I bought this while living in Brooklyn, and read it mostly on the subway. At those time I would take the dust jacket off and leave it in my bookshelf to look proper, and over time the hard cover would become stained and shabby with the sweat and oils from my fingers and palms. I even wrote about this phenomena over at my oldest blog, complete with pictures of the damage.
I had read a review of this book, and of Roberto Bolanyo. He'd been a Chilean poet and author and had moved to Mexico and started a poetry movement. This book mirrors that scenario to a degree. The whole idea behind the novel, and its execution piqued my interest, and I went out and got it.
It starts out like a seventies coming-of-age/soft-core film, with a main character out writing poetry and trying get laid. He tries to ally himself with two older poets who have started a movement, one Chilean and one Mexican, and they have big plans: they plan on kidnapping Octavio Paz. There is so much discussion of seventies era new-world Latin American poets and poetry that it'll blow your mind. You don't really have to know anything about them to enjoy the story, but if you were familiar with it, the references would be awesome.
This section ends abruptly, on the eve of a big action set piece. The next two-thirds of the book is a series of interviews with folks who were tertiary characters in the opening section, and all taking place fifteen to twenty-five years later. Through the interviews the ramifications of the actions that hadn't occurred when the first section stopped are starkly apparent. How everybody reacted and the aftermath played over the years, the disappointment and regret, all laid bare.
A few things, though: the interviewers are never fully defined or introduced, and the main character from the first section, is mentioned maybe once during the long interview section, and that's way near the end.
When the interviews are over, and a couple of decades of living on the margins of society, as many non-famous poets are wont to do, are painted for the reader, the first section starts up again, right where it left off, and now it's like a seventies action movie. The events that are being investigated throughout the middle of the book are witnessed, and we see how events turned into anecdotes and then turned into stories.
It really is a good work, a nice work of fiction. I looked into but haven't yet procured Bolanyo's so-called masterpiece, the mysteriously titled 2666, a 900-page novel split in five sections and deal with European literature critics and Mexican prostitute murders, and they are all connected. In reading a review of 2666, the names of some of my favorite writers get mentioned (Denis Johnson and Murakami) and a few writers I've heard of but haven't yet gotten into (Don DeLillo, James Ellroy).
If you're looking for something else, somewhere to start in the newly discovered and ever-growing market of Spanish writing translated into English, The Savage Detectives would probably be a good start.
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