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Sunday, December 18th, 2011
 Somewhere, José Saramago is laughing -- emol.com reports that the town of Bello in northern Colombia will be repeating its mayoral elections after no-one won the vote -- no-one won the vote because 56.7% of the voters marked their ballots as blank. (Reinaldo Spitaletta of El espectador writes that he knew something was going on when he saw a lot of people in Bello reading Saramago's Seeing before the elections.) Thanks for the link, Jorge!
posted evening of December 18th, 2011: Respond
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Thursday, December 15th, 2011
by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
El espectador
December 8, 2011
Although I’ve been doing it non-stop for thirty years, in spite of living my life surrounded by other people who are always doing it, I still think there are few activities so intriguing as the reading of novels.
I keep wondering why we do it: why would an adult devote his time, his mental energies, his moral intelligence to reading about things that never happened to people who never existed; how could this activity be so important, so vital, that this person would voluntarily withdraw from real life to carry it out. I've come across a few answers over the years, some of them in conversations with other addicted readers, but mostly in books here and there along the way. And indeed, the most recent of these books is truly marvelous: The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist consists of six essays in which Orhan Pamuk seeks to answer one crucial question: What happens to us when we read (and write) novels? This book is the most illuminating, most stimulating, most abundant examination of this difficult topic that I've read in years. I can do no less than to offer this urgent call to readers.
"I have learned by experience that there are many ways to read a novel," says Pamuk. "We read sometimes logically, sometimes with our eyes, sometimes with our imagination, sometimes with a small part of our mind, sometimes the way we want to, sometimes the way the book wants us to, and sometimes with every fiber of our being." In other words: there are no two identical readers of the same novel; not even two identical readings. And this fact, which seems so obvious, is what can explain the effects, the intimate, unpredictable effects the novel can have on us. What are these effects? Pamuk says we read the way we drive a car, pressing the pedals and shifting gears while watching the signals and traffic and the landscape around us: our intellect moves in a thousand and one directions in every instant. With part of our mind we do the simplest thing: follow the story. But readers of "serious" novels are doing something more: are looking constantly for the secret center of the novel, for that revelation the novel seeks to bring to light, which cannot be summarized, which can only be expressed just as the novel expresses it. Sábato was once asked what he meant to say in On Heroes and Tombs. Sábato replied, "If I could have said it any other way, I would never have written the book."
To read a novel is to leave behind a Cartesian understanding of the world. We know these things never happened, but we believe in them as if they had happened; we know they are the product of someone else's imagination, but we live through them as if they were a part of our own experience. "Our ability to believe simultaneously in contradictory states," according to Pamuk, is an essential characteristic of the reader of novels; another one is the urge to understand, not to judge, the characters. "At the heart of the novelist's craft lies an optimism," says Pamuk, "which thinks that the knowledge we gather from our everyday experience, if given proper form, can become valuable knowledge about reality." As readers, we share in this belief: that a good novel is a means of bringing a little bit of order to the chaos which reigns around us, of beginning to understand it. And that’s no small thing.
 Vásquez (who I think is my favorite new author that I found out about this year) writes a weekly column for Bogotá-based newspaper El espectador. Many thanks to Mr. Vásquez for allowing me to post this translation here, and especially to Anne McLean for helping me to contact him and for passing an editorial eye over my effort. It reads much more smoothly with her suggestions incorporated.
posted evening of December 15th, 2011: 1 response
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Tuesday, December 13th, 2011
The incantatory force of GarcÃa Madero's invocation here brings to mind Judith Weissman's take on the "Wanderings of Oisin"...
Una excursión: nuestro Impala enfiló por la pista que cuelga a un lado del golfo de California, hasta Punta Chueca, enfrente de la isla Tiburón. Después fuimos a El Dólar, enfrente de la isla Patos. Lima la llama la isla Pato Donald. Tirados en una playa desierta, estuvimos fumando mota durante horas. Punta Chueca-Tiburón, Dólar-Patos, naturalmente son sólo nombres, pero a mà me llenan el alma de oscuros presagios, como dirÃa un colega de Amado Nervo. ¿Pero qué es lo que en esos nombres consigue alterarme, entristecerme, ponerme fatalista, hacer que mire a Lupe como si fuera la última mujer sobre la Tierra? Poco antes de que anocheciera seguimos subiendo hacia el norte. Allà se levanta Desemboque. El alma absolutamente negra. Creo que incluso temblaba. Y después volvimos a BahÃa Kino por una carretera oscura en donde de tanto en tanto nos cruzábamos con camionetas llenas de pescadores que cantaban canciones seris.
Also thinking vaguely of Dorfman and of Rivera Letelier and of the Atacama Desert as I read about the poets' journey through their desert. And here again!
Lo seguimos por la avenida principal del cementerio, un paseo bordeado de cipreses y viejos robles. Cuando nos internamos por las calles laterales, en cambio, vi algunos cactus propios de la región: choyas y sahuesos y también algún nopal, como para que los muertos no olvidaran que estaban en Sonora y no en otro lugar.
posted evening of December 13th, 2011: Respond
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Monday, December 12th, 2011
Todas las lenguas, todos los murmullos sólo una forma vicaria de preservar durante un tiempo azaroso nuestra identidad.-- Jacobo Urenda
July, 1996
I had forgotten all about Urenda's narration, about this story of Angola and Rwanda and wartime Liberia. It started coming back to me when I was reading about Belano's duel with Iñaki and I've been feeling anxious about it ever since. (Anxious and a little mystified. "I remember that being a long story. How is there going to be space to fit it in to what little remains of part 2?") As it turns out, not really that long a story at 23 pages; but powerfully dense. This narrative could be a book almost by itself. Luigi's death is one of the most frightening, most moving moments in Savage Detectives.The action here is more precisely pinpointed in time than anywhere else; Urenda says he got to Monrovia in April 1996 -- only a few months before he is speaking, and I wonder why he says "April 1996" instead of just "April"* -- I wonder if this has something to do with its being the end of Belano's story.
 ...And we get to the end, the final two interviews in part 2: after Urenda's story we hear from Ernesto GarcÃa Grajales, the only scholar specializing in the Visceral Realists in Mexico and, so he believes, the whole world. The interviewer asks if he has heard of Juan GarcÃa Madero, the first time GarcÃa Madero's name has come up since part 1; he has not. (Is GarcÃa Madero the interviewer? This would kind of work, except he could not have interviewed Amadeo Salvatierra in Mexico City in January 1976.) And finally we get to the end of Salvatierra's story, dawn of the following day, the two young poets promising him that they will find Cesárea Tinajero. *This may just be an idiomatic thing. In Wimmer's translation, Urenda says "I got to Monrovia in April."
posted evening of December 12th, 2011: Respond
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Wednesday, December 7th, 2011
Iñaki me miró y lugo miró el mar y sólo entonces comprendà que la escena tenÃa algo de irremediablemente ridÃculo y que lo ridÃculo no era ajeno a mi presencia allÃ.
—Jaume Planells
June, 1994
A couple of episodes in part 2 of Savage Detectives are retold several times by successive narrators/interviewees, from their different vantage points. I think these are my favorite parts of the book -- here Bolaño uses the form he has chosen to its fullest extent. One of these is Belano's ludicrous duel with Iñaki Echavarne, fought off-season on a nude beach near Barcelona sometime in the early 90's (as close as I can tell) -- it is told first by unsuspecting Susana Puig, Belano's nurse and lover when he was hospitalized for pancreatitis, then by Guillem Piña, who hatches the scheme with Belano and serves as his second, then by Jaume Planells, who is drawn in against his better judgement as Echavarne's second. I'd like to think about what it means that Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase #2 serves as a leitmotif for this episode. Piña repeatedly says he "felt like the Nude Descending a Staircase" in relation to Belano and that he "waited, which is what the Nude Descending a Staircase did" -- Planells picks up on this when he says he thinks Echavarne mentioned the painting when telling him about the duel, wonders "what did Picasso have to do with it?" And, well, I'm not sure what Picasso or Duchamp has to do with this absurd duel. The whole thing works nicely as a way of keeping the image in your mind when you're reading the episode, as a backdrop to its events. Bolaño has not used visual art this way very much in Savage Detectives -- many of the poems in Romantic Dogs have a painting as their centerpiece.
 I ran into a woman on the subway this morning who was reading The Skating Rink, and we chatted for a few minutes about how Bolaño is the greatest thing ever. That was fun.
posted evening of December 7th, 2011: 2 responses
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Tuesday, December 6th, 2011
Y Cesárea me miró, una mirada cortita, asà como de lado, y dijo que ése era el porvenir común de todos los mortales, buscar un lugar donde vivir y un lugar donde trabajar.
—Amadeo Salvatierra
January, 1976
While I was reading Amadeo Salvatierra's narrative this afternoon, it occurred to me to wonder whether he has ever referred to either of his two guests individually -- he is always saying things to "the boys" or recounting what they say to him, never (if memory serves) either one of the two by himself. A little funny because everywhere else in the book there seems to be a pretty strong distinction drawn between the two of them.
posted evening of December 6th, 2011: Respond
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Monday, December 5th, 2011
In Savage Detectives Group Read news, Rise links to two videos: Laura Healy reading from Romantic Dogs, and Natasha Wimmer talking with Daniel Alarcón about how she discovered Bolaño's work. (Wimmer's biographical essay "Bolaño and the Savage Detectives" is online at Anagrama.)
posted evening of December 5th, 2011: Respond
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Sunday, December 4th, 2011
Un poquito sublime y un poquito siniestro. Como en todo amor loco, ¿no? Si al infinito uno añade más infinito, el resultado es infinito. Si uno junta lo sublime con lo siniestro, el resultado es siniestro. ¿No?
—Felipe Müller
October, 1991
The narratives in the latter half of part 2 of Savage Detectives are spinning farther and farther away from the core of the book (which I stubbornly continue to insist is Belano and Lima's search for Cesárea Tinajero in 1975-6) -- long narratives by minor characters which involve Belano and Lima only glancingly or only in parts. Look at Felipe Müller's narrative from October, 1991 -- Müller summarizes a short story by Theodore Sturgeon, one which he is pretty sure Belano told him, "since he was the only one of our crowd who read science fiction."The story is "When You Care, When You Love" -- it strikes me as curious and interesting that a full three pages are spent on relating this story, more adjacent space than has been devoted to any other work referenced in this book so far. Add another entry to the long list of influences for Bolaño, I guess...
posted morning of December 4th, 2011: 2 responses
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Saturday, December third, 2011
photo by Sylvia Daniel Grossman, sentado en un banco de la Alameda, México df, febrero 1993.
posted afternoon of December third, 2011: Respond
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Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
...el Impala aún seguÃa aquÃ, por lo que deduzco quie actué con una velocidad sólo concedida a ciertos locos, y vi el Impala con mis gafas, esas gafas que hasta ese momento no sabÃa que poseÃa...
—Quim Font
August, 1987
The more I read from Quim Font's monologues, the more I like him. He is beginning to remind me of Amadeo Salvatierra, who I think is the only other narrator in the same age bracket... The two are not at all the same person, but they share a few endearing mannerisms.
I'm knocked a bit for a loop by Andrés RamÃrez' monologue from December 1988. The first sentence is "I was destined to be a failure, Belano, take my word for it." (Wimmer's rendering -- had to look this up to make sure I was understanding correctly what he was saying.) This is the first time any of the narrators has addressed an interviewer by name -- so the interviewer here is Belano. But for a lot of reasons Belano cannot be the interviewer elsewhere...
posted evening of November 29th, 2011: Respond
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