Feel better, Trevor! Like the first section, I found this one strangely compelling and hypnotic, without fully being able to explain why.
More youthful escapades and flitting or wandering from short scene to short scene, peppered with glimmers of art, poetry and literature that potentially (hopefully?) hint at what might come in later sections.
I’m enjoying it so far but will admit I’m also glad that several people have suggested that it expands and grows from here. Not sure I’d want to spend 650 pages doing only this…
Can’t wait to hear everyone’s thoughts about section two!
I have bad news on my reading front. I've been sick this week and it was that kind of sickness that doesn't leave room for reading or much of anything other than lying in a heap and hoping it passes! So I'm not done with this week's section. But I will be soon, and I'll participate freely in this thread over the coming week as I get caught up!
In the meantime, please go forth! How was this last section (for now) with García Madero?
Quite honestly I think much of the sex in both week 1's reading and this week's reading is clearly exaggerated. There is a moment where Luscious Skin is describing in detail his sex with Maria and once I started thinking about it, I realized that what he described is almost surely physically impossible, so I came to the conclusion that they all embellish their sexual escapades. Rosario came 12 times in 2 hours? Like come on! Somehow Garcia Maduro went from a virgin to a real high-class Don Juan within a few weeks? And honestly that like sexually infused narrative unreliability makes the reading enjoyable—I can't imagine anything else from guys in their late teens, early 20s.
I also found this section to be fast reading, and as Paul said, strangely compelling even though I usually don't much like books all about youthful escapades. I'm also very interested to see where the story goes from here, since I've heard the rest of the book is quite different. I'm also curious to see if we get to see more of our young thus-far protagonist, as he is in the back of the Impala as we fade to black... what happens to him, if the rest is mostly Bolano and Lima, who are still quite nebulous figures?
I've also enjoyed the street-level view of Mexico DF - I've only spent time there once, but it wasn't far off from the time period in this book - just 5 years later. As a then 15yo girl, I did not have the freedom to wander that our protagonist did (the families I was living with were much stricter than the Fonts!), but I did get to live in various parts of the city.
One of the neighborhoods he mentions is Roma, which is an upper-class section of DF. Has anyone watched the excellent movie Roma, set in 1970? A year in the life of an upper-class family and their indigenous maid. Highly recommend.
Oh, and what did others think of the kind of insta-affection almost reverence Quim developed for García Maduro? Well, I think GM was as confused by it as anyone. What an odd duck Quim is. What do you think his deal is? Maybe he's just one of those people who makes instant judgements of people - he seemed to strongly dislike Pancho for equally murky reasons.
I hope you feel better quickly, Trevor. I agree that this seemed to move along quickly, I am amused by Quim's character, I agree with Paul's statement about being amused but also ready to move on, & I also agree with Elie's statement about finding it hard to suspend disbelief with how many women want to sleep with GM.
How do Mexico City bookstores stay in business with the apparent amount of shoplifting going on?
I mentioned this in the week one thread but Rey Rosa’s book Severina also revolves heavily around a book thief. Apparently it’s an issue for Guatemalan booksellers, too!
I remember that from Severina too, lol. I wonder if there are more novels from other cultures that revolve so heavily around literate characters who shoplift books.
I'm thinking about the mentions of an unreliable narrator. I haven't really thought of it that way even though GM obviously exaggerates. It feels almost like he's holding up the expected cultural contract (from the 1990s at least) of teen guys bragging about their sexual conquests, kind of like how you expect fishermen to exaggerate the size of their catch.
But, then I also thought about the fact that this first section is a diary. Was GM writing it with the plan for it to be read by others someday? If not, if it's for his consumption only, is he hiding himself from himself? If he's the only one reading it later, will he believe his writing or his memories? Or will they become one & the same? Who is his audience?
Very interesting! As I'm going through the next section, I've been wondering who it is interviewing these people - as they do seem like interviews, as they seem to be answering a prompt. And also interesting that we're still being kept at arm's length from Belano and Lima - we have lots of new POV, but none from them - or Garcia Madero for that matter.
I also did peek ahead (at least in the TOC) and notice that the interview snippets move way forward into the future from where we started (1990s) but the last section appears to be GM's diary again, picking up just one day after we left him. This makes me curious, but I haven't peeked at the actual text to figure out more - will wait to see how it all comes together!
It's really hard to introduce such a cast, even with the classic newcomer character approach, but I think he does it masterfully. There are how many real viceralists and associates and yet you can pretty much see them all so vividly. I once saw a guy in a hostel in Turkey who was exactyl how I had imagined Piel Divina (Luscious Skin is it in english?). I snapped a pic of him, sent it to a friend and with no context, just the pic, my friend said "that's Piel Divina!". Pretty interesting how for a book about poets there's been no poetry shown, just stuff like "I wrote a poem she said, read it to me Arturo asked. It's really good, he said", and you never see the poem. It help aggrandize the mythos, cause no poem would be up to the mystique that he's trying to convey. Imagine he showed the poetry they were writing and it absolutely sucked? I adore Bolaño, I've read pretty much all his books and feel his poetry is really lackluster. But reading about someone's profound love for somethingn is always fascinating.
Really interesting point about the poetry. Trevor and I have talked before about the admirable audacity of authors like Calvino and AS Byatt who inject fictional “great poetry” or “compelling bestsellers” into their own works. I agree that in this case, leaving the poems out adds to the romance and gravitas of it all.
And so fascinating to hear your thoughts on seeing the characters so vividly. I’ll admit that isn’t the case for me, but that’s certainly on me as the reader. This is something I often struggle with while reading - for some reason, my mind just doesn’t do a good job of creating characters’ physical appearances.
Great point about the poetry not being seen. I agree that it adds to the mythos, as well as allowing you to like the characters as poets, not for their skill (or lack thereof) as poets.
Sometimes I can visualize characters or settings. For this one, like Paul, I don't see the characters vividly. It's almost more of an impressionistic style painting for me -- I see it but it's hazy around the edges, giving it more of a feel than a look, if that makes sense.
I’m still enjoying this mad romp on week 2 but i’m increasingly worried that my reading of it is rather quite shallow. I’m glad someone posted last week a wiki page of who the characters were IRL because this would have gone over my head. Equally, all the Mexican literature references are lost on me. Badly need to investigate.
I think I’m mainly loving the atmosphere of the gritty Mexican streets, with their cafes and louche patrons, the leafy courtyards, it feels like the enjoyable bits in Kerouac’s On The Road. It’s a good antidote to the Irish Winter either way.
Erin, Roma was also on my mind while reading (blame my limited exposure to anything Mexican, it was that or childhood favourite Disney’s The Three Caballeros so ahem…). I was like oh! when JGM mentioned Roma North.
I kept thinking how this 1st section would have been like 5 pages if they all had mobile phones. Then i got sad thinking of all the madcap adventures we’ve all been missing out on since the advent of the cellphone.
Thank you Trevor (sending you all the healing vibes) for mentioning the paranoia thing in the previous post, i paid more attention to it this week and i can now see the pattern. I hadn’t thought further than JGM was going a little ham on the weed.
What purpose does it serve as a literary device? It’s puzzling that so many times JGM starts a diary entry by ‘something awful happened’ and then nothing really.
Does it point out to how much of an unreliable narrator he is? I keep wondering how much should we believe him? He seems either high, or drunk, or plain feverish (maybe undiagnosed paranoia too?). He also keeps contradicting himself and at times i feel like, we’re supposed to understand things when he’s not which in turn makes me feel dumb as i think i’m as clueless as he is.
I have to say, I’ve not relaxed since the Visceral Realist’s tenet was mentioned (“A momentary disconnection from a certain kind of reality”). How likely is it that it’ll all kick off into a hallucinatory fever dream?
Some bits i liked:
“When I saw her or rather when I saw that she was looking at me (the other times I’d been there she’d never looked at me), I felt as if a hand, its fingers long and delicate but very strong, was squeezing my heart. I know Lima and Belano wouldn’t approve of that image, but it fits my feelings like a glove.”
“Then everything turned into a succession of concrete acts and proper nouns and verbs, or pages from an anatomy manual scattered like flower petals, chaotically linked.”
“The problem with literature, like life, said Don Crispín, is that in the end people always turn into bastards”. A sign of things to come?
The section on the homosexual archetypes of various poets, Mexican or otherwise, makes for one hell of a reading list if I'm ever idle, the only name I actually recognize is Borges and I don't know if I've ever read *poetry* by Borges...
Other than that, in this section I got the impression that Juan is honestly just a big liar, he takes the past of least resistance and is all-to-willing to make the motions to appease someone but rarely follows through, or cares. I do think his feelings for María are genuine, though.
There's also the aspect you pointed out which is when he brings things up out of the blue and never elaborates ("No one gives the visceral ANYTHING."), like there's a lot of stuff he does and just doesn't record for one reason or another.
Probably my favorite quote this week (since I'm already here, sorry!):
"Today Rosario and I had sex from midnight until four-thirty in the morning and I clocked her again. She came ten times, I came twice. And yet the time we spent making love was longer than yesterday. Between poems (as Rosario slept), I made some calculations. If you come fifteen times in four hours, in four and a half hours you should come eighteen times, not ten. The same ratio goes for me. Are we already in a rut?" (p. 97)
You guys are making this readalong even more fun for me by helpfully quoting parts of the text where I've wondered "how did they translate that". To share in reverse...
GM usually uses the slang term 'coger' for 'have sex' rather than saying that more literally or 'make love' (hacer el amor) which he does use a few times but rarely. It's not as raunchy as f*cked, more on the level of screwed or some other term like that, but not as proper/clinical as 'had sex' - it's very much slang.
In Spain, 'coger' is a completely non-sexual verb meaning 'to catch or grab', and I was blissfully aware of its more colorful meaning in the Americas till recently when chatting with more diverse Spanish speakers. Yet I notice that GM does also use the verb in its original meaning as well, as he says 'cogió un taxi' - or 'I caught a taxi'. So, I guess maybe I don't have to worry so much if I slip up (as that's how I'd normally use it - to say to catch a bus/taxi).
Very interesting (and fun to think about how slang can make seemingly innocent phrases have a whole new meaning)! Keep posting this stuff, my knowledge of Spanish is embarrassing and I don't have the book in its native language:)
I loved popping into the bookstores of Mexico City. I would love to go into The Rebeca Nodier bookstore and be greeted by the blind old lady (“I’m Rebeca Nodier” who then asks the name of the “lover of literature she has the pleasure of meeting”.) I also think Quim is such a great character, Bolano has a fascination with madness and Quim is our representative here. Looking forward to meeting him in the next section -this time getting into his perspective.
My wife and I were recently in Puerto Rico and found a neighborhood full of bookstores covered in murals so that was fresh in my mind during this section. Had the same thought about the Rebecca Nodier bookstore - I love Bolano’s way of always returning to books.
I love Quim too. But haven't we left him behind in DF? I didn't think we'd be seeing him in the next section? Just his car, lol.
Oh, wait, did you mean Belano as in Arturo and that's whose perspective we'll get? I thought first you were referring to Bolaño as in Roberto the author? Are you thinking Belano the character is a stand-in for Bolaño the author? I've been wondering if that was the case myself, but we've seen so little of A. Belano so far, it's hard to tell.
No we are not done with Quim, he will be back along with some others from this section. And no I meant Quims perspective, the next section we will get to inhabit what feels like a hundred different characters.
For Belano yes I think Bolano once even called him his alter-ego. A lot of the personal details line up and Ulises is based off of his best friend Mario Santiago.
The following is an interesting analysis of “Ernesto San Epifanio's catalogue of world literary faggotry” by David Kurnick from his book The Savage Detectives Reread:
“Juan records that, toward the end of the previous night's party at Catalina O'Hara's, Ernesto began to hold forth about the "the vast ocean of poetry," inside of which "he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. …Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet." No arguments there. But when the indisputably heterosexual Pablo Neruda is labeled an exemplary "queer," we move to shakier ground. The designations that immediately follow-Blake was a faggot, Paz a queer-confirm that Ernesto is using the terms in other than workaday ways.
The pattern that emerges is easier to see in Spanish. Bolaño's terms are maricón and marica, words whose very orthographic and semantic closeness is part of the joke. Slang dictionaries tend to say that the former is a derogatory term for a gay man, the latter a slur for an effeminate one. There's of course plenty of room for overlap here: the border between homo- and effeminophobia is a heavily trafficked and shifting one. And at a semantic level the distinction is even more subtle. Marica is an insulting diminutive of the name María (not far, then, from the antiquated American gay slang term "Mary"). So the distinction between maricón and marica might be a bit like the difference between "faggot" and "faggy”.
In Ernesto's view, at any rate, this latter category is the term of honor. Look again at the exemplary names and you see that the opposition is about access to cultural and state power: Whitman (the jobbing journalist, "one of the roughs," the singer of the open road) is a maricón; Neruda (ambassador, Nobel winner) a marica; Blake (printmaker, Swedenborgian, possible lunatic) is a maricón; Paz (ambassador, Nobel winner) a marica. The maricones are the elect, the band apart, the true believers; the maricas are the cozy, the praised, the laureates.”
LOL, I was wondering how the heck all those shades of gay references in the original were possibly translated. I guess in neither language is there a shortage! But I'm not sure the translation you gave got the shading right. In Spanish, as you point out, most of them are riffs on mari- Ernesto's list is: maricón, marica, mariquitas, locas, bujarrones, mariposas, ninfos and filenos. The 'ón' ending is definitely more masculine than the 'a', and the 'ita' is both feminine and diminutive. "Mariposa" literally means "butterfly" so is a whole 'nother riff on the theme. But 'loca' just means 'crazy' and 'bujarrón' if I look it up means 'fool' but also 'poof', which is also a gay term in English and I think matches the intent here much better than the translation given above.
Your last paragraph I think is spot on with where he's going with the more masculine but still gay maricón and the more effeminate sounding marica, and how he considers the former the term of honor. Faggot and queer do not carry that intrinsic differentiation in the same way imho, but of course actually in English those meanings have shifted quite a bit since the '70s. Queer is now an umbrella term. A modern translation of 'maricón' in this particular context (not overall) might be "Bear" - the gay men who present manly.
Here are the weekly reading threads. I'll update this as they go up.
-Preliminary Thread: https://mookse.substack.com/p/the-savage-detectives-preliminary/comments
-Week 1: https://mookse.substack.com/p/week-1-the-savage-detectives-readalong/comments
-Week 2: https://mookse.substack.com/p/week-2-the-savage-detectives-readalong/comments
-Week 3: https://mookse.substack.com/p/week-3-the-savage-detectives-readalong/comments
-Week 4: https://mookse.substack.com/p/week-4-the-savage-detectives-readalong/comments
Feel better, Trevor! Like the first section, I found this one strangely compelling and hypnotic, without fully being able to explain why.
More youthful escapades and flitting or wandering from short scene to short scene, peppered with glimmers of art, poetry and literature that potentially (hopefully?) hint at what might come in later sections.
I’m enjoying it so far but will admit I’m also glad that several people have suggested that it expands and grows from here. Not sure I’d want to spend 650 pages doing only this…
Can’t wait to hear everyone’s thoughts about section two!
I have bad news on my reading front. I've been sick this week and it was that kind of sickness that doesn't leave room for reading or much of anything other than lying in a heap and hoping it passes! So I'm not done with this week's section. But I will be soon, and I'll participate freely in this thread over the coming week as I get caught up!
In the meantime, please go forth! How was this last section (for now) with García Madero?
I’m finding it really, really hard to suspend my disbelief about the amount of women apparently wanting to sleep with García Maduro…
I know! Also, is anyone using birth control? Seems unlikely that there wouldn't be little GM's on the way by now with all the 'cogiendo' going on.
Quite honestly I think much of the sex in both week 1's reading and this week's reading is clearly exaggerated. There is a moment where Luscious Skin is describing in detail his sex with Maria and once I started thinking about it, I realized that what he described is almost surely physically impossible, so I came to the conclusion that they all embellish their sexual escapades. Rosario came 12 times in 2 hours? Like come on! Somehow Garcia Maduro went from a virgin to a real high-class Don Juan within a few weeks? And honestly that like sexually infused narrative unreliability makes the reading enjoyable—I can't imagine anything else from guys in their late teens, early 20s.
Totally agree - you gave a woman five (imperceptible) orgasms while losing your virginity? Sure. And Bolano absolutely means it that way!
Yeah - it reads a bit like the fantasy of a horny teenager who's watched a bit too much porn.
Hope you feel better soon, Trevor!
I also found this section to be fast reading, and as Paul said, strangely compelling even though I usually don't much like books all about youthful escapades. I'm also very interested to see where the story goes from here, since I've heard the rest of the book is quite different. I'm also curious to see if we get to see more of our young thus-far protagonist, as he is in the back of the Impala as we fade to black... what happens to him, if the rest is mostly Bolano and Lima, who are still quite nebulous figures?
I've also enjoyed the street-level view of Mexico DF - I've only spent time there once, but it wasn't far off from the time period in this book - just 5 years later. As a then 15yo girl, I did not have the freedom to wander that our protagonist did (the families I was living with were much stricter than the Fonts!), but I did get to live in various parts of the city.
One of the neighborhoods he mentions is Roma, which is an upper-class section of DF. Has anyone watched the excellent movie Roma, set in 1970? A year in the life of an upper-class family and their indigenous maid. Highly recommend.
Oh, and what did others think of the kind of insta-affection almost reverence Quim developed for García Maduro? Well, I think GM was as confused by it as anyone. What an odd duck Quim is. What do you think his deal is? Maybe he's just one of those people who makes instant judgements of people - he seemed to strongly dislike Pancho for equally murky reasons.
I really enjoyed Roma. Thanks for making the connection with this section! Now I may just have to rewatch it…
Great call on Roma, fantastic film! Will have to rewatch now.
I hope you feel better quickly, Trevor. I agree that this seemed to move along quickly, I am amused by Quim's character, I agree with Paul's statement about being amused but also ready to move on, & I also agree with Elie's statement about finding it hard to suspend disbelief with how many women want to sleep with GM.
How do Mexico City bookstores stay in business with the apparent amount of shoplifting going on?
I mentioned this in the week one thread but Rey Rosa’s book Severina also revolves heavily around a book thief. Apparently it’s an issue for Guatemalan booksellers, too!
I remember that from Severina too, lol. I wonder if there are more novels from other cultures that revolve so heavily around literate characters who shoplift books.
I'm thinking about the mentions of an unreliable narrator. I haven't really thought of it that way even though GM obviously exaggerates. It feels almost like he's holding up the expected cultural contract (from the 1990s at least) of teen guys bragging about their sexual conquests, kind of like how you expect fishermen to exaggerate the size of their catch.
But, then I also thought about the fact that this first section is a diary. Was GM writing it with the plan for it to be read by others someday? If not, if it's for his consumption only, is he hiding himself from himself? If he's the only one reading it later, will he believe his writing or his memories? Or will they become one & the same? Who is his audience?
Keep that question in the back burner, cause "who is the audience?" is one of the quintessential things in the novel
Very interesting! As I'm going through the next section, I've been wondering who it is interviewing these people - as they do seem like interviews, as they seem to be answering a prompt. And also interesting that we're still being kept at arm's length from Belano and Lima - we have lots of new POV, but none from them - or Garcia Madero for that matter.
I also did peek ahead (at least in the TOC) and notice that the interview snippets move way forward into the future from where we started (1990s) but the last section appears to be GM's diary again, picking up just one day after we left him. This makes me curious, but I haven't peeked at the actual text to figure out more - will wait to see how it all comes together!
It's really hard to introduce such a cast, even with the classic newcomer character approach, but I think he does it masterfully. There are how many real viceralists and associates and yet you can pretty much see them all so vividly. I once saw a guy in a hostel in Turkey who was exactyl how I had imagined Piel Divina (Luscious Skin is it in english?). I snapped a pic of him, sent it to a friend and with no context, just the pic, my friend said "that's Piel Divina!". Pretty interesting how for a book about poets there's been no poetry shown, just stuff like "I wrote a poem she said, read it to me Arturo asked. It's really good, he said", and you never see the poem. It help aggrandize the mythos, cause no poem would be up to the mystique that he's trying to convey. Imagine he showed the poetry they were writing and it absolutely sucked? I adore Bolaño, I've read pretty much all his books and feel his poetry is really lackluster. But reading about someone's profound love for somethingn is always fascinating.
Really interesting point about the poetry. Trevor and I have talked before about the admirable audacity of authors like Calvino and AS Byatt who inject fictional “great poetry” or “compelling bestsellers” into their own works. I agree that in this case, leaving the poems out adds to the romance and gravitas of it all.
And so fascinating to hear your thoughts on seeing the characters so vividly. I’ll admit that isn’t the case for me, but that’s certainly on me as the reader. This is something I often struggle with while reading - for some reason, my mind just doesn’t do a good job of creating characters’ physical appearances.
Great point about the poetry not being seen. I agree that it adds to the mythos, as well as allowing you to like the characters as poets, not for their skill (or lack thereof) as poets.
Sometimes I can visualize characters or settings. For this one, like Paul, I don't see the characters vividly. It's almost more of an impressionistic style painting for me -- I see it but it's hazy around the edges, giving it more of a feel than a look, if that makes sense.
I’m still enjoying this mad romp on week 2 but i’m increasingly worried that my reading of it is rather quite shallow. I’m glad someone posted last week a wiki page of who the characters were IRL because this would have gone over my head. Equally, all the Mexican literature references are lost on me. Badly need to investigate.
I think I’m mainly loving the atmosphere of the gritty Mexican streets, with their cafes and louche patrons, the leafy courtyards, it feels like the enjoyable bits in Kerouac’s On The Road. It’s a good antidote to the Irish Winter either way.
Erin, Roma was also on my mind while reading (blame my limited exposure to anything Mexican, it was that or childhood favourite Disney’s The Three Caballeros so ahem…). I was like oh! when JGM mentioned Roma North.
I kept thinking how this 1st section would have been like 5 pages if they all had mobile phones. Then i got sad thinking of all the madcap adventures we’ve all been missing out on since the advent of the cellphone.
Thank you Trevor (sending you all the healing vibes) for mentioning the paranoia thing in the previous post, i paid more attention to it this week and i can now see the pattern. I hadn’t thought further than JGM was going a little ham on the weed.
What purpose does it serve as a literary device? It’s puzzling that so many times JGM starts a diary entry by ‘something awful happened’ and then nothing really.
Does it point out to how much of an unreliable narrator he is? I keep wondering how much should we believe him? He seems either high, or drunk, or plain feverish (maybe undiagnosed paranoia too?). He also keeps contradicting himself and at times i feel like, we’re supposed to understand things when he’s not which in turn makes me feel dumb as i think i’m as clueless as he is.
I have to say, I’ve not relaxed since the Visceral Realist’s tenet was mentioned (“A momentary disconnection from a certain kind of reality”). How likely is it that it’ll all kick off into a hallucinatory fever dream?
Some bits i liked:
“When I saw her or rather when I saw that she was looking at me (the other times I’d been there she’d never looked at me), I felt as if a hand, its fingers long and delicate but very strong, was squeezing my heart. I know Lima and Belano wouldn’t approve of that image, but it fits my feelings like a glove.”
“Then everything turned into a succession of concrete acts and proper nouns and verbs, or pages from an anatomy manual scattered like flower petals, chaotically linked.”
“The problem with literature, like life, said Don Crispín, is that in the end people always turn into bastards”. A sign of things to come?
It also reminds me of On The Road, in the way that it's written and the way it demands to be read. I can't imagine reading this slowly.
The section on the homosexual archetypes of various poets, Mexican or otherwise, makes for one hell of a reading list if I'm ever idle, the only name I actually recognize is Borges and I don't know if I've ever read *poetry* by Borges...
Other than that, in this section I got the impression that Juan is honestly just a big liar, he takes the past of least resistance and is all-to-willing to make the motions to appease someone but rarely follows through, or cares. I do think his feelings for María are genuine, though.
There's also the aspect you pointed out which is when he brings things up out of the blue and never elaborates ("No one gives the visceral ANYTHING."), like there's a lot of stuff he does and just doesn't record for one reason or another.
Probably my favorite quote this week (since I'm already here, sorry!):
"Today Rosario and I had sex from midnight until four-thirty in the morning and I clocked her again. She came ten times, I came twice. And yet the time we spent making love was longer than yesterday. Between poems (as Rosario slept), I made some calculations. If you come fifteen times in four hours, in four and a half hours you should come eighteen times, not ten. The same ratio goes for me. Are we already in a rut?" (p. 97)
You guys are making this readalong even more fun for me by helpfully quoting parts of the text where I've wondered "how did they translate that". To share in reverse...
GM usually uses the slang term 'coger' for 'have sex' rather than saying that more literally or 'make love' (hacer el amor) which he does use a few times but rarely. It's not as raunchy as f*cked, more on the level of screwed or some other term like that, but not as proper/clinical as 'had sex' - it's very much slang.
In Spain, 'coger' is a completely non-sexual verb meaning 'to catch or grab', and I was blissfully aware of its more colorful meaning in the Americas till recently when chatting with more diverse Spanish speakers. Yet I notice that GM does also use the verb in its original meaning as well, as he says 'cogió un taxi' - or 'I caught a taxi'. So, I guess maybe I don't have to worry so much if I slip up (as that's how I'd normally use it - to say to catch a bus/taxi).
Very interesting (and fun to think about how slang can make seemingly innocent phrases have a whole new meaning)! Keep posting this stuff, my knowledge of Spanish is embarrassing and I don't have the book in its native language:)
Haha!
I loved popping into the bookstores of Mexico City. I would love to go into The Rebeca Nodier bookstore and be greeted by the blind old lady (“I’m Rebeca Nodier” who then asks the name of the “lover of literature she has the pleasure of meeting”.) I also think Quim is such a great character, Bolano has a fascination with madness and Quim is our representative here. Looking forward to meeting him in the next section -this time getting into his perspective.
My wife and I were recently in Puerto Rico and found a neighborhood full of bookstores covered in murals so that was fresh in my mind during this section. Had the same thought about the Rebecca Nodier bookstore - I love Bolano’s way of always returning to books.
I love Quim too. But haven't we left him behind in DF? I didn't think we'd be seeing him in the next section? Just his car, lol.
Oh, wait, did you mean Belano as in Arturo and that's whose perspective we'll get? I thought first you were referring to Bolaño as in Roberto the author? Are you thinking Belano the character is a stand-in for Bolaño the author? I've been wondering if that was the case myself, but we've seen so little of A. Belano so far, it's hard to tell.
That’s definitely my understanding from what I’ve read about it in the intro and elsewhere.
No we are not done with Quim, he will be back along with some others from this section. And no I meant Quims perspective, the next section we will get to inhabit what feels like a hundred different characters.
Thanks for the clarification! I'm glad he's not going to just fade away!
For Belano yes I think Bolano once even called him his alter-ego. A lot of the personal details line up and Ulises is based off of his best friend Mario Santiago.
The following is an interesting analysis of “Ernesto San Epifanio's catalogue of world literary faggotry” by David Kurnick from his book The Savage Detectives Reread:
“Juan records that, toward the end of the previous night's party at Catalina O'Hara's, Ernesto began to hold forth about the "the vast ocean of poetry," inside of which "he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. …Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet." No arguments there. But when the indisputably heterosexual Pablo Neruda is labeled an exemplary "queer," we move to shakier ground. The designations that immediately follow-Blake was a faggot, Paz a queer-confirm that Ernesto is using the terms in other than workaday ways.
The pattern that emerges is easier to see in Spanish. Bolaño's terms are maricón and marica, words whose very orthographic and semantic closeness is part of the joke. Slang dictionaries tend to say that the former is a derogatory term for a gay man, the latter a slur for an effeminate one. There's of course plenty of room for overlap here: the border between homo- and effeminophobia is a heavily trafficked and shifting one. And at a semantic level the distinction is even more subtle. Marica is an insulting diminutive of the name María (not far, then, from the antiquated American gay slang term "Mary"). So the distinction between maricón and marica might be a bit like the difference between "faggot" and "faggy”.
In Ernesto's view, at any rate, this latter category is the term of honor. Look again at the exemplary names and you see that the opposition is about access to cultural and state power: Whitman (the jobbing journalist, "one of the roughs," the singer of the open road) is a maricón; Neruda (ambassador, Nobel winner) a marica; Blake (printmaker, Swedenborgian, possible lunatic) is a maricón; Paz (ambassador, Nobel winner) a marica. The maricones are the elect, the band apart, the true believers; the maricas are the cozy, the praised, the laureates.”
LOL, I was wondering how the heck all those shades of gay references in the original were possibly translated. I guess in neither language is there a shortage! But I'm not sure the translation you gave got the shading right. In Spanish, as you point out, most of them are riffs on mari- Ernesto's list is: maricón, marica, mariquitas, locas, bujarrones, mariposas, ninfos and filenos. The 'ón' ending is definitely more masculine than the 'a', and the 'ita' is both feminine and diminutive. "Mariposa" literally means "butterfly" so is a whole 'nother riff on the theme. But 'loca' just means 'crazy' and 'bujarrón' if I look it up means 'fool' but also 'poof', which is also a gay term in English and I think matches the intent here much better than the translation given above.
Your last paragraph I think is spot on with where he's going with the more masculine but still gay maricón and the more effeminate sounding marica, and how he considers the former the term of honor. Faggot and queer do not carry that intrinsic differentiation in the same way imho, but of course actually in English those meanings have shifted quite a bit since the '70s. Queer is now an umbrella term. A modern translation of 'maricón' in this particular context (not overall) might be "Bear" - the gay men who present manly.