Lost Scenes, Found Scenes, Your Own Scenes

After six months of intermittent reading, I finally finished "The Savage Detectives," the novel that deservedly made Roberto Bolano quite famous in the final years of his life. That it took me so long to finish isn't a reflection of how much I loved the book. It was wonderful, though sad and long enough that I needed to take breaks. (A semester of graduate school also intervened.)

My favorite part of the novel was the idolization of the obscure, a theme that appears in Bolano's other work, but is probably celebrated at greater length and in greater depth here. The torrents of obscure poets, novelists and theorists, Mexican, Latin American and others; the chase after Cesearea Tinajero, the 1920s poetess who only ever published the scraps of one poem and doodles; and the chronicles of the band of visceral realists in mid-1970s Mexico City are all filled with names you never heard, but are presented in a way that the line between the fictional and real-life ones is blurred.

My hypothesis is the implied interviewer of the novel's middle section -- the person who's traveling the globe for 25 years to capture the lives of two of the protagonists, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, only to find himself a few steps behind them -- is Juan Garcia Madero, the third protagonist of the visceral realist gang. In the final pages of the novel, there's the suggestion that Garcia Madero went searching for Belano and Lima in Mexico City after their adventures splintered, but never found them and then never stopped looking. Earlier, in the final interview of the middle section, featuring the self-anointed only academic specialist of visceral realism, the professor says he never heard of Garcia Madero so he must not have been part of the gang. Bolano then insinuates that the interviewer's reaction is one of offense, that he can't believe he's been wiped from the pages of obscure literary history.

Art is everywhere, the novel teaches. That it's often overlooked doesn't mean it's not happening in every corner. Usually the art is better there too, the novel says. The biggest lesson is: Create your own scene. Don't wait to join the existing one in a big city because it may have ossified already. Better yet, go somewhere out of the way and start something. Play mid-tempo rock with lots of reverb.

Update: Also great about the novel is the way Bolano-like phrases can be created. My friend spontaneously said one Saturday night outside his house in Guilford, Vt., as we stood and watched thousands of fireflies sparkle like the camera flashes of spectators at big sporting events. "The fireflies all make us feel like celebrities," he said.