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🦋 Visceral realism

I checked The Savage Detectives out from the library yesterday and started reading it. (This may have been a foolish decision: it looks as of 20 pages in, as if this book is going to devour my consciousness utterly, and for a long time; when I had been planning to spend the next two weeks working on an essay about Pamuk.) What joy! Every page is just delightful. But here's the thing: on nearly every page, Bolaño is telling me about source material that I ought to read if I want to really understand where he is coming from.

For example, on November 8, Madero writes: "I've discovered an amazing poem. They never said anything about its author, Efrén Rebolledo, in any of our literature classes," and goes on to quote El vampiro -- he says it haunts him in the same way as his reading of Pierre Louÿs -- and then on November 10, at the end of a truly breathtaking scene, he mentions 9 books that the 3 visceral realists he has met are carrying:

• Manifeste électrique aux paupiers de jupes -- an edition of poetry by "Michel Bulteau, Matthieu Messagier, Jean-Jacques Faussot, Jean-Jacques Nguyen That, and Gyl Bert-Ram-Soutrenom F.M., and other poets of the Electric Movement, our French counterparts (I think)."
• Sang de satin, by Michel Bulteau
• Nord d'éte naître opaque, by Mattieu Messagier
• Le parfait criminel, by Alain Jouffroy
• Le pays où tout est permis, by Sophie Podolski
• Cent mille milliards de poèmes, by Raymond Queneau
• Little Johnny's Confession, by Brian Patten
• Tonight at Noon, by Adrian Henri
• The Lost Fire Brigatde, by Spike Hawkins

A few more authors, from November 14: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is one of the earliest Mexican poets (unrelatedly, I am entranced by Madero's line from November 7, "I finished Aphrodite, the book by Louÿs, and now I'm reading the dead Mexican poets, my future colleagues.") -- Rodríguez wanted to name the visceral realists' magazine after her; and Laura Damián is (according to Rodríguez) "a poetess who died before she turned twenty, in 1972, and her parents established a prize in her memory."

posted morning of Sunday, December 13th, 2009
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I felt exactly the same way in those first pages, as if I'd entered a wholly new world that I was going to want to spend all my available time in the next few days exploring.

In some ways I feel fortunate that my Spanish isn't good enough for me to be able to really read in the language--otherwise, I think Bolano's list of writers would have overwhelmed me. As is, I'm definitely frustrated that there are so many I've not heard of or read, but I can at least keep moving through the novel despite.

posted morning of December 13th, 2009 by Levi Stahl

Wow! I always assumed Bolaño was just playing with fictional writers - it just seemed to fit to have him creating a fictional world with a few real figures here and there..

.. I was going to say something else about the book but I won't spoil the fun!

posted morning of December 13th, 2009 by Jorge López

Levi -- sure, overwhelming. (As many or more of these references seem to be to French poets as to Spanish-language ones, and I don't read French at all, so that saves me some effort of tracking them down...) My line of thinking right now is, I can experience the novel from García Madero's viewpoint without having read this stuff, because he is just now finding out about it -- and at some point in the future maybe I'll be able to come back and experience the novel from Bolaño's viewpoint, being more familiar with the literature under discussion.

Jorge -- I thought at first he was just throwing made-up names out; but then I searched for a couple and they matched real poets, and it turned out there was a real "Electric Movement" in French poetry...

posted evening of December 13th, 2009 by Jeremy

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