The abyss of madness stalks the deserts of Northern Mexico. Roberto Bolaño’s The Savages Detectives represents a literary/oedipal quest for the eternal mother. A vagabond world of poets, pimps and provocateurs . A world where art has been rendered absurd and poetry doubly so. Bolaño writes with an unhinged insanity that speaks more “truth” than the cold empiricism of the contemporary “scientific moment”. When the “Real” of human nature unfolds, the only remainder are discarded corpses, wayward hipsters and mumbling sociopaths. The Savages Detectives, in its round about way, chronicles the end of literature as a metaphor for the pure apocalyptic moment of “being human”. Roberto Bolaño’s writing inspires madness and conspiracy while concurrently renewing our position in the precarious incertitude of daily life. We are a fickle, savage species. A wounded species. A fragile species.
There is beauty in his pages. But with all true works of literature, it requires an investment both mentally and emotionally. A mutual act of diablerie. A blood pact between author and reader, the author bleeds for his art, and the reader feasts at this unholy communion of words. The process of reading Bolaño is a process of morbid change. His writing changes you, the words rupture your sense of space, time, morality. The world of knowing is left a barren and vacuous desert that somehow strengthens our human desire for life. Or at least opens the asylum doors and welcomes the madness, insanity and conspiracy into the day-to-day normalcy of “just being” human. We are savage. We are fragile.
Notable quotes:
I like to write notable passages down. It exposes my mental state as reader vis-a-vis the act of reading. Why of all the words in a work of this length and substance did these few passages speak to me?
Pg.114: “The problem with literature, like life, is that in the end people always turn into bastards”
Pg. 314: “Ah, what a relief to come into the light, even when it’s a shadowy half-light, what a relief to come where it’s clear.”
Pg. 355: “Stop moping, all poets get lost at some point or another”
Pg. 400: “Freedom is like a prime number.”
Pg. 420: “…the heart of the matter is knowing whether evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it’s purposeful, we can fight it, it’s hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less. If it’s random, on the other hand, we’re fucked, and we’ll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us. “
Pg. 421: “If that woman had told me that a piece of her shit wrapped in a shopping bag was a poem I would have believed it.”
Pg. 451: “Poets are dazzled by the spectacle of wealth.”
Pg. 466: “Someone has to defend the murderers, the crooks, the men who want divorces and aren’t prepared to surrender all their money to their wives; someone has to defend them.”
Pg. 488: “The search for a place to live and a place to work [is] the common fate of all mankind”.
Pg. 500: “I felt like the Nude Descending a Staircase, although I wasn’t descending any staircase, not that I recall.”
Pg. 503: “But then I thought that life (or the specter of life) is constantly challenging us for acts we’ve never committed, and sometimes for acts we never even thought of committing.”
Pg. 627: “Measuring time is as meaningless as measuring eternity.”
Burlesque Philosophe 