wandering the avenues of Mexico City. The abstraction of Sonora, in other words, is not really contentless; it matters that the novel comes to ground in this particular space. And there is a curious dusting of sociohistorical and geographical specificity in Part III, stray indications that Sonora’s status as a provincial outpost and border territory is key to the book’s final movement. When Belano and Lima report on their visit with a professor in the University of Santa Teresa’s

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literature department named Horacio Guerra, for example, they tell Juan that Guerra is “the spitting image of Octavio Paz, but in miniature”— and of course they go on (vaya nombrecito) to comment on the systems of meaning (Roman emperors and poets, states of war and peace) set in motion by the resonance of Guerra’s name with that of his hero. The moment serves for Juan as an illustration of the potency of national cultural fantasy, which operates here just as in Mexico City: even in Sonora, he reflects, “forgotten poets, essayists, and professors were simulating the mass-media actions of their idols.” The border state turns out to be surprisingly illustrative of the nation’s power to organize cultural and political life. The capitalized outposts of the state apparatus that litter the pages of Part III—the Sonora Cultural Institute, the National Indian Institute, the Bureau of Folk Culture (Sonora Regional Branch), the National Education Council—stand out in particularly stark relief against the sparse landscape. And Bolaño ensures that we perceive the connection between these entities and crueler forms of state power. When Belano tries to access some records at the university, he is asked for his papers, which turn out not to be “in order.” When the secretary there tells him he could be sent “back” to his country, Belano responds with incredulity and outrage: “Didn’t you read here that I’m Chilean? You might as well shoot me in the head!” But the secretary, apparently uninterested in Chilean politics, calls the cops, sending the visceral realists running. The nightmarish exchange suggests that the most apparently innocuous state employee might suddenly morph into an agent of the feds.

Coyotes In this instance, the presence of the Mexican state refers us to a  tragedy unfolding at the other end of Latin America. But

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elsewhere in Part III the question of papers and nationality points north. When the group learns that Cesárea lives parttime in an Arizona town called El Palito, they realize they can’t track her there: only Belano has a passport, and, as we’ve seen, not a valid one. But once raised, the idea of crossing the border takes on its own momentum. Lupe suddenly tells Juan that she doesn’t plan to return to Mexico City: she’ll “live in Sonora or cross over into the United States.” As often in the novel, a character’s opaque decision making appears to take its cue from a suprapersonal or allegorical dimension. There may be good reasons for Lupe to think of crossing into Arizona (financial opportunity, distance from Alberto)—but the abrupt announcement seems to partake of another order of motivation. In 1976, Mexican immigration rates to the United States had ticked up to about a million a year from the lower numbers at which they’d hovered all through the twentieth century—a relatively small jump nobody could have anticipated was the first sign of the hugely increased migration over the next few decades (peaking at twelve million in 2010). In suddenly announcing an inclination to move north, Lupe appears to be obeying an impulse to join this future trend, as if her character function were being conscripted to an emergent history: her version of Juan’s dreaming-forward. A similar Sonora-induced collapse of historical moments animates “El Burro,” a poem Bolaño wrote in the late eighties in which a speaker impossible to distinguish from Bolaño dreams of riding on the back of Mario Santiago’s motorcycle, “always headed north, always on the road / of coyotes.” In the line’s final word, the open-road fantasy meets the new reality of desperate, “coyote”-assisted migration— a melding of private motivation and historical context that the poem openly acknowledges: “And sometimes I dream that the road / Our bike or our

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longing is traveling / Doesn’t begin in my dream, but in the dreams / of others.” The journey to the northern edge of the nation draws Bolaño’s characters not only into the future but into a collective condition, as if the proximity of the border were forcing their wayward individual movements to bear larger meanings.

Games Even the lightest moment in Part III, a road-trip game with which Juan distracts his traveling companions, is subtly imbued with such historical and collective weight. Juan draws a series of visual puzzles, all premised on the same joke: that a large circle enclosing a tiny circle can be read as an image of a sombrero “seen from above.” Thus when the large circle has two little loops hanging from its lower portion—loops that we can interpret, once we imagine ourselves positioned overhead, as the outline of a pair of feet protruding beyond the hat’s circumference—the image can be decoded as “a Mexican seen from above.” When the hat has short vertical lines sticking out at twelve and six o’clock, the image is a “Mexican on a bicycle,” and when it’s positioned between two parallel lines we’re looking at “a Mexican on a bridge.” As Juan’s riddles proliferate, we sense a relation between the two mental operations on which their humor depends—the notion that we are seeing this from a bird’s-eye view, and the idea that a sombrero indicates “a Mexican.” The national-stereotype part of the joke is of course ironized by The Savage Detectives itself, which is replete with Mexicans but entirely innocent of sombreros. And this tweaking of the national cliché feels obscurely connected to the way these pictograms ask us to view the national territory as if from a mapmaker’s altitude. It is as if this verticalization, this tilting of the diegetic space, has been

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produced by the story’s proximity to the Mexican state’s northernmost border. These visual jokes, in other words, are the most explicit instance of Bolaño’s cartographic imaginary; the riddles push the novel’s geopolitical unconscious to the visible surface. The surreal quality of the moment turns out to coincide with the most scrupulous realism. The border, after all, is a place where “representational effects are also objective effects” (as Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle write in their book on the politics of cartography): imaginary lines have real force here. Juan’s cartoon riddles are documents of a real political situation. In putting a hard limit on the group’s freedom of movement, the border has indeed “Mexicanized” them in the most inescapable sense. But this stubbornly literal boundary also summons another abstraction—the abstraction of “Latin America” that haunts the most local details in Bolaño’s world. The atmosphere of allegory that pervades Part III insistently points in the direction of this continental imaginary. It’s there in the nightmarish possibility that Belano might be deported to Pinochet’s Chile, as if the group’s scrambling around at the upper edge of Latin America somehow calls up its farthest-away geographic reaches. It’s there too in Belano’s ludicrous claim, when teased about his inability to decode the pictograms, that the puzzles elude him “because I’m not Mexican.” The deadpan self-ethnography recalls Juan’s confusions of Yucatecans and Chileans, Veracruzans and Sonorans, as well as Bolaño’s own dyslexic swapping of Venezuela and Colombia. It recalls, that is, Bolaño’s habit of positing Latin America as a kind of uncognizable sublimity—uncognizable first and foremost to Latin Americans themselves. This might seem an eccentricity of Bolaño’s, but in fact the notion of Latin America as a difficult-to-grasp totality is a consistent feature of the concept’s history: in the words of the

“MEXICANS” SEEN FROM ABOVE.

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Ecuadorian-Mexican theorist Bolívar Echeverría, Latin America is a “unity that does not deny but reproduces plurality,” an entity that cannot be reduced to race or ethnicity or nationality but that is produced by the shared history that has made those categories scramble one another in specific ways. Echeverría glosses his observation by invoking precisely the kind of scalar confusions that trouble Bolaño’s characters (and by using as exemplary of this confusion exactly the border landscape in which they find themselves in Part III): “one finds the twins of the Mexican norteño,” Echeverría writes, “less in the rest of Mexico than in Venezuela, in Argentina, in Brazil, in Chile.” The region, that is, is self-similar only when considered at an international scale. This is one reason why the experience of intensified “Mexicanness” the characters undergo at the border is also an intensified awareness of “Latin America.” The border is a totalizing object par excellence: it draws a line around an entity, poses the question of the terms of its unity. The whole continental sweep from Chile to Sonora—along with the visceral realist dream of effecting a poetic revolution “on a Latin American scale”—is somehow on the line in these dusty border towns.

The Edge of Empire Literally on the line: to be at the boundary of Latin America here means to be also on the edge of the United States. The U.S. is palpably a shaping presence on Latin America, both in the cartographic sense (Arizona is right there) and in the most expansive political sense (from the annexation of Texas to the CIA’s adventures in regime change to the militarization of the Mexican border, the United States’ history has of course been violently intertwined with Latin America’s). For readers located in the

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United States, Part III is doubly strange for the way it writes that history faintly but unmistakably into the story’s setting—which is to say, the way it writes us into Bolaño’s hemispheric map. This fact is paradoxically difficult for Americans to see: the U.S.’s influence so saturates Latin America’s self-conception as to be unremarkable, barely requiring thematization. But it textures everything. Take Juan’s sombrero riddles: the equation of Mexicans with ten-gallon hats isn’t just a “stereotype”; it’s an inscription of a specifically gringo idea of Mexico. Like most stereotypes, it distortedly reflects a real situation—in this case, the fact that the wide-brimmed cowboy hat is traditionally worn by norteño ranch workers. The sombrero, in other words, reflects a vision of Mexico derived entirely from that part of it that borders the United States. The riders in the Impala instantly recognize “themselves” in these silly drawings because they know that this image of Mexicanness comes to them after having been circulated through a U.S. popular culture for which Mexico is the border. Thus does the joke illustrate the utterly mundane fact that the U.S. perception of Mexico is an internal feature of Mexico’s apprehension of itself—and, shifting the scale, that the United States’ historical interventions in Latin America are an internal feature of any idea of Latin America. It’s a point Echeverría makes in a theoretical register when he says that what congeals the plurality of Latin America into a unity is less any internal principle than these nations’ embodiment of “everything that is dysfunctional for capitalist modernity and its ultimate figure, U.S. modernity.” In a world conceived in rigorously relational terms, every entity is contoured from the outside. And for a reader in the United States, the novel’s final sequence brings us to our outside, to the literal ground of our contiguity with the space of Latin America.

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How to Read Donald Duck If we can see that contiguity. On January 15, Juan records a brief excursion to the Gulf of California, “to Punta Chueca, across from the Island of Tiburón. Then we went on to El Dólar, across from the Island of Patos. Lima calls the island Pato Donald . . . Punta Chueca-Tiburón, Dólar-Patos: they’re only names, of course, but they fill my soul with dread.” Juan’s anxiety seems straightforward enough in the case of the gothically forbidding Punta Chueca (“Crooked Point”) or the frankly unpleasant Tiburón (“Shark”). But Dólar-Patos (“Dollar-Ducks”) is different. Lima is riffing on the air of yankeedom imparted by these signifiers when he jokingly rechristens the island “Pato Donald,” or Donald Duck. He’s almost certainly also thinking of Para leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck), the hugely successful 1971 book by the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman and the Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart that critiqued the colonialist imagination of Walt Disney’s cartoon empire. In 1976, How to Read Donald Duck was a ubiquitous reference point on the Latin American left, its cultural-studies method as shiny-new as its basic argument about the United States’ expansionist ethos was axiomatic. In glancingly invoking this conversation, and in hedging it with “dread,” Bolaño efficiently signals the relevance of these hemispheric concerns to this seemingly random trip to the beach. But not for anglophone readers. The sentence with which Bolaño casually calls up this whole frame of reference—“Lima la llama la isla Pato Donald”—doesn’t appear in the English version of the novel. Whether by oversight or design, the omission encapsulates the unequal opacities that fracture this continental divide. For Americans, one of the oddest consequences of American imperialism is to make it hard for us to see how seen we are.

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Windows But if we do perceive the geopolitical frame, we get a new sense of the novel’s enigmatic final moments. The last pages of Juan’s diary record the second week of February 1976. The foursome has split in two; Lima and Belano have headed off to dispose of the bodies, while Juan and Lupe are . . . doing what, exactly? A few actions are indicated: the entry for February 8 tells us that Juan has read Cesárea’s notebooks, but of course he doesn’t relate their contents; on February 9 he recounts an inconclusive exchange with Lupe over whether it’s safe for them to return to Villaviciosa (she says yes; he thinks the police will be looking for them). The next three entries consist of the names of tiny Sonora towns. The route is meandering—impossible to chart an intention here, aside from a desire to remain in the northern half of Sonora: we sense that, like the proverbial criminal drawn to the scene of the crime, they’ll eventually end up back in the invented border city of Santa Teresa and its satellite Villaviciosa, where Cesárea died. And for all we know, by mid-February they may in fact have returned there. The last three entries abandon conventional narration, returning to Juan’s habit of pictographic riddling. But the playful tone has matured into something fully ominous. On three successive days, Juan captions a series of rectangles with the repeated question: “What’s outside the window?” The words point us to the strange will-to-verticality that provides this section’s narrative momentum, as if in these final images the novel wants to be hung up on a wall, stared through to some region beyond or “outside.” On the first rectangle, for February 13, Juan has drawn a triangle sticking in from the left side. It looks a bit like a shark’s dorsal fin emerging from a vertical ocean, but Juan, answering his own riddle, says that it represents “a star.” On February 14 the rectangle is unadorned, and Juan tells us that

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what’s outside this window is “a sheet.” By February 15, the lines of the rectangle have become dashes, as if the window frame is beginning to disintegrate, and the question, repeated for the third time, lingers unanswered at the novel’s end: “What’s outside the window?” If pressed, one could make some kind of allegorical meaning from the sequence: the star evoking the romantic ambitions of the visceral realists, the sheet emblematizing the shroud that has enfolded those stillborn dreams, the crumbling window giving us a final picture of Emptiness itself. Like the three-part series of Cesárea’s “Sión,” this is an affectively down-trending narrative, tracing a good-to-bad-to-worse trajectory of personal or historical decline. Unavoidable as this interpretation is, there is a less metaphysical way to think about the spatial implications of that closing query. One good answer to Juan’s question— a literally good one if you’re in a Chevy Impala at the northern edge of Mexico’s Sonora desert—is that what you see outside the window is the United States of America. If this geopolitical fact is one thing Juan’s pictures are pointing us toward, this final sequence looks less like mythmaking than demystification, a bringing into view of the sovereign structures that underlie daily experience. The closing image of the dissolving frame is powerfully suggestive of the whole edifice of The Savage Detectives itself crumbling in our hands— or, more precisely: turning into a perfectly crystalclear window, one that lets us perceive what’s beyond it all the better by seeming to disappear before our eyes. The comparison of page to window suggests that the book might become a kind of optical apparatus: not something to be pored over but something to be looked through, a viewfinder to be held up to the reader’s vision so as to remake perception. Seen in this way (seen through in this way), The Savage Detectives emerges as aspiring to the condition of a vanishingly thin

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transparent membrane, one designed to reveal the elemental structures that make up the world. One such unavoidable structure, these pages say, are the states and empires that carve up land, manage political desire, determine the movement of bodies, set cultural fantasy in motion. The visceral realist dream of a continental poetic vanguard—itself an afterimage of the dream of a continental political revolution—here meets its conditioning limit in the presence of the United States. And for American readers, who “see” all this from the other side, that dissolving window at the novel’s end is also an uncanny mirror: an invitation to see ourselves on this shared and militarized territory.

A Twist in Reality There’s something science-fictional about watching this epic book evaporate into the real, as if a planet were collapsing into itself before our eyes. And just as a black hole will theoretically slow the hands of a clock placed in its vicinity, the rules governing time in Part III are confounding. We’ve seen, for example, that Bolaño’s border territory is suffused with intimations of the hugely increased immigration to the United States that in 1976 has barely begun. The novel concentrates its effects of temporal compression in the figure of Cesárea. Until now, the novel has presented Cesárea in cubist fashion, as a figure of multiple superimposed moments: the young poet and urban explorer in the 1920s, the older, disillusioned woman sending herself into a perverse internal exile, the ghostly superintendent of a post-’60s poetic movement. By the time we meet her in the flesh of 1976, this multiplication of timeframes seems to have given her a wholly new body—seems indeed to have made her into an apotheosis of embodiment: “Seen from behind,” Juan reports, “leaning over the trough, there was nothing poetic about her. . . .

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Her rear end was enormous and it moved to the rhythm set by her arms, two oak trunks, as she rinsed the clothes and wrung them out. Her hair was long, it fell all the way to her waist. She was barefoot.” What Juan calls her “huge bulk” answers to the logic of allegory more than that of realist verisimilitude, as if Cesárea has become a principle of pure mass, a gravitational center in her own right. Her squalid rented room in Santa Teresa (a remembered description of which the group hears from the teacher who befriended Cesárea there) likewise imparts a sense of disturbance in the physical laws of the universe. There’s something subtly upsetting about the room, Cesárea’s friend says, “as if reality were twisted inside that lost room, or even worse, as if over time someone (who but Cesárea?) had imperceptibly turned her back on reality. Or, worst of all, had twisted it on purpose.” Only one object here seems distinctive enough to account, however obscurely, for this oddity: the “plan of the canning factory pinned to the wall.” The friend reports that, when asked why she drew it, “Cesárea said something about days to come . . . and the teacher, to change the subject, asked her what times she meant and when they would be. And Cesárea named a date, sometime around the year 2600. Two thousand six hundred and something.” A few years after The Savage Detectives, the arrival of Bolaño’s next novel will permit us to specify the date Cesárea utters as 2666, and thus to identify the canning factory in which Cesárea works as a premonition of that later novel’s turn-of-thecentury reality. Santa Teresa is clearly a fictional version of Ciudad Juárez, the Chihuahua city famous for a stretch of the aughts as the world’s most murderous metropolis. While the epidemic of unsolved killings of women that began in the 1990s accounted for only a fraction of that number, the feminicidios remain today an emblem of entrenched misogyny and of the precarity of life on the post-NAFTA border, especially for the largely female

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workforce in the notorious maquilas, the border-adjacent dutyfree factories producing commodities for immediate export. The first maquilas appeared in the wake of a 1933 free-trade law and thus are fully in operation when Cesárea works in the canning factory in the mid-1940s. The industry picked up speed in the 1960s and came to dominate the area in the 1990s, when the maquilas begin to employ large populations of migrants from rural Mexico or Central America whose intense vulnerability is a precondition for the murders at the center of Bolaño’s final novel. That collapse of times—1933, 1945, 1976, 1990—is conveyed numerically in the gleaming figure of 2666 that, unspoken, haunts this whole final stretch of The Savage Detectives. Imagistically, that temporal condensation finds form in what Juan calls Cesárea’s “immense humanity,” her fleshiness palpably the result of a representational burden: a century compressed on the back of one woman. And this prophetic function is embodied by that blueprint of the canning factory pasted to the wall, in the position of a window, as if the twist in reality that lives in Cesárea’s room were a version of the adjustment in planar orientation these pages demand of the reader. The blueprint is yet another invitation to stop reading The Savage Detectives and instead to hang it on the wall, look through this portal of 1976 to an image of a future which is in fact our present.

Noncommunicating Vessels Is Cesárea the first victim of Santa Teresa’s feminicidios? The question’s nonsensicality is instructive. The answer should logically be no: the term wasn’t common until the 1990s, when the upsurge in murders of women on the border seemed to demand a new coinage. But in its strict nominalism, this response dodges the deeper issue: the misogyny undergirding violence against

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women has been a structural fact since long before the obscenity of the murders in turn-of-the-century Juárez gave rise to this new nomenclature, and in this sense, it is tempting to take the sheer randomness of Cesárea’s killing as indicative of that longer history. Still, the more intractable problem posed by the novel’s bloody finale may be the way it brings into contact supposedly distinct realms of human experience. Cesárea is the object of the visceral realists’ quest because of her role in the history of poetry. That she should meet her demise in the crossfire of a pimp’s vengeful possessiveness feels aggressively meaningless: we could take it as an emblem of aesthetic vanguardism succumbing to thuggish brutality, but this ham-fisted just-so story has little to do with the foregoing novel and its endlessly subtle verisimilitude. And if we associate Cesárea’s murder with the depredations of an emergent neoliberalism, as I have been arguing we can, this connection too taunts us with its undermotivated quality. The visceral realist detectives are not (are they?) the agents of globalization, they are not (are they?) the thoughtless participants in a brutal culture of human, and particularly female, expendability. Absurd as they sound, these are the questions Bolaño wants us to ask. The futility so palpable at the end of the novel has less to do with the quasi-mystical air of doom that hangs over the proceedings than with this utterly mundane interpretive blockage. Art and crime, poetry and politics: you can’t make these tubes connect in any cleanly meaningful way. But, The Savage Detectives says, aesthetic practice only makes sense at all in the vicinity of the attempt. The visceral realists did not commit the murder of Cesárea, and they are not in any rational accounting responsible for it. But they are, in a nontechnical but unavoidable sense, answerable for it: in all the decades we follow them, through all the geographies they traverse, they will never stray far from this crime, from the question of what their art has done to mitigate

The Deserts of Sonora (1976) = 177

or foresee or forestall the damage of the world. The question is infantile. But anyone who cares about art never really gets over it or past it.

Hapax legomenon Lupe’s sombrero puzzles aren’t the only road-trip game the foursome gets up to. Their first, more pretentious activity involves guessing the meaning of obscure technical terms from the history of poetics. It’s not even really a game: Juan proposes all the terms and in almost every case is the only one to provide the answers. But at least once, the joke is larger than he knows. Hapax legomenon, Juan informs his friends, is the Greek term for a word “that appears just once in a language, oeuvre, or text.” At the characterological level, this is precisely the situation of Juan and Lupe themselves, who alone among the characters we meet in Part I are never heard of again in Part II. The closest we come is when Ernesto García Grajales, the literary scholar whose specialty in visceral realism has earned him a position in the decidedly third-tier (and fictional) University of Pachuca, answers his invisible interlocutor’s prompting this way: “Juan García Madero? No, the name doesn’t ring a bell. He never belonged to the group.” Part III at once gives the lie to García Grajales (Juan is very much here and very much in the group) and confirms him: by the end, Juan’s existence does indeed seem tenuous, conjectural, undone. Bolaño’s characters, says the Chilean critic Leonidas Morales, “appear to live permanently on the verge of their explosion as subjects.” For Morales, the condition is appropriate to the historical moment of globalization and the aesthetic of postmodern flatness widely said to accompany it. The only thing this characterization misses is the depth of feeling that accompanies

178 = The Deserts of Sonora (1976)

the explosion, the sense of mourning that attends the dissolution of a fully realized world. For all the abstraction of its conclusion, there’s nothing chilly or cerebral about The Savage Detectives. Juan and his cohort are extravagantly plausible fictional beings, and their immolation on the altar of history, their disintegration into a series of dashes and doodles on the page, is a veritable novelistic and human tragedy. This disintegration is not given but lived, not an ontological condition but a historical eventuality the novel presents through its large social canvas as it moves through time. This is the charge of all great historical fiction. But what is startling about this history is how pertinent it still feels. The categories that magnetize the novel’s characters— Latin America, poetry, solidarity—have time and again been declared outmoded. Bolaño vindicates them not as shibboleths but as provisional containers of emotion, experience, political desire. It’s a miracle that the book gives such leeway to the volatility of those contents and yet holds its structure. That achievement makes The Savage Detectives itself a kind of hapax legomenon in his career. Bolaño’s body of work is famously interconnected, a sea of stories that spill over the boundaries of any given textual container. This is abundantly true of The Savage Detectives, which throws out connective lines to every corner of his career. But the novel is also the citadel in this sprawl, the place in his oeuvre where the moving parts click most perfectly and most ephemerally into intelligible shape, where it’s hardest to distinguish map from territory, where the viscera that pulse inside any realism worth its name are most palpable: a singularity in spite of itself.

CO DA

A

t some point in moving from The Savage Detectives to 2666, Bolaño sketched a map (or diagram, or dream image) of Santa Teresa, the city on whose outskirts Cesárea dies and that would become the center of his final novel. The picture looks like a classic grid in a process of decomposition: names of landmarks or neighborhoods float in a disjointed space connected by gestural lines indicating streets or thoroughfares. But even in this exploded condition, we recognize how Bolaño’s imagination tends to geographical allegory. A municipal dump in the extreme southeast is ominously called El Chile; a neighborhood at the city’s northern edge is named Colonia México: this invented city shadows forth an image of the Latin America totality. But for American readers, nothing is odder about this map than our absence from it. Ciudad Juárez, Santa Teresa’s original, is steps away from El Paso, Texas. But in moving his fictional avatar of Juárez several hundred miles west, Bolaño erased its American counterpart: Santa Teresa abuts not a fictional version of El Paso but the emptiness of the Arizona desert.

180 = Coda

Looking at Bolaño’s drawing “from” the United States is accordingly a bit like staring into a mirror in which your face remains invisible. It’s an eerie, educative cancellation— one that will no doubt operate most forcefully for those (white, anglophone) readers most strongly identified as American but that remains legible to anyone located in any civic or just physical sense in the northern nation that Bolaño simply erases. Getting into relation to this map demands that Americans recognize the representational issues that obsess Bolaño’s characters as our own— demands, for starters, that we question the very contours of “America” (the name for a continent as well as for the neoliberal world order). More strongly: it demands that U.S. readers accept an alternate center of gravity for the continental terrain—that we recognize our national space as a satellite of this center. This reorientation, seismic or gravitational in nature, is one that the critiques of Bolaño’s work as pandering to an anglophone U.S. audience fail utterly to register. To read The Savage Detectives is, for Americans, to be summarily deprived of the ballast of our presumed centrality. The book may be from “elsewhere,” but it asks to be read as a report from a shared reality. The invitation can of course be refused: it’s possible for Americans to insist on receiving this novel as if it were an exotic import—although doing so, I hope to have suggested, involves a willful refusal of the novel’s content. More subtly, one can accept the invitation but honor it in the form of liberal wish fulfillment: the idea of an evaporating United States has its appeal for any American who harbors the fantasy (reasonable but selfindulgent) of not being one. The gringo visitor to Mexico who carries The Savage Detectives hidden in his mental or real suitcase is playing out his own daydream of passing for invisible. That visitor, to state the obvious, has more than a passing resemblance to myself. The argument I have been pursuing here, that

Coda = 181

Bolaño’s novel knows about American readers but doesn’t turn toward us—that The Savage Detectives perceives us but ignores us—might be understood as a literary cognate of the consummate touristic fantasy of living “like a local.” In this uncharitable account, the novel’s uncanny way of turning every reader into a kind of eavesdropper makes it the perfect vehicle for the American reader’s narcissistic projection—enabling the dream that one can inhabit an alien reality while taking up no space there. If it’s pointless to defend oneself against the charge of indulging that fantasy, that’s partly because the fantasy is as unavoidable as it is embarrassing. But it’s also because the dream of dwelling in a world from which you somehow remain absent is a feature not just of American reading but of reading generally. In that sense, the hallucinatory richness of Bolaño’s novel derives from its exacerbation of this condition of novel reading, its intensification of the reader’s status as a receptive but ghostly presence. That experience finds representation inside Bolaño’s fictional world. “His pleasure in telling desperate stories, my pleasure in listening to them”: thus does Luis Sebastián Rosado attempt to account for the strange enchantment of his affair with Piel Divina. As a model for the relationship the reader maintains with Bolaño’s text, this one works ambiguously—it’s an intense liaison but a deeply unhappy one, in which communication is sporadic and powerless to prevent disaster. In reading Bolaño, are we too simply transfixed by catastrophe, savoring in silence the spectacle of loss and defeat? This possibility might seem confirmed by Arturo’s remark to Juan, early in The Savage Detectives, that the visceral realists “walked backward . . . gazing at a point in the distance, but moving away from it, walking straight toward the unknown.” For any reader glancingly familiar with academic literary studies of the last forty

182 = Coda

years, the image inevitably recalls Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, his gaze fixed on a past he perceives as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” as the wind of progress blows him into the future. That reader will also know that this image, once virally popular on the academic left in the United States as in Latin America, is now more likely to be critiqued as the very picture of “left melancholy,” the paralyzed admixture of despair and complacency that has colored so much progressive commentary in the age of neoliberalism. Bolaño’s novel, as we’ve seen, has been arraigned for its supposed courting of just such quietistic melancholy—its failure to depict purposeful activism interpreted as antipolitical, its interest in disappointed characters described as an apology for a stricken and stuck relation to the past. I’m not sure that politics and the literary object are related in this way—not sure that the absence of a coherent political program from the pages of a book vitiates that book’s political desire or political imagination, or constitutes an argument against political engagement. The faintly mechanistic vision of readerly relations implicit in such judgments can’t account for the demonstrably unpredictable ways people end up feeling about novels— can’t account for the possibility that a reader will be, say, angered by a complacent narrator, or bored by a progressive character, or spurred into radical action by a defeatist plot arc. Fiction sits at an odder angle to the real than is dreamt of in a lot of academic criticism. (The silence to which The Savage Detectives reduces me feels enlivening, a heightened state of alertness to contingency, danger, possibility, changefulness.) But the deeper reason such critiques frustrate may be that the attempt to specify what politics a book “has” relies on a taxonomic clarity that Bolaño’s novel feels engineered to defeat. “To narrate,” Roland Barthes claims, “is to raise the question as if it were a subject which one delays

Coda = 183

predicating.” It’s only when we reach the end of narration, he continues, that the predicate arrives— only then, in Barthes’s arresting phrase, that “the world is adjectivized.” Telling a story, in this account, is an effort at staving off that final adjectivization, an attempt to forestall any reader’s confidence in declaring what the world of the narrative is like. What is The Savage Detectives like? How is it finally adjectivized? Arturo’s backward walking indeed sounds fatalistic, and Luis Sebastián is certainly melancholic. But neither word serves adequately as a descriptor of Bolaño’s novel. Nor do the countervailing terms we might wish to assign in reaction (“hopeful,” “exuberant”) work any better. All of these emotional and political attitudes are contained in the pages of the novel, and all of them are volatilized—set in reaction against one another, constantly morphing into something else (maybe this, maybe that). Arturo’s Benjaminian remark does not encapsulate the truth of The Savage Detectives’s politics. It’s a moment in conversation, a move in an unfolding social game. “What do you mean, backward?” is Juan’s first dubious response to Arturo, followed by the seemingly approving judgment that “this sounded like the perfect way to walk.” But he confesses to his journal that “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.” Arturo’s image is not utterly discredited here, but its self-dramatizing assurance is comically placed in social space and historical time. The Savage Detectives does not promulgate Arturo’s image so much as set in motion a set of questions around it: What kind of historical experience makes such a vision seem attractive, comforting, inevitable? What kind of a collective takes shape around such a practice, and how durable is that collective, and where can it lead? The answer to these questions can’t take the form of an adjectival label: it takes the form of the novel’s unwinding, its

184 = Coda

hundreds of pages of speaking-in-time. I still find the vividness of that speaking almost literally unbelievable, an incredulity that sometimes takes the superstitious form of marveling at the mundanity of the physical book. How is it that this rectangular object, smaller than a breadbox, contains so many people and so many moods, so many projects, so much ongoinginess? I’ve read it many times, but it’s a book about which I am still curious: I want to know what these people are talking about. In the face of that curiosity, in the reading itself, the analytic habit is momentarily suspended. “For a while,” Iñaki Echevarne says in a Barcelona bar in July 1994, “Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it’s the Readers who keep pace with it. The journey may be long or short.” The Savage Detectives makes the critic—this critic at least—a reader again, trying to keep pace on the journey. I don’t know what The Savage Detectives is like: it’s a book to which I can finally only say, Go on, I’m listening.

AC K N OWLED GMENTS

This book owes its existence to conversations with José Juan Aguilar, Víctor Altamirano, Scott Challener, Michelle Clayton, Nicholas Dames, Luis Felipe Fabre, Lynn Festa, Nattie Golubov, Laura Gutiérrez, Daniel Howell, Héctor Hoyos, Colin Jager, Chad Kia, Mara La Madrid, Gabriele Lazzari, Heather Love, Tina Lupton, Barry McCrea, D. A. Miller, Ricardo Montez, Alfonso Navarrete, Emiliano Pastrana, Iohann Pita, Dierdra Reber, Joe Rezek, Bruce Robbins, Rachel Saltz, Jake Short, Mike Snyder, Patricio Villareal, Rebecca Walkowitz, Natasha Wimmer, Abigail Zitin, and Felipe Zúñiga. Special thanks to Susana Bercovich, Iñaki Bonillas, Jeff Lawrence, Valerie Miles, María Minera, and Rodrigo Parrini. And to Sergio Faz, poeta maricón. In memoriam: Sergio González Rodríguez, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Rino Torres, Jesús Valdez.

= = = Most of this book was written during research leave from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and with the support of the staff and facilities at the Biblioteca Vasconcelos, the Casa del Poeta Ramón López Velarde, and the Wertheim Study at the New York Public Library.

NOTES

While the following notes indicate sources for all quoted material, a handful of texts have shaped my thinking in ways local quotation doesn’t sufficiently reflect. For English-language readers, the most illuminating books devoted to Bolaño’s career are Chris Andrews’s Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe (especially insightful about the narrative principles undergirding Bolaño’s interconnected fictional world) and Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat’s Understanding Roberto Bolaño, which provides biographical and historical context along with a cogent account of Bolaño’s corpus. The English-language books not specifically devoted to Bolaño that have been most important to my sense of his work are Héctor Hoyos’s Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel and Jeffrey Lawrence’s Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño. Both have deeply shaped my understanding of Bolaño’s self-positioning as a Latin American writer and of his awareness of where this locates him vis-à-vis the United States and the idea of the “world.” In Spanish, Oswaldo Zavala’s La modernidad insufrible: Roberto Bolaño en los límites de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea offers the fullest monographic treatment of Bolaño’s career, and a theoretically searching account of his relation to the modernizing projects of Mexico’s twentieth-century avant-gardes. Montserrat Madariaga Caro’s Bolaño infra, 1975–1977: los años que inspiraron “Los detectives salvajes” (Santiago:

188 = Notes

RIL, 2010) is an indispensable sourcebook on Bolaño’s Mexican years, based on multiple interviews with surviving infrarealists and providing a lively sense of the political, social, and artistic ferment of 1970s Mexico City. Several articles from which I have not directly quoted have nonetheless informed my sense of Bolaño’s work. Valeria de los Ríos’s “Mapas y fotografías en la obra de Roberto Bolaño,” in Edmundo Paz Soldán and Gustavo Faverón Patriau’s collection Bolaño salvaje (Barcelona: Candaya, 2008) is a thoughtful analysis of Bolaño’s cartographic imagination, one that notes the pertinence of Lynch’s and Jameson’s notion of “cognitive mapping” to his work. My sense of the relevance of Auerbach to Bolaño’s fiction was confirmed by José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra’s essay “Fate o la inminencia,” in Felipe Ríos Baeza’s collection Roberto Bolaño: ruptura y violencia en la literatura finisecular (Mexico City: Ediciones Eón, 2010), which explores allegory in 2666. Jobst Welge’s “Apocalipsis y contingencia: Roberto Bolaño y los fines de la novela,” in Ursula Henningfeld, ed., Roberto Bolaño: violencia, escritura, vida (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2015), helped me understand the sense of parallel worlds so powerful in Bolaño’s work. Finally, three more books that informed this writing—books not about The Savage Detectives but in different senses around it. Josefina Ludmer’s Aquí América latina: una especulación (Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2010) is a fascinating meditation on the concept of Latin America, centered on Buenos Aires at the turn of the millennium and dense with commentary on the spatiotemporal experience of urban life. Alberto Vital and Alfredo Barrios’s Manual de onomástica de la literatura (Mexico City: UNAM, 2017) is a collection of astute essays by mostly Mexican researchers on the uses of proper names in literature. José Joaquín Blanco, the Mexican literary and cultural critic (and the original for The Savage Detectives’s Luis Sebastián Rosado), has published several collections of crónicas about Mexico City. Función de medianoche: ensayos de literatura cotidiana (Mexico City: Era, 1981), which covers the late 1970s, is an excellent companion to Bolaño’s novel.

Introduction = 189

ABBREVIATIONS

TSD LDS

Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, trans.Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1998)

References to The Savage Detectives show page numbers for both English and Spanish editions. An asterisk (*) after the English page number indicates that I have modified the translation. Where multiple phrases are quoted from a single passage, only the first phrase is given here, and a page range is indicated. Unless otherwise specified, translations from Spanish sources are mine.

INTRODUCTION

“authority of the negative”: Gérard Genette, Essays in Aesthetics, trans. Dorrit Cohn (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 51. “They were getting tired”: Nicolás Medina Mora, “Two Weeks in the Capital,” n+1 30 (2018): 88. “nostalgic”; “relive”: Sarah Pollack, “Latin America Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in the United States,” Comparative Literature 61, no. 3 (2009): 357, 361. “The swashbuckling Bolaño”: Dwight Garner, “Freewheeling Essays Pair Nicely with Bitters,” New York Times, June 7, 2011. “played off ”: Veronica Esposito, The Latin American Mixtape / Mixtape Latinoamericano (Mexico City: Argonáutica, 2015), 23– 27. “two huge teasers”: Jean Franco, “Questions for Bolaño,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 18, no. 2– 3 (2009): 207. “The Bolaño Myth”: Horacio Castellanos Moya, “Sobre el mito Bolaño,” La Nación, September 19, 2009, https://www.lanacion.com.ar/cultura /sobre-el-mito-bolano-nid1176451 /.

190 = Introduction

“We have enough”: Sam Carter, “The Roberto Bolaño Bubble,” New Republic, December 12, 2013, https://newrepublic.com /article /111140 /the-roberto-bolano-bubble. “boldly leaps”: Esposito, The Latin American Mixtape, 32. “games of influence”: Genette, Essays in Aesthetics, 57. “from now on”: Roberto Bolaño, “Sensini,” in Last Evenings on Earth, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2006), 18. “more often in poetry”: Leonidas Morales, De muertos y sobrevivientes: narración chilena moderna (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2008), 34. “expanding universe”: Chris Andrews, Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). “those born,” “free of classifications,” “salvific,” “aftertaste”: Jorge Volpi, El insomnio de Bolívar: cuatro consideraciones intempestivas sobre América Latina en el siglo XXI (Barcelona: Debate, 2009), 74, 156, 163, 170. “the last Latin American writer,” “infected,” “delirium”: Volpi, El insomnio de Bolívar, 157, 171. “that mythic territory”: Volpi, El insomnio de Bolívar, 178. “John Coltrane”: John  H. Richardson, “The Last Words of Roberto Bolaño,” Esquire, November  4, 2008, https://www.esquire.com /entertainment / books/a5191 / last-words-roberto-bolano-1108/. “uncomfortable Sartrean argument”: Francisco Carrillo Martín, Excepción Bolaño: crisis política y reescritura de la derrota (San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 2014), 32. “normalization”: Volpi, El insomnio de Bolívar, 82. “we need to cultivate”: Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers (New York: Verso, 2007), 293 “Though Bolaño never went”: Jeffrey Lawrence, Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 4. “a . . . normal life”: Volpi, El insomnio de Bolívar, 174. “sober family man”: Pollack, “Latin America Translated,” 359. “an excellent father”: Castellanos Moya, “Sobre el mito Bolaño.”

I. Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975) = 191

“feat of continental relevance”: Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat, Understanding Roberto Bolaño (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016), 199. “two primary instincts”: “Carmen Boullosa entrevista a Roberto Bolaño,” in Roberto Bolaño: la escritura como tauromaquia, ed. Celina Manzoni (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2006), 105. “Notes for Composing a Space”: Roberto Bolaño, “Notas para componer un espacio,” in Muchachos desnudos bajo el arcoiris de fuego: 11 jóvenes poetas latinoamericanos (Mexico City: Editorial Extemporáneos, 1979), 142. “As we all know”: Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 99. “a critical edition”: Jorge Carrión, “Roberto Bolaño, realmente visceral,” in Bolaño salvaje, ed. Edmundo Paz Soldán and Gustavo Faverón Patriau (Barcelona: Candaya, 2008), 362. “infinity of minor writers”: Camilo Marks, “Roberto Bolaño, el esplendor narrativo finisecular,” in Territorios en fuga: estudios sobre la obra de Roberto Bolaño, ed. Patricia Espinosa (Santiago: FRASIS, 2003), 136. Mexican journalists: see, e.g., Ana Clavel, “Darío Galicia: el infra que faltaba,” Milenio, June  7, 2019, https://www.milenio.com /cultura / laberinto/paso-dario-galicia-companero-aventuras-roberto-bolano. “macho anxiety”: Andrew Martin, “Deeper Into the Labyrinth,” New York Review of Books, March 25, 2021, 18. “For the foreigner”: César Aira, “La destrucción,” in Ciudad, espacio público y cultura urbana, ed. Tulio Hernández (Caracas: Fundación para la Cultura Urbana, 2010), 70.

I: “MEXICANS LOST IN MEXICO” (1975)

“cordially invited”: TSD 3 / LDS 13. “too poor for his part”: Henry James, Literary Criticism (New York: Library of America, 1984), 2:327.

192 = I. Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975)

Lukács on Scott: see Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hanah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). “talking about poetry”: TSD 7 / LDS 17. “our great enemy”: TSD 4 / LDS 14. “cut-rate surrealists”: TSD 6 / LDS 15. “neutralized”: Oswaldo Zavala, La modernidad insufrible: Roberto Bolaño en los límites de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 131. “the best poem”: TSD 6– 7 / LDS 16. “the rules of art”: Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). conflicting accounts: see José Vicente Anaya and Heriberto Yépez, “Los infrarrealistas . . . Testimonios, manifiestos, y poemas,” Replicante 3, no. 9 (2006): 135–47. “a degree unparalleled”: Ignacio Sánchez Prado, “La ‘generación’ como ideología cultural: el FONCA y la institucionalización de la ‘narrativa joven’ en México,” Explicación de textos literarios 36, nos. 1– 2 (2007– 2008): 13. “hard-to-pinpoint”: Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 15. “the first major collection”: jacket copy for Mario Santiago, Poetry Comes out of My Mouth: Selected Poems, trans. Arturo Mantecón (New Orleans: Diálogos, 2018). “Belano and Lima’s . . . recommendations”: Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes (Barcelona: Alfaguara, 2016), n.p. “help you, be good to you”: TSD 87 / LDS 89. “a cock worth its weight”: TSD 122 / LDS 121. “if you come fifteen times”: TSD 97 / LDS 98. “a little old Spaniard”: TSD 103 / LDS 104. “all poets were bums”: TSD 101 / LDS 102. “at a certain point”: TSD 80 / LDS 82. “swarming everywhere”: TSD 80 / LDS 82.

I. Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975) = 193

“show them . . . yes sir”: TSD 77 / LDS 80. “sound track for a horror movie”: TSD 75 / LDS 78. “As we walked”: TSD 64– 65 / LDS 69. “The space they traverse”: Laura Hernández Martínez, “La ciudad imaginada en Los detectives salvajes,” in Ficción y realidad: los retos de la novela contemporánea, ed. Álvaro Ruiz Abreu (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2017), 156. on tactics and strategy, see, e.g., Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). “wielders of pen and paper,” “administrators,” “immense tasks,” “written documents,” “The new continent,” “ubiquitous checkerboard,” “symbolic dioramas”: Ángel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 18, 18, 19, 30, 1, 5, 73. “I talk about her eyes”: TSD 13 / LDS 22– 23. “I’m the cowboy from Sonora”: TSD 14* / LDS 23. “a girl from Sonora”: TSD 36 / LDS 43. “I thought he might be”: TSD 51 / LDS 56. “overinterpretation”: Andrews, Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction, 56. “the gringo seemed nice”: TSD 87 / LDS 89. “a movement on a Latin American scale”: TSD 28 / LDS 36. “cognitive mapping”: Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). “the mental map of city space”: Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 353. “foundational fictions”: Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). “I’ve always had a problem”: Roberto Bolaño, “Caracas Address,” in Between Parentheses, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: New Directions, 2011), 29– 31.

194 = I. Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975)

on the economy of world literary prestige, see James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). “open totality”: Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño, 9. “everything that I’ve written”: Bolaño, Between Parentheses, 35. “rejection of radical politics”: Juan E. De Castro, “Politics and Ethics in Latin America: On Roberto Bolaño,” in Roberto Bolaño as World Literature, ed. Nicholas Birns and De Castro (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 74. “the students supporting Álamo”: TSD 6 / LDS 16. “He’s expelled three women”: TSD 99 / LDS 101. “At Catalina O’Hara’s house”: TSD 75* / LDS 78. “ten or fifteen times”: TSD 12–13 / LDS 21– 22. “dragging a girl”: TSD 91 / LDS 92– 93. “the situation was untenable!”: TSD 105 / LDS 106. “I’d like to sleep with María”: TSD 85 / LDS 87. “I imagined María”: TSD 98* / LDS 99. “his face twisted”: TSD 90 / LDS 91– 92. “I went up to Jorgito’s room”: TSD 133 / LDS 131. “Quim looked out”: TSD 137 / LDS 134. “When I came out”: TSD 134 / LDS 132. “Pancho shut himself up”: TSD 129 / LDS 127– 28. “going north, mana”: TSD 137 / LDS 135. “After the countdown”: TSD 137– 38 / LDS 135. “what would happen”: TSD 138 / LDS 135. “I heard voices”: TSD 138– 39 / LDS 136– 7. “strict rectangle,” “our car leaped”: TSD 139 / LDS 137.

SOME NEIGHBORHOODS OF PART I

“An extravagant cast”: Sarah Pollack, “Latin America Translated,” 360. “Ay, mana”: TSD 43 / LDS 49. “lots of poetesses?”: TSD 22 / LDS 31. “making reference to Gertrude Stein”: TSD 45–46 / LDS 51.

Some Neighborhoods of Part I = 195

“The dominant machismo”: Susana Draper, México 1968: experimentos de la libertad / constelaciones de la democracia (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 2018), 200. “I soon realized”: TSD 131 / LDS 129. “the vast ocean of poetry,” “Walt Whitman”: TSD 80 / LDS 83. “maricas beg”: TSD 83* / LDS 85. “an extremely minor marica”: TSD 81* / LDS 83. “Not Gilberto Owen!”: TSD 82 / LDS 85. “our beloved Sophie Podolski”: TSD 82 / LDS 84. “startling juicy displays”: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 150. “What you’re telling us”: Émile Zola, Nana, trans. Victor Plarr (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924), 352. “That night”: TSD 41 / LDS 47. “all in complete agreement”: TSD 21 / LDS 30. “one of the great efrainitas”: Carmen Boullosa, “El agitador y las fiestas,” in Bolaño salvaje, ed. Edmundo Paz Soldán and Gustavo Faverón Patriau (Barcelona: Candaya, 2008), 425. “the alternating current”: TSD 5 / LDS 15. documentary footage: see Fernando Saucedo Lastra, México en la obra de Roberto Bolaño: Memoria y territorio (Mexico City: Bonilla Artigas, 2015), 39. “absence of humor”: Bolaño, Between Parentheses, 243. “poetry has been likened”: Octavio Paz, Alternating Current, trans. Helen Lane (New York: Viking, 1973), 3. “to her heart”: TSD 15 / LDS 24. “Nacos”: TSD 30 / LDS 37. “Two pairs of bright eyes”: TSD 18 / LDS 27. “as people say”: TSD 133 / LDS 131. “smiling like a spider”: TSD 132 / LDS 130. “Isn’t it possible?” Georgij Gurevic, “La infra del dragón,” in Lo mejor de la ciencia-ficción rusa, ed. Jacques Bergier (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1968), 430.

196 = Some Neighborhoods of Part I

“what may be called infrarealism”: José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art, trans. Helene Weyl (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 35. “liberated him”: José Agustín, La contracultura en México (Mexico City: Debolsillo, 2007), 138.

II: THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES (1976– 1996)

“the iterative mode,” “anachrony,” “prolepsis”: Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). Los Suicidas mezcal: see Oswaldo Zavala, La modernidad insufrible, 129. “a little field trip to the revolution”: TSD 349 / LDS 331. “river that connects”: TSD 387 / 366. “It was all vague”: TSD 484 / LDS 457. “third-rate Julien Sorel”: TSD 462 / LDS 437. “Dates . . . aren’t my forte”: TSD 425 / LDS 402. “there’s something nice”: TSD 581 / LDS 547. “They looked at me”: TSD 165 / LDS 162. “the boys . . . stood at attention”: TSD 228 / LDS 220. “what a wonderful job”: TSD 207 / LDS 201. “it’s a joke”: TSD 398 / LDS 376. “I get the feeling”: TSD 279 / LDS 269. “Then I heard voices”: TSD 281 / LDS 270. “I’m going to talk about 1970”: TSD 145 / LDS 142. “This was at the end of 1973”: TSD 148 / LDS 146. “The whole visceral realist thing”: TSD 152 / LDS 149. “Arturo Belano never liked me”: TSD 170 / LDS 167. “1977 was the year”: TSD 252 / LDS 243. “the summer of 1977”: TSD 253 / LDS 244. “were living in a hotel”: TSD 186 / LDS 181. “My dear boys”: TSD 143 / LDS 141. “the first great experiment”: David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London: Verso, 2006), 12.

II. The Savage Detectives (1976–1996) = 197

“the long downturn”: Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (London: Verso, 2006). “We’re doing it for Mexico”: TSD 587–88 / LDS 553. “rigidity imposed by Cronos”: Celina Manzoni, “Reescritura como desplazamiento y anagnórisis en Amuleto,” in Roberto Bolaño: la escritura como tauromaquia, ed. Celina Manzoni (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2006), 180. “I came to Mexico City”: TSD 195 / LDS 190. “airplanes crossing Latin America”: TSD 203 / LDS 197. “then I hit 1968”: TSD 197 / LDS 192. “I lived in the time”: TSD 197 / LDS 192. “heard others tell”: TSD 205 / LDS 199. “In Mexico”: TSD 424 / LDS 401. “underwear king”: TSD 428 / LDS 405. “sound of breaking glass”: TSD 434– 35 / LDS 410–11. “a town called Silverado”: TSD 441 / LDS 416. “When we’d been”: TSD 442 / LDS 418. “Mrs. Schwartz’s house”: TSD 446–47 / 422– 23. “Really, universally”: Henry James, The Art of the Novel (New York: Scribner’s, 1962), 5. “Everything began last February”: TSD 297 / LDS 284. “smiling out of sheer happiness”: TSD 302 / LDS 289. “a collection of fragments”: TSD 300 / LDS 286. “in the kitchen”: TSD 365 / LDS 346. “in the bathroom”: TSD 364 / LDS 345. “I’ve always been sensitive”: TSD 297 / LDS 284. “I knew that traveling”: TSD 306– 7* / LDS 292– 93. “from one end of Israel”: TSD 303 / LDS 290. “Julius the policeman”: TSD 326 / LDS 310. “dignity, evolution”: TSD 328 / LDS 312. “together. Like a cluster”: TSD 329 / LDS 313. “according to Piel Divina”: TSD 75* / LDS 78. “no money”: TSD 171 / LDS 168.

198 = II. The Savage Detectives (1976–1996)

“Why do I have to like”: TSD 175 / LDS 171. “For a moment”: TSD 384 / LDS 363. “Ernesto isn’t a fairy”: TSD 294 / LDS 281. “died in 1981”: TSD 372 / LDS 352. “repression, poverty”: John Beverly, “The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative),” in The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, ed. Georg Gugelberger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 26. “literature that does not want”: Georg Gugelberger, introduction to Gugelberger, ed., The Real Thing, 4. “There’s a Mexico”: Elena Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco (Mexico City: Era, 1971), 15–16. “forma conversada”: Luis Zapata, El vampiro de la colonia Roma (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1979), n.p. “Tell you my life story?”: Zapata, El vampiro de la colonia Roma, 15. “have forfeited none”: Erich Auerbach, “On the Anniversary Celebration of Dante,” in Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, ed. James I. Porter, trans. Jane Newman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 122. “the situation and attitude”: Erich Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: NYRB, 2007), 88. “contact with real life”: Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 189. “all of them find in the living Dante”: Auerbach, Dante, 139–40. “I’m going to tell you something”: TSD 514 / LDS 485. “For a while, Criticism”: TSD 513 / LDS 484. “walking along”: TSD 180 / LDS 176. Calle Montes: TSD 333 / LDS 316. “a jungle”: TSD 534 / LDS 504. “dark office” / “estudio en penumbras”: TSD 287 / LDS 276. “earthly entelechy”: Auerbach, Dante, 91. “the shift of power”: Auerbach, Dante, 64– 65.

Some Microclimates of Part II = 199

“turbulent new forces”: Auerbach, Dante, 178. “if God exists”: “Nunca creí que llegaría a ser tan viejo,” Roberto Bolaño interviewed by Rodrigo Pinto, in Bolaño por sí mismo: entrevistas escogidas, ed. Andrés Braithwaite (Santiago: Universidad Diego Portales, 2006), 94. “none of them”: TSD 150 / LDS 147. “he loved the stars”: TSD 151 / LDS 148. “I don’t know why”: TSD 151 / LDS 148.

SOME MICROCLIMATES OF PART II

“icy lakes”: TSD 160 / LDS 157. “eager to blend”: TSD 178 / LDS 174. “daylight came”: TSD 183 / LDS 178. “at the speed”: TSD 314 / LDS 299. “like zombies”: TSD 295 / LDS 283. “my parents”: TSD 483 / LDS 456. “A bus full”: TSD 189 / LDS 184. “it isn’t normal”: TSD 189 / LDS 184. “John, from London”: TSD 253–55 / LDS 244–45. “Hans gathered us”: TSD 254 / LDS 245. “once Erica joined”: TSD 255 / LDS 246. “there was more chaos”: TSD 360 / LDS 341. “a ship without a sail”: TSD 424 / LDS 401. “María and I”: TSD 396 / LDS 374. “Many of my friends”: “La literatura no se hace sólo de palabras,” Roberto Bolaño interviewed by Héctor Soto y Matías Bravo, in Braithwaite, ed., Bolaño por sí mismo, 67. “Herr Professor”: TSD 305 / LDS 292. “María Font, Catalina”: TSD 14 / LDS 23. “Such a funny name”: TSD 234 / LDS 225. “What a name!”: TSD 408 / LDS 386. “Such a nice”: TSD 408 / LDS 386.

200 = Some Microclimates of Part II

“no idea”: TSD 270 / LDS 259– 60. “Juan Las”: TSD 225 / LDS 218. “The mystery of place-names”: Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), 214. “What the country needs”: see José Joaquín Blanco, Se llamaba Vasconcelos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1977), 104. “Kito”: Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes (Barcelona: Alfaguara, 2016), n.p. they give their testimony in transit: see Antonio Córdoba, “ ‘¿Qué hay detrás de la ventana?’: Oralidad delirante y el enigma de la voz en Los detectives salvajes de Roberto Bolaño,” Vanderbilt E-Journal of LusoHispanic Studies 7 (2011): 103. “a moment in time”: Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 10. “I’m not leaving”: TSD 191 / LDS 186. “my childhood”: TSD 406 / LDS 384. “which is a subject”: TSD 255 / LDS 246. “I followed them”: Roberto Bolaño, Amulet, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2006), 86. “Vertical metaphors”: Stephen Graham, Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers (London: Verso, 2016), 17.

III: THE DESERTS OF SONORA (1976)

“José Avellaneda”: TSD 622 / LDS 586. “around the year 2600”: TSD 634 / LDS 596. “a rock or an elephant”: TSD 639 / LDS 602. “I heard Belano”: TSD 643 / LDS 605. “Today I realized”: TSD 591 / LDS 557. “the city and the desert”: Saucedo Lastra, México en la obra de Roberto Bolaño, 117. “Suddenly someone”: TSD 420 / LDS 396–97. “the spitting image”: TSD 604–5 / LDS 569. “Didn’t you read”: TSD 628 / LDS 591.

Coda = 201

“live in Sonora”: TSD 637 / LDS 599. “always headed north”: Roberto Bolaño, “The Donkey,” in The Unknown University, trans. Laura Healey (New York: New Directions, 2103), 697. “a Mexican seen from above”: TSD 610–11 / LDS 574– 75. “representational effects”: Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester: Zero, 2015), 10. “because I’m not Mexican”: TSD 611 / LDS 575. “a unity”: Bolívar Echeverría, Vuelta de siglo (Mexico City: Era, 2006), 197. “everything that is dysfunctional”: Echeverría, Vuelta de siglo, 198. “to Punta Chueca”: TSD 620* / 584. Para leer al Pato Donald: see Armand Mattelart and Ariel Dorfman, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, trans. David Kunzle (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975). “What’s outside the window?”: TSD 647–48 / LDS 608– 9. “Seen from behind”: TSD 639–40 / LDS 602. “huge bulk”: TSD 642 / LDS 604. “something subtler”: TSD 633– 34 / LDS 595– 96. “immense humanity”: TSD 640 / LDS 602. “that appears just once”: TSD 592 / LDS 558. “Juan García Madero?”: TSD 585 / LDS 551. “appear to live”: Morales, De muertos y sobrevivientes, 40.

CODA

Bolaño sketched a map: see “Mapa de Santa Teresa,” in Archivo Bolaño 1977–2003 (Barcelona: Centro de Cultura Contemporánea, 2013), 106– 7. “His pleasure”: TSD 290* / LDS 278. “walked backward”: TSD 7 / LDS 17. “one single catastrophe”: Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 257. on the “left melancholy” debate in Latin America, see Beatriz Sarlo, Siete ensayos sobre Walter Benjamin (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura

202 = Coda

Económica, 2000); and Mabel Moraña, “Walter Benjamin y los micro-relatos de la modernidad en América Latina,” in Crítica impura (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2004). The best-known account in English is Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” boundary 2 26, no. 3 (Autumn 1999). “To narrate”: Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 76. “What do you mean, backward?”: TSD 7 / LDS 17. “For a while, Criticism”: TSD 513 / LDS 484.

INDEX

Agustín, José, 84–85 AIDS, 141 Aira, César, 32 Akerman, Chantal, 66 albur (Mexican wordplay), 142–43 allegory: and continental imaginary, 165, 179; half-serious invocations of, 86, 156, 171– 74; and historical fiction, 54, 56–59. See also characters; Fuentes, Carlos; Gallegos, Rómulo Allende, Salvador, 98, 102. See also Chile; 1973 (year) Alternating Current (Paz), 81 Anagrama (publisher), 11–12, 15–16 Andrews, Chris, 18, 50, 188 angel of history (Benjamin), 181–82 Auerbach, Erich, 126, 131– 32, 188 Balzac, Honoré de, 79, 147 Barnet, Miguel, 122

Barrios, Alfredo, 188 Barthes, Roland, 182–83 Bechdel Test, 75 Benedetto, Antonio di, 15. See also Bolaño, Roberto, works: “Sensini” Benjamin, Walter, 181–82 Beverly, John, 122 Biografía de un cimarrón (Barnet), 122 Birth of Dionysus (Henríquez Ureña), 145 Blanco, José Joaquín, 145, 188 Blake, William, 76– 78 Bolaño, Roberto: biography, 3–4, 8– 9, 19, 24– 25, 54–55, 132– 33; cartographic imagination, 164– 68, 179–80; and counterculture, 4; fatalism, 160– 61, 182; generational consciousness, 19– 20, 58–59,

204 = Index

Bolaño, Roberto (continued) 88, 102– 3, 131– 32; and history, 22, 69– 70, 88; infrarealism, 39, 83–85; and Latin America, 8, 52–53, 161; “myth” of, 7, 16, 24– 26, 101; purported “normality”, 24; posthumous publication, 17–18; reception and criticism, 1– 6, 16–17, 21– 22, 27– 28, 31, 121, 179–81; translation of, 14–16; and the United States, 1–6, 16–17, 21– 23, 179–81; world literature, 56. See also history; Latin America; Savage Detectives, The Bolaño, Roberto, works: Amberes, 14; Amulet, 151–54; Between Parentheses, 4; “El Burro,” 163–64; “Caracas Address,” 54–56, 58–59; Llamadas telefónicas, 11–12; Nazi Literature of the Americas, 20; “Sensini,” 11–14, 25–26; The Spirit of Science Fiction, 41; 2666, 10–11, 15–16, 24, 153, 174, 179; Woes of the True Policeman, 141. See also Savage Detectives, The books: as fetish objects, 10–11, 15–16; as physical objects, 40–41, 172– 73, 184 Bolívar, Simón, 56 “Boom,” the, 18, 57 borders, 52, 150–53, 162– 64, 168– 69.

Borges, Jorge Luis, 17–18 Boullosa, Carmen, 26, 80 Bourdieu, Pierre, 38 Brenner, Robert, 102 Buñuel, Luis, 152–53 Carrillo Martín, Francisco, 20– 21 Carrión, Jorge, 29 Casa de las Américas, 122 casa verde, La (Vargas Llosa), 55 Castellanos Moya, Horacio, 8 characters: and collectivity, 36, 60–61, 86–88; correspondence to real-life models, 29, 34, 39, 145–47; dissolution of, 36, 70– 71, 158–59, 177– 78; and exoticism, 73– 74; and stylized literary presentation, 95–97, 124–31. See also allegory; collectivity chien andalou, Un (Buñuel), 152–53 Chile, 23– 25, 98, 102, 104 class, 67, 82, 119, 121– 24 cognitive mapping, 53 collectivity, 28, 60– 66, 110–11; and eroticism, 60– 64; and exclusion, 114–16; group assembly and disassembly, 60– 61, 69, 137– 39, 110–11; and political affiliation, 60, 113. See also politics; sex committed literature (Sartre), 20– 21, 77 Contemporáneos (Mexican cultural group), 78

Index = 205

contracultura en México, La (Agustín), 84–85 Córdoba, Antonio, 147 Cortázar, Julio, 6 Crack (Mexican literary group), 18. See also Volpi, Jorge Dalton, Roque, 6 Dante, 125– 26, 131– 32 dates/dating, 94, 97–105, 152– 3, 174– 75. See also history; time Dehumanization of Art, The (Ortega y Gasset), 84. See also infrarealism Dick, Philip K., 84–85 “disappearance” (state murder) 12, 103, 124, 135 Divine Comedy, The (Dante), 125– 26, 131– 32 Doña Bárbara (Gallegos), 54–57 Dorfman, Ariel, 170 Draper, Susana, 75 Echeverría, Bolívar, 168 English, James, 56 Esposito, Veronica, 5– 6, 8– 9 exile, 12, 44, 103–4, 117–18, 125, 160– 61 exoticism, 4–5, 22, 24, 73– 74, 180–81 Farrar, Straus and Giroux (publisher), 3–4, 15 fascism, 113–15 fatalism, 7, 69– 70, 104–5, 160– 61

feminicidio, 174– 76 feminism, 74– 76 Flaubert, Gustave, 36 Fondo de Cultura Económica, 39. formalism, 28, 39–41, 108–9, 131– 32 Franco, Jean, 6– 7 Frank, Joseph, 150 Fuentes, Carlos, 55, 57 Fukuyama, Francis, 21 Gallegos, Rómulo, 26, 54–57. See also Premio Rómulo Gallegos García Márquez, Gabriel, 7, 29 Garner, Dwight, 4–5 gender: 41–44, 60– 64; sexism, 31, 74– 78; and violence, 174– 77; women’s friendships: 75, 139–41. See also feminicidio; feminism; homosexuality; Savage Detectives, The; sex generational consciousness, 19– 20, 58–59, 88, 102– 3, 131– 32. See also Bolaño, Roberto Genette, Gérard, 2, 89 González de Alba, Luis, 123 Graham, Stephen, 154 Gugelberger, Georg, 122 Gurevic, Georgij, 83–84 Gutiérrez-Mouat, Ricardo, 25, 188 Harvey, David, 102 Hasta no verte, Jesús mío (Poniatowska), 122

206 = Index

Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 145 Hernández Martínez, Laura, 46 history, 23–24; contingency, 25–27; dates, 101–5; and the everyday, 26–27; fatalism, 69– 70; human action, 22; and temporality, 33– 34, 88. See also Bolaño, Roberto; fatalism; time Homer, 145 homosexuality, 31, 76– 78, 141–42. See also gender; sex How to Read Donald Duck (Dorfman and Mattelart), 170 Hoyos, Héctor, 38– 39, 56, 187 Huerta, Efraín, 80 Iliad, The (Homer), 145 Image of the City, The (Lynch), 53. See also cognitive mapping In Search of Lost Time (Proust), 89 “infra del dragón, La” (Gurevic), 83–84 infrarealism, 39, 80, 83–85, 125. See also Bolaño, Roberto Iphigenia the Cruel (Reyes), 145 Israel, 113–15 James, Henry, 36 Jameson, Fredric, 23, 53, 144, 188 Joyce, James, 45, 117–18, 145 Kerouac, Jack, 2 Kinkle, Jeff, 165 Krauss, Nicole, 20

Latin America: continental imaginary, 52–53, 58–59, 144–46; mapping, 48–53, 71– 72; purported “normalization” of, 21– 22; as open totality, 56, 165– 68; relation to United States, 21– 22, 179–81; sublime scale of, 29, 59, 144–46, 165; as superannuated concept, 20, 55. See also Bolaño, Roberto Lawrence, Jeffrey, 22– 23, 187 left melancholy, 181–83 Lethem, Jonathan, 24 Lettered City, The (Rama), 47 List Arzubide, Germán, 92 literalism, 81–83 literature: and markets, 1– 6, 16, 18; and prestige, 26, 56, 77, 83–85, 92– 93, 122. López, Carolina, 81 Ludmer, Josefina, 188 Lukács, Georg, 36 Lynch, Kevin, 53, 188. See also cognitive mapping Madariaga Caro, Montserrat, 187–88 magical realism, 18 Manzoni, Celina, 104 Maples Arce, Manuel, 92, 120, 128, 143, 146–47 maps/mapping: and Latin American totality, 52–53,

Index = 207

168– 69; and the novel’s índice, 146–51; of Santa Teresa, 179–80; and the urban grid, 46–47, 71– 72; and visual games, 164–65. See also Roberto Bolaño; cognitive mapping marea rosa (pink tide), 21 Marks, Camilo, 29 Martin, Andrew, 31 Mattelart, Armand, 170 Medina Mora, Nicolás, 3 metaphor, 82–83, 136– 37 Mexico: Ciudad Juárez, 174– 76, 179–80; El Halconazo massacre, 103; literary culture in, 39, 77, 80–85, 116–18, 145–47, 161; maquilas, 174– 75; Mexican Revolution, 38, 91– 92, 116–17; Mexico City, 45–53, 117–18, 153–54; national territory of, 48–51, 70– 71, 168– 69; 103–4; state sponsorship of culture, 39; state violence, 23, 103; stereotypes about, 73– 74, 107, 164– 69; Tlatelolco massacre, 103. See also 1968 (year); UNAM Monsiváis, Carlos, 146 Morales, Leonidas, 17, 177– 78 myth, 19– 20, 130, 132, 145; “Bolaño myth,” 7, 16, 24– 26, 101; and demystification, 58, 160– 62, 172

NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 23, 131, 174 names, 48–53, 75– 76, 128– 30, 142–47; onomastic wonder, 143, 162; toponymania, 53–54, 71, 146 Nana (Zola), 79 Narrative Discourse (Genette), 89 neighborhood (as metaphor), 30– 32 neoliberalism, 23– 24, 102, 180–82 Neruda, Pablo, 76– 78, 80 New Directions (publisher), 3 1968 (year), 73, 75, 84, 102–5, 123. See also Mexico 1973 (year), 102– 3, 104, 132. See also Chile 1975 (year), 101– 3 noche de Tlatelolco, La (Poniatowska), 123– 24 Odysseus, 144 Ortega y Gasset, José, 84 paragraphs, 14; as emotional containers, 65– 70; socioformalism of, 28; and submerged climax, 107– 9; as territorial markers, 150–51 Pascal’s wager, 132– 33 Paz, Octavio, 37, 76– 78, 80–81, 94 Pedro Páramo (Rulfo), 125 Pinochet, Augusto, 25, 102. See also Chile

208 = Index

Podolski, Sophie, 78 poetry, 37– 39, 65, 74, 82–83, 136– 37 politics, 18–19, 165; apoliticality, 6– 7, 58, 69– 70, 160– 61; fascism, 113–15; of literary works, 18– 23, 88, 122– 23, 176, 182–83; party affiliation, 60, 80; and totemic dates, 101–5; U.S. imperialism, 9–10, 22– 23, 50–51, 168– 70 Pollack, Sarah, 3–5 Poniatowska, Elena, 122– 24 postmodernism, 177– 78 Premio Herralde de Novela, 26 Premio Rómulo Gallegos, 54–56 Prometheus Victorious (Vasconcelos), 145 Proust, Marcel, 89 Rama, Ángel, 47 reading: academic and lay, 32– 33; while American, 2, 9–11, 13–14, 22– 23, 29– 30, 73– 74, 147, 168– 70, 179–84; and the physicality of the book, 40–41; and time, 10–17, 33– 34, 90– 92 realism, 13–14, 126– 27, 132, 154 región más transparente, La (Fuentes), 57 Reyes, Alfonso, 145 Rimbaud, Arthur, 95 Ríos, Valeria de los, 188 Ruisánchez Serra, José Ramón, 188 Rulfo, Juan, 125

Sánchez Prado, Ignacio, 29, 39 Santiago Papasquiaro, Mario, 39 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 21, 35, 77 Saucedo Lastra, Fernando, 81, 159– 60 Savage Detectives, The (Bolaño), 1– 7, 15–16, 20, 24, 26– 29; allegory in, 57–59, 173– 74; atmospherics of, 27– 28; borders in, 151–53, 162– 64, 168– 69, 172– 75; cartographic imaginary, 164– 68; characterization in, 73– 74, 95– 97, 124– 31, 146–47, 177– 78; comedy of, 33– 34, 164– 68, 172; and The Divine Comedy, 124– 26; and dates and dating, 101–5; and death, 120– 21; digressions, 106– 9; formalism of, 40; gender in, 31, 41–44, 60– 64, 74– 78, 139–41, 174– 77; and genre, 67, 122– 24; and groups, 115–16, 137– 39; and history, 131– 32; and homosexuality, 44, 76– 78, 118– 20, 141–42; índice, 147–50; and Latin America, 29, 71– 72, 165– 68; and Mexico City, 45–53, 117–18; narrative pacing in, 89– 92; “neighborhoods” of, 30– 32; pictograms in, 96, 138– 39, 164– 69, 171– 72; and poetry, 38– 39, 65, 74, 136– 37; and proper names, 48–53,

Index = 209

128– 30, 142–47; and puzzles, 177– 78; and Premio Rómulo Gallegos, 54; and speech, 127– 28; structure of, 26– 27, 43–44; and time, 89– 92, 97–101; translation of, 170; and Ulysses, 117–18, 144–46; and the United States, 168– 70, 172– 75, 180–81; vehicles in, 137– 39; and violence against women, 174– 77; and visceral realism, 35– 38, 52, 59– 60, 80, 118–19. See also Bolaño, Roberto; history; paragraphs; time science fiction, 83–84, 153–54, 173 Scott, Sir Walter, 36 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 78 Sentimental Education (Flaubert), 36 sex, 31, 41–44, 63– 64 sex work, 62, 78–80, 119, 123–24, 152 skyscrapers, 153–54 Sommer, Doris, 54 spatial form (Frank), 150–51 speech, 121– 28, 184 Stridentism (Mexican cultural movement), 38, 92, 100, 146 structure/destructuration, 13, 26– 28, 43–44, 144, 178 surrealism, 152–53 taste, 8– 9 testimonio (genre), 122– 24

Terra Nostra (Fuentes), 55 time, 17, 34, 36; dates, 101–5; and diary form, 36, 158–59; narrative pacing, 89– 92 Toscano, Alberto, 165 Torre del Caballito, 154 tourism, 10, 180–81 translation, 7, 142–43 Twitter, 7, 16 2001: A Space Odyssey (Clarke/ Kubrick), 154 2666 (year), 152–54, 174– 75. See also Bolaño, Roberto, works of: 2666 Ulises criollo (Vasconcelos), 145 Ulysses (Joyce), 117–18, 145 UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), 37– 38, 40, 103–4, 113–14, 124, 145. See also Mexico United States: border with Mexico, 162– 64, 168– 69; CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 22, 102; Civil Rights Movement, 22; imperialism, 9–10, 22– 23, 50–51, 168– 70; and Latin America, 23, 102; ugly Americans, 9–10. See also Latin America; Mexico urban landscape, 30– 32, 45–48, 52–53, 152–54 urban legend (genre), 105 Uruguay, 104

210 = Index

vampiro de la colonia Roma, El (Zapata), 123– 24 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 55 Vasconcelos, José, 145 Vázquez Amaral, Joaquín, 146 vehicles (motif), 137– 39 Venezuela, 54–57 visceral realism, 35– 38, 52, 59– 60, 80, 118–19. See also infrarealism Vital, Alberto, 188 Volkow, Verónica, 146 Volpi, Jorge, 18–19, 21– 24.

Waves, The (Woolf), 128 Welge, Jobst, 188 Whitman, Walt, 76– 78 Wimmer, Natasha, 15, 30 Wiseman, Frederick, 66 Woolf, Virginia, 128 world literature, 23, 56 Zapata, Luis, 123– 24 Zavala, Oswaldo, 38, 92, 187 Zendejas Pineda, José Alfredo. See Santiago Papasquiaro, Mario Zola, Émile, 79