Watching the detectives

ROBERTO BOLANO’S “The Savage Detectives” is a deeply satisfying, yet overwhelming reading experience. Ostensibly about two poets and their search for another poet who has mysteriously disappeared, the novel becomes nothing less than a broad portrait of the Hispanic diaspora, spreading from Central and South America to Israel, Europe, Africa and every place in between, from the late 1960s through the 1990s.

Bolano, a Chilean novelist and poet who died in 2003, is not entirely unknown in the United States. Three previous works of fiction have been published in English to wide acclaim -- a book of stories, “Last Evenings on Earth,” and two novels, “By Night in Chile” and “Distant Star,” that are short, obsessive monologues set during the bleak days of the Pinochet regime in Chile. But, before going on, let’s be honest. You may have noticed a little detail in the book information above that stopped you: 578 pages. You and I -- time-bound creatures that we are -- may share the same question: Is this novel worth our commitment?

To answer, consider the score of voices that make up “The Savage Detectives.” We hear from poets, prostitutes, revolutionaries and lovers, and aging editor-poet Amadeo Salvatierra, who recalls for us a long visit by two friends, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, years ago. It becomes clear that they are the detectives of the title, and that “savage” refers to their ragged youth. On that visit, they are accompanied by a few other artist friends -- they call themselves the “visceral realists” -- all looking for poet Cesarea Tinajero, the group’s inspiration.

In the course of their conversation, Salvatierra, describing himself as being “drunker than I thought,” walks over to the mirror in the front room and stares into it: “I could separate myself from the confounded quicksilver of the mirror I was leaning against, or what I mean is, I could peel my hands off the glass of that old mirror (noticing, all the same, how my fingerprints lingered like ten tiny faces speaking in unison and so quickly that I couldn’t make out their words).” Those fingerprints tantalizingly define the great project of Bolano’s novel and urge the reader to continue, knowing that nothing is as it seems, that everything is subject to contradiction, simplification and refinement.

Although not as audacious as Julio Cortazar’s “Hopscotch,” Bolano’s book throws down a great, clunking, formal gauntlet to his readers’ conventional expectations. Divided into three parts, the novel opens with “Mexicans Lost in Mexico,” 100-plus pages of a diary kept by Juan Garcia Madero, a 17-year-old sometime law student. He and Lupe, an on-the-run prostitute, are along for the ride with Belano and Lima in a Chevy Impala through the Sonoran Desert. The diary breaks off at a dramatic moment: Our two poets, the diarist and Lupe are fleeing Mexico City in a hail of bullets.

Readers might hope, might expect, this pursuit to continue in the second section, from which the novel takes its title, but they instead encounter a collage of obsessive and contradictory, informed and misinformed narrators. Some of them appear, disappear and later reappear, but all are concerned with the fate of Belano and Lima. This section -- the novel’s longest -- describes the myriad men and women the pair meet as their adventures push them to and fro across the earth. The novel takes a picaresque shape, focusing on these adventures -- loves found, loves lost, crimes petty, crimes major, nastiness and kindness. To recount all of these would become tedious and betray the spirit of the novel, which another narrator, a pompous French rock critic, captures perfectly in an excited phone call from Lima:

“The Mexican reeled off a story that I had trouble following, a story of lost poets and lost magazines, and works no one had ever heard of, in the middle of a landscape that may have been California, or Arizona, or some Mexican region bordering those states, a real or imaginary place bleached by the sun and lost in the past, forgotten or at least no longer of the slightest importance here, in Paris, in the nineteen seventies. A story from the edge of civilization.... “

Other narrators include Luscious Skin, deliciously sad, sexually confused and wonderfully named; and Auxilio Lacouture, the so-called mother of Mexican poetry. Lacouture’s story, crossed by that of Salvadoran poet Lilian Serpas (who is said to have slept with Che Guevara), is amplified in Bolano’s short novel “Amulet.” That book is being published by New Directions, which plans to bring out additional short novels by Bolano, adding more tantalizing flesh to some of the voices heard in this section of “The Savage Detectives.”

The diary returns in the book’s third section, “The Sonora Desert,” and our desire to find out what happens to Belano and Lima and their search for Tinajero is satisfied; we also -- possibly -- learn the reason for the novel’s long middle section.

So, you get the picture: first, a mad, diaristic plunge into sex, drugs and drink by poetry-obsessed and -crazed young people whose lives intersect with an energy reminiscent of that in “On the Road.” “Everything turned into a succession of concrete acts and proper nouns and verbs,” writes Garcia Madero, the diarist, “or pages from an anatomy manual scattered like flower petals, chaotically linked.”

The book’s middle section also serves as a cacophonous Greek chorus describing Belano’s and Lima’s lives when they are older: Belano covers the Liberian civil war in 1996 as a photographer; and Lima, back in Mexico City, is engaged in less-than-respectable actions following a mission of solidarity to Sandinista-run Nicaragua. Something happens to Lima in Nicaragua that is never made clear. But maybe that is the point, as his life, like that of so many others, has been permanently intersected by the drug trade.

Bolano captures the wild devouring of poetry by his young protagonists in the 1970s; however, in the book’s latter parts, many of its narrators come to see literature as a dreary academic pursuit or a crass, cliche-ridden enterprise. Countering this wrong impression, there is that third section, in which readers will be reassured that genuine, consuming literature is still possible.

So, again the questions: Is it worth our time? Is it a good novel or a great novel? Time alone will supply the adjective “great,” but what I can say now is: “The Savage Detectives” is a very good novel. *