Joseph Grammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "experimental"
A Diary Isn't About You, Dweeb
Roberto Bolaño once stood in a crowd and yelled his own poem at Octavio Paz, then Mexico’s most recognized wordsmith and a future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Bolaño was not, it seems, hesitant to tell people what he thought of them, a skill I wish I practiced every day. I can barely tell a Jehovah's Witness at my doorstep that I don't believe in God, and that even if I did, I wouldn't expect Her to oppose blood transfusions for dying infants.
While I don't understand why the Almighty acts like a Ba'athist tyrant, let's lay off supreme deities temporarily and head back to the 1970s, when the wandering Bolaño founded a small artistic group called the infrarrealistas, who accomplished such noble deeds as crashing other poets' lectures in Mexico City and yelling abuse at them. Bolaño hated Octavio Paz, hence the interruption, which brings up a good tangent: protests by their nature are disruptive, so before you complain about the audacity of the Black Lives Matter movement (e.g., at the Bernie Sanders rally), kindly remind yourself of your enclavish whiteness and criticize your own jacked-up community first. Issues with rubios notwithstanding, the spirit of a young, radical "fuck-you" imbues Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives, a twisty fictionalization of his itinerant past.
The book's first and third parts are presented as the diary of a teenage poet, which might also be titled "Graphic Analog Sexts." (It was the 70s.) The larger, middle chunk, which I boldly and unoriginally christen "The Point," conducts a series of interviews about--not "with"--two adult unorthodox poets, who are basically professional drifters. This split format invites the reader into a parade of heterogeneous brains, which was confusing and even off-putting at first, but eventually convinced me to care for the humans, even if I didn't always enjoy their lurid escapades.
Throughout the center bit Bolaño switches back and forth among interviewees, weaving through countries, human psyches, and a handful of weird-ass decades. Like any mother, I chose my favorite characters and started to wonder, while reading some story I didn't care about at all, "When are we getting back to Amillo? I want to know if he finds another bottle of mezcal with those two rascals in 1976." I didn't really say the word "rascal"; I just realized later it kind of rhymes with "mezcal."
One section about a lawyer had its positive moments, but the frequent Latin and overall size turned me off, not unlike a certain ponderous church--by the way, when are you going to accept female priests? The longer you wait, the more likely we'll all see you as a pedophile exchange program with beautiful hats, even if young people love you now. Also, let male priests marry.
Why can't I smoke forty-five cigarettes at once?
So in the book, more than one section did nothing but list the names of obscure poets, some real and others arbitrarily fake. While I get the design behind "realism," this kind of inventory prose is soul-killing, which is a mortal sin when you are not also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. As a rule of thumb, killing more trees than you need for self-indulgence is a stupid idea. Here's looking at you, Kissinger...
...that's an Agent Orange joke.
As a whole, though, The Savage Detectives impressed me with a plucky, heartfelt vitality, which sounds like professional jacket copy but feels true to say. At least in the English translation, Bolaño writes without pyrotechnics, preferring what I call "chill uncle bluntness" (I hate the word "avuncular") in the vein of Murakami, except Bolaño's lack of restraint opens more breathing room for the long, propulsive sentence that can make me relive the memory of falling in love for the first time, as well as the subsequent understanding that an orgasm on a couch and the pledging of your life to another human are two very different forms of meaning, which only overlap a few times a week, or fewer, if there's hormone stuff going on.
Roberto Bolaño was born in Chile in 1953 and moved to Mexico City when he was young. At some point, he returned to his birthplace to deliver messages for the resistance against General Pinochet, who was both the focus of his book By Night in Chile and a murderous, chronic human rights violator installed by the US government in place of an elected president. During this time, Roberto was held in a prison where people were brutally tortured, and the sole reason he escaped was because two of his guards had gone to high school with him. Luck such as this makes me relieved to have been the weird, harmless chameleon who kept friends in every clique, or as relieved as my deep-seeded conformity can make me.
Meanwhile, shit goes down in Mexico City while rich and poor poets fuck, fight, laugh, love, drink, and write poetry, hardly a line of which we ever get to see (we see the fucking, though). It seems certainly a challenge to be happy when money troubles, romantic pitfalls, and the overall craziness of 1970s Mexico combine in one location, but some of these artists manage to do it, even if they realize the pursuit of happiness is secondary, since joy is fleeting, to the pursuit of meaning, which is the only thing that probably matters. Props to Dr. Frankl.
The two focal poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, spend their time searching for Cesarea Tinajero, a very elusive poet from the 1920s who started what was called the "visceral realist" movement (no relation to infrarrealismo). Most of the "plot" revolves around this goal of discovery, as the dope-dealing poets talk to everyone they can about Tinajero's life. What's strange, though, is Cesarea has only one recorded poem to her name, which begs the question: is she even a writer? Belano and Lima seem sure, but I find it tough to trust their judgment when they're impulsive and intoxicated all the time, which admittedly sounds like bullshit from a man who recreationally abused horse tranquilizers.
We only ever learn obliquely what Lima and Bolano are like. The general consensus is that they're weird, and, like Tinajero, it's not even 100% certain they're really poets (the ratio of odd jobs and marijuana sales to actual lyrical output seems rather lopsided). Honestly, they both seemed like one composite character to me as I was reading, which could have been annoying but somehow I just didn't care. They're both lonely, pretend-mysterious men who love poetry and act apathetic about everything else, except maybe sex. Both follow a logic that baffles their companions at times, transforming them into a strange, slightly spooky urban legend of Mexico City.
The interviewees, who all spoke in the first person, were by far the realest characters, and this seems like the point: through these artists (most of them are), we get sketches of two men who are chasing the sketch of a possibly dead woman. In that sense it bears resemblance to a detective story, but only if you drink a few fingers of mezcal and squint between the lines of your favorite poem.
Bolaño might dissect his rowdy times, but not with the narcissism Bret Easton Ellis prefers. On the contrary, Roberto jumps willingly into the skulls of many others for unexpected angles into a history he's left behind (what history isn't?). Like Ellis, he is willing to write about horrible things--a story about a gangster brutally choking a woman with his dick, in the middle of a crowded bar, no less, and to applause, was particularly unsettling--but not only from a sense of insecure weariness.
Pretending to be cool, by the way, is entirely normal, but you start to grievously wound people if you keep it up much longer than your teenage years. Actually being cool requires a bunch of stuff I fail all the time at, like being authentic and pursuing what you're actually interested in. (Animals, writing, Spongebob Squarepants memes.)
What I gather Bolaño believed, writing as he was in his middle age, is that his diary was unconcerned with him. Sure, every novel bears something incredibly personal to the author--and Ms. Morrison's exhortation to "write the book you want to read" is always true--so this author wanted to read about his friends, who they were, how strangely they might have seen him, and, of course, an unavoidable bit about how terrifying/exciting it was to write his first poems and lose his virginity. That Bolaño at the time of writing had detoxed from a heroin addiction and begun a family only drives the point home harder that he cared more for other people than his own limited mind, even if he did want to see himself as a kooky teen.
Rather than standing up and screaming at Octavio Paz, the fictional poet Arturo Bolano, when he sees the actual famous future laureate in a park, only respects his space, and at some point later has a friendly conversation with him. This is the mature, maybe more defeated but also more honest writer, no longer motivated by hatred of an "other," which is more than a lot of us can say. Just mouth the word "Muslim" in a crowd and watch people in our "post"-racial country cringe.
I admit I enjoyed the ending, in part because it ran counter to my expectation that the book would just taper off into random entries of carnal love, cheap hotels, exchanges of poems without showing them. The denouement feels like a disc between the book's vertebrae, to risk a medical simile, and avoids being a tacked-on attempt to wring excitement out of the pages. This is a challenge in a book that, on purpose, screws with the idea of plot, and is so hostile to your run-of-the-mill narrative arc.
While the biggest drawback of The Savage Detectives is baggage, I forgive most of it. Whenever I'd feel myself trudging into a slump, Bolaño would shake things up with some jarring action out of nowhere, and I'd sign up for the next section. This means his pacing is pretty odd, but I don't come away from the novel wishing he had more fights and car crashes. It's the quiet parts I remember most: San Epifanio's vacant smile while he recovers from surgery, the old man pouring mezcal for Lima and Belano, Belano crying on a friend's couch in Israel (a married friend whom he's in love with), Lima struggling to fish on a commercial boat, "the mother of all poets" hiding in a toilet stall for days while the Mexican Army storms the university where she works.
Maybe that last one isn't 100% tranquil, but I savored the lulls in The Savage Detectives. The gaps where poetry might skulk around and show itself, though it almost never does. In effect, this is a book about poets, not the lines they produce, and by grounding himself in the humans behind the creative process, Bolaño lets his novel breathe.
A bristly avant-garde poet in his youth, Bolaño settled down eventually and started a family in Spain, where he began writing books to make real money—real, of course, relative to writing poetry, which makes the business of fiction look like credit default swaps in 2005. For a man who claimed his chief desires in life were "writing and making love," he lived pretty much according to his principles (married people statistically have more sex) and got some solid art out of it. That he shared his diary with the world by splitting it into a hundred mini-versions, he showed that one's vulnerable thoughts are hardly selfish--they're pretty much charity, as long as you realize you're a lame organism like everyone else. In other words, Bolaño=Octavio Paz. With a viewpoint like that, there's really only room for care and understanding.
When the Jehovah's Witness next rings my doorbell (at my parent's place, since I live in a third-floor apartment now), I know I might feel like disparaging their beliefs in favor of my own, like some less eloquent Christopher Hitchens, straining to prove to them that their system creates misunderstanding and pain while my own is more rational, more inclusive, and allows for a greater capacity to be kind to others. However, maybe I'll just think of Bolaño's winter years (relative: he died of liver failure in 2003, in his fifties) and take the honest route, neither offering polite banalities, nor directing the plucky inquirer to a hell of her own choosing, but saying only this: "I don't believe in God. Hopefully it's rewarding that you do, and I expect you to respect my lack of religion, so let's both get on with our days and do some good in the world. Thanks for stopping by."
And then I'd skip church and blaspheme with my pups in the backyard. ¡Felicitaciones!
While I don't understand why the Almighty acts like a Ba'athist tyrant, let's lay off supreme deities temporarily and head back to the 1970s, when the wandering Bolaño founded a small artistic group called the infrarrealistas, who accomplished such noble deeds as crashing other poets' lectures in Mexico City and yelling abuse at them. Bolaño hated Octavio Paz, hence the interruption, which brings up a good tangent: protests by their nature are disruptive, so before you complain about the audacity of the Black Lives Matter movement (e.g., at the Bernie Sanders rally), kindly remind yourself of your enclavish whiteness and criticize your own jacked-up community first. Issues with rubios notwithstanding, the spirit of a young, radical "fuck-you" imbues Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives, a twisty fictionalization of his itinerant past.
The book's first and third parts are presented as the diary of a teenage poet, which might also be titled "Graphic Analog Sexts." (It was the 70s.) The larger, middle chunk, which I boldly and unoriginally christen "The Point," conducts a series of interviews about--not "with"--two adult unorthodox poets, who are basically professional drifters. This split format invites the reader into a parade of heterogeneous brains, which was confusing and even off-putting at first, but eventually convinced me to care for the humans, even if I didn't always enjoy their lurid escapades.
Throughout the center bit Bolaño switches back and forth among interviewees, weaving through countries, human psyches, and a handful of weird-ass decades. Like any mother, I chose my favorite characters and started to wonder, while reading some story I didn't care about at all, "When are we getting back to Amillo? I want to know if he finds another bottle of mezcal with those two rascals in 1976." I didn't really say the word "rascal"; I just realized later it kind of rhymes with "mezcal."
One section about a lawyer had its positive moments, but the frequent Latin and overall size turned me off, not unlike a certain ponderous church--by the way, when are you going to accept female priests? The longer you wait, the more likely we'll all see you as a pedophile exchange program with beautiful hats, even if young people love you now. Also, let male priests marry.
Why can't I smoke forty-five cigarettes at once?
So in the book, more than one section did nothing but list the names of obscure poets, some real and others arbitrarily fake. While I get the design behind "realism," this kind of inventory prose is soul-killing, which is a mortal sin when you are not also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. As a rule of thumb, killing more trees than you need for self-indulgence is a stupid idea. Here's looking at you, Kissinger...
...that's an Agent Orange joke.
As a whole, though, The Savage Detectives impressed me with a plucky, heartfelt vitality, which sounds like professional jacket copy but feels true to say. At least in the English translation, Bolaño writes without pyrotechnics, preferring what I call "chill uncle bluntness" (I hate the word "avuncular") in the vein of Murakami, except Bolaño's lack of restraint opens more breathing room for the long, propulsive sentence that can make me relive the memory of falling in love for the first time, as well as the subsequent understanding that an orgasm on a couch and the pledging of your life to another human are two very different forms of meaning, which only overlap a few times a week, or fewer, if there's hormone stuff going on.
Roberto Bolaño was born in Chile in 1953 and moved to Mexico City when he was young. At some point, he returned to his birthplace to deliver messages for the resistance against General Pinochet, who was both the focus of his book By Night in Chile and a murderous, chronic human rights violator installed by the US government in place of an elected president. During this time, Roberto was held in a prison where people were brutally tortured, and the sole reason he escaped was because two of his guards had gone to high school with him. Luck such as this makes me relieved to have been the weird, harmless chameleon who kept friends in every clique, or as relieved as my deep-seeded conformity can make me.
Meanwhile, shit goes down in Mexico City while rich and poor poets fuck, fight, laugh, love, drink, and write poetry, hardly a line of which we ever get to see (we see the fucking, though). It seems certainly a challenge to be happy when money troubles, romantic pitfalls, and the overall craziness of 1970s Mexico combine in one location, but some of these artists manage to do it, even if they realize the pursuit of happiness is secondary, since joy is fleeting, to the pursuit of meaning, which is the only thing that probably matters. Props to Dr. Frankl.
The two focal poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, spend their time searching for Cesarea Tinajero, a very elusive poet from the 1920s who started what was called the "visceral realist" movement (no relation to infrarrealismo). Most of the "plot" revolves around this goal of discovery, as the dope-dealing poets talk to everyone they can about Tinajero's life. What's strange, though, is Cesarea has only one recorded poem to her name, which begs the question: is she even a writer? Belano and Lima seem sure, but I find it tough to trust their judgment when they're impulsive and intoxicated all the time, which admittedly sounds like bullshit from a man who recreationally abused horse tranquilizers.
We only ever learn obliquely what Lima and Bolano are like. The general consensus is that they're weird, and, like Tinajero, it's not even 100% certain they're really poets (the ratio of odd jobs and marijuana sales to actual lyrical output seems rather lopsided). Honestly, they both seemed like one composite character to me as I was reading, which could have been annoying but somehow I just didn't care. They're both lonely, pretend-mysterious men who love poetry and act apathetic about everything else, except maybe sex. Both follow a logic that baffles their companions at times, transforming them into a strange, slightly spooky urban legend of Mexico City.
The interviewees, who all spoke in the first person, were by far the realest characters, and this seems like the point: through these artists (most of them are), we get sketches of two men who are chasing the sketch of a possibly dead woman. In that sense it bears resemblance to a detective story, but only if you drink a few fingers of mezcal and squint between the lines of your favorite poem.
Bolaño might dissect his rowdy times, but not with the narcissism Bret Easton Ellis prefers. On the contrary, Roberto jumps willingly into the skulls of many others for unexpected angles into a history he's left behind (what history isn't?). Like Ellis, he is willing to write about horrible things--a story about a gangster brutally choking a woman with his dick, in the middle of a crowded bar, no less, and to applause, was particularly unsettling--but not only from a sense of insecure weariness.
Pretending to be cool, by the way, is entirely normal, but you start to grievously wound people if you keep it up much longer than your teenage years. Actually being cool requires a bunch of stuff I fail all the time at, like being authentic and pursuing what you're actually interested in. (Animals, writing, Spongebob Squarepants memes.)
What I gather Bolaño believed, writing as he was in his middle age, is that his diary was unconcerned with him. Sure, every novel bears something incredibly personal to the author--and Ms. Morrison's exhortation to "write the book you want to read" is always true--so this author wanted to read about his friends, who they were, how strangely they might have seen him, and, of course, an unavoidable bit about how terrifying/exciting it was to write his first poems and lose his virginity. That Bolaño at the time of writing had detoxed from a heroin addiction and begun a family only drives the point home harder that he cared more for other people than his own limited mind, even if he did want to see himself as a kooky teen.
Rather than standing up and screaming at Octavio Paz, the fictional poet Arturo Bolano, when he sees the actual famous future laureate in a park, only respects his space, and at some point later has a friendly conversation with him. This is the mature, maybe more defeated but also more honest writer, no longer motivated by hatred of an "other," which is more than a lot of us can say. Just mouth the word "Muslim" in a crowd and watch people in our "post"-racial country cringe.
I admit I enjoyed the ending, in part because it ran counter to my expectation that the book would just taper off into random entries of carnal love, cheap hotels, exchanges of poems without showing them. The denouement feels like a disc between the book's vertebrae, to risk a medical simile, and avoids being a tacked-on attempt to wring excitement out of the pages. This is a challenge in a book that, on purpose, screws with the idea of plot, and is so hostile to your run-of-the-mill narrative arc.
While the biggest drawback of The Savage Detectives is baggage, I forgive most of it. Whenever I'd feel myself trudging into a slump, Bolaño would shake things up with some jarring action out of nowhere, and I'd sign up for the next section. This means his pacing is pretty odd, but I don't come away from the novel wishing he had more fights and car crashes. It's the quiet parts I remember most: San Epifanio's vacant smile while he recovers from surgery, the old man pouring mezcal for Lima and Belano, Belano crying on a friend's couch in Israel (a married friend whom he's in love with), Lima struggling to fish on a commercial boat, "the mother of all poets" hiding in a toilet stall for days while the Mexican Army storms the university where she works.
Maybe that last one isn't 100% tranquil, but I savored the lulls in The Savage Detectives. The gaps where poetry might skulk around and show itself, though it almost never does. In effect, this is a book about poets, not the lines they produce, and by grounding himself in the humans behind the creative process, Bolaño lets his novel breathe.
A bristly avant-garde poet in his youth, Bolaño settled down eventually and started a family in Spain, where he began writing books to make real money—real, of course, relative to writing poetry, which makes the business of fiction look like credit default swaps in 2005. For a man who claimed his chief desires in life were "writing and making love," he lived pretty much according to his principles (married people statistically have more sex) and got some solid art out of it. That he shared his diary with the world by splitting it into a hundred mini-versions, he showed that one's vulnerable thoughts are hardly selfish--they're pretty much charity, as long as you realize you're a lame organism like everyone else. In other words, Bolaño=Octavio Paz. With a viewpoint like that, there's really only room for care and understanding.
When the Jehovah's Witness next rings my doorbell (at my parent's place, since I live in a third-floor apartment now), I know I might feel like disparaging their beliefs in favor of my own, like some less eloquent Christopher Hitchens, straining to prove to them that their system creates misunderstanding and pain while my own is more rational, more inclusive, and allows for a greater capacity to be kind to others. However, maybe I'll just think of Bolaño's winter years (relative: he died of liver failure in 2003, in his fifties) and take the honest route, neither offering polite banalities, nor directing the plucky inquirer to a hell of her own choosing, but saying only this: "I don't believe in God. Hopefully it's rewarding that you do, and I expect you to respect my lack of religion, so let's both get on with our days and do some good in the world. Thanks for stopping by."
And then I'd skip church and blaspheme with my pups in the backyard. ¡Felicitaciones!
