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"The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words the scrawled."
–From Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion -
"But Las Vegas seems to offer something other than “convenience”; it is merchandising “niceness,” the facsimile of proper ritual, to children who do not know how else to find it, how to make the arrangements, how to do it “right."
–From Slouching from Bethlehem by Joan Didion -
The Savage Detectives
My introduction to Roberto Bolaño was 2666, a book that took me ages to read, a book that I love for its unexpected shifts in voice and style. The Savage Detectives, my second Bolaño text, also took me ages to read, but only because I left it at home while I spent half a year abroad. I also think I like it more than 2666. This has been a surprise to me.
The Savage Detectives is fascinating because it follows the two leaders of a fringe poetry movement in Mexico, yet we never interact with them directly. Instead, the book consists of anecdotes from friends, lovers, rivals, critics, and strangers who met the two leaders. Bolaño is constantly changing voices, as the characters shift from rich to poor, from male to female, from young to old. The range is simply unbelievable. Yet, as the book goes on, the two leaders become more defined, more layered, and also, inevitably, more difficult to grasp. The two leaders are heralded ideologues, failed bums, brave explorers, naive humanists, and so on. Each voice sees the leaders differently, yet there is a fragile cohesiveness to their identities.
Bolaño never writes from plot. It could be said that nothing, really, happens. There are fragments of stories, but as a whole the book cannot be surmised so simply. More so, Bolaño writes with characters, atmosphere, pacing. He is a stylist. I don’t think many people will enjoy this book.It is more fragmented than 2666, but also, I think, more daring, more crude. And, because of that very fact, I liked it more. This is definitely one of my favorite books.
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"My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."
–From Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion -
"Writers, like tyrants, are capable of bending the world to their will."
–From Dawk Dusk or Night by Yasmina Reza -
"Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy.
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Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy.
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Everything that begins as comedy inevitably ends as comedy.
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Everything that begins as comedy ends as a cryptographic exercise.
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Everything that begins as comedy ends as a horror movie.
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What begins as comedy ends as a triumphal march, wouldn’t you say?
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Everything that begins as comedy inevitably ends as mystery.
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Everything that begins as comedy ends as a dirge in the void.
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Everything that begins as comedy ends as a comic monologue, but we aren’t laughing anymore."–From The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño -
Apr 14thPlot Lines
An infographic on the main themes among the 2011 Booker Longlist. Apparently, the best books deal with death. And I now want to read Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers just because it deals with “Homicidal Cowboy Brothers.”
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"Of all the islands he’d visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another."
–From The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño -
Invisible Stories: A man who nearly breathed himself to death
“‘In a book I once read by Peter Freuchen,’ Fanshawe writes, ‘the famous Arctic explorer describes being trapped by a blizzard in northern Greenland. Alone, his supplies dwindling, he decided to build an igloo and wait out the storm. Many days passed. Afraid, above all, that he would be attacked…
I need to start reading Paul Auster.
(Source: metaincognita)
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"What is it? I said, what’s wrong? I heard the last coin fall into the bowels of the public phone, the sound of leaves, the wind whipping dead leaves, a sound like cables tangling and untangling and then slipping apart in the void. Poetic misery."
–From The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Copyright © 2009–2012 Stephen, etc.
