Wow! Here we are at the. end of Part 2, with just one relatively short section left! Are you all excited to get back to our hero from Part 1?
Well, I won’t get ahead of myself. I am actually going to miss these chapters with their multiplicity of voices and perspectives. As I’ve said before: at first, it was disorienting and I wasn’t sure if anything was being constructed, but as we’ve gone on I’ve really enjoyed this flawed (deliberately, surely) way of presenting our main characters across two decades.
I also really appreciated that in this section we got some perspective (still second-hand) of Octavio Paz. Is there a reason, do you suppose, that Belano, Lima, Tinajero, and now Paz are presented in this way?
I apologize that this post is going up much later in the day, but I hope you’ll all find a bit of time to share your thoughts!
I just wanted to add a comment before tomorrow's discussion when we all will have finished the novel. I am about to head to a local beach bar to indulge in a few happy hour drinks before I come home to what will be an early bedtime, before rising in the early AM to finish The Savage Detectives.. It is at this moment that I am already anticipating the sense of loss that comes from completing an enjoyable book and it is felt stronger since I will also miss the comments shared by everyone in the group. Thankfully, there are so many more books to enjoy and I will get to read some of them with some of you whom I know, but for those of you I do not know from other activities, I do hope we cross reading paths in the future. Now on to some suicide tequila!
Trevor wrote, "I also really appreciated that in this section we got some perspective (still second-hand) of Octavio Paz. Is there a reason, do you suppose, that Belano, Lima, Tinajero, and now Paz are presented in this way?"
I haven't given it enough thought, but I think the approach humanizes them, takes them from legendary status.
First, something I couldn't comment the other week , a tattoo a friend of mine has: https://imgur.com/a/pXqx06H
And for the big question: who’s doing the interviews and why? Many people in the readalong have noticed the date discrepancies, so that’s one thing, but a tiny detail I can’t get over: when the self proclaimed expert on RV is interviewed he says that he’s never heard of Madero, so it’s likely Madero himself is doing the interviews, obsessed with his youth or whatever might have happened and this is his way of atoning. Cesárea wasn’t his obsession like it was for the other poets, but still. But the guy who could see numbers and wins the lottery calls the interviewer Belano, and I don’t know if it was a slip on Bolaño and his editor's part, as in he changed his mind midway through and forgot, or the interviewers are several people. The lawyer that speaks in latin hates Belano’s guts, there’s no way he’d accept being interviewed by him, so this is the only clue I feel could support that theory, although it doesn’t make a lot of sense that Belano would interview people so long after the events. Besides, how would he frame it? “I’m gonna ask you about your relationship to me / us, but talk about me in the third person, not the second”? They are the detectives looking for Cesárea, the interviewer/s is/are the detectives looking for them, we are the detectives trying to piece everything together.
I always look forward to coming to this comment section after i read the weekly pages. It genuinely makes me happy to read what you all have enjoyed, it makes me stop and rethink things i’ve read during the week.
But i also can’t help feeling a little disappointed with myself for not finding the same enjoyment on my own.
Last week, I nearly convulsed out of boredom when the duel scene switched to focussing on a dirty hankie but reading your enjoyment helps me changing my mindset a bit.
I think, in hindsight, I can conceptually see the slapstickness of it but I can’t say that it works for me *while* reading it. I don’t know if it’s a cultural difference or the translation or that I’m just a humourless droid.
I think ultimately Bolaño’s tendency to load up his narrative with an inane amount of seemingly useless details is doing my head in a bit. Or when he painstakingly describes a scene then backtracks by saying ‘maybe it didn’t happen that way, or maybe I misheard it or dreamt it’ it properly drives me up the wall. Like why mate?
I think what really frustrates me is that I know he’s obviously capable of telling a good yarn, I was really engaged by the Valley-of-the-dolls-esque section of Edith Oster for instance (someone mentioned she was the girl who broke his heart but then he calls her the Andalusian girl, is that the same woman? Did we even meet her?).
Some sections do work for me but mostly it still feels like a slog, which I didn’t expect to feel in the latest stages of the novel. I have to say I’m happy we’re going back to the diary form next week, I missed that narration style.
I was told that the pay off was really good, so I’m hoping this will be all worth it.
From what I have heard, Bolaño created many myths about his own life. Some were partially true others seem to be total fabrications. Some examples are that he was a habitual drug user and another was that he was jailed during during Pinochet’s coup and was only released because his jailers were childhood friends. At the beginning of chapter 25, when Jacobo was in disbelief about the duel story, I was struck by the narrator not believing the duel story. So many layers upon layers with this book. Seems so very meta to have a narrator not believe a story that was told from multiple perspectives, so I am guessing we should believe the duel actually happened.
Just finished up. Some of the later parts of Belano's life were obscure and kind of confusing to me, which is unfortunate considering once Lima fades into obscurity in Mexico City, and all the other visceral realists just sort of settled into their lives, Bolano is all that's left. I don't even know if he's carrying that Visceral Realist torch in Spain, but he becomes almost the sole focus of the interviews aside from a couple breaks.
How you interpret his fate seems up to how you interpreted him as a person. I saw him as a generally good-intentioned guy, with mental health issues (depression?), who as time went on lost sight of what he actually wanted - something that happens to most of us as time wears us out. The myriad of other health problems had to have worn him down, too. As a result he kind of floated around here and there just getting by.
In Africa, it seems he reached some kind of ephiphany, or understanding of himself, but here's where I got a bit of a disconnect: Belano said "...I wanted to die, but I realized it was better not to." Urenda then follows this with "Only then did I fully understand that Lopez Lobo was going to go with the soldiers the next day, not the civilians, and that Belano wasn't going to let him die alone."
Honestly, it seems perfectly in character for Belano to stick by someone until the bitter end, but why choose to join someone in their suicide if you realize it's better to live? I'd be interested to hear how other people interpreted Belano's fate!
I also didn't quite grasp the significance of the final Salvatierra section. I looked up Simonel and all I found was that it could be a variant of Simon (of course), from Shimeon, Hebrew for "one who harkens." But if that's what it is, I still don't quite get it. Insight on that would be nice to see too.
I fell behind by one week’s section because of a conference I was preparing for so I will try to catch up in the next day or so! Have missed the characters a lot, it’s so easy to get attached to them.
I just wanted to add a comment before tomorrow's discussion when we all will have finished the novel. I am about to head to a local beach bar to indulge in a few happy hour drinks before I come home to what will be an early bedtime, before rising in the early AM to finish The Savage Detectives.. It is at this moment that I am already anticipating the sense of loss that comes from completing an enjoyable book and it is felt stronger since I will also miss the comments shared by everyone in the group. Thankfully, there are so many more books to enjoy and I will get to read some of them with some of you whom I know, but for those of you I do not know from other activities, I do hope we cross reading paths in the future. Now on to some suicide tequila!
Trevor wrote, "I also really appreciated that in this section we got some perspective (still second-hand) of Octavio Paz. Is there a reason, do you suppose, that Belano, Lima, Tinajero, and now Paz are presented in this way?"
I haven't given it enough thought, but I think the approach humanizes them, takes them from legendary status.
First, something I couldn't comment the other week , a tattoo a friend of mine has: https://imgur.com/a/pXqx06H
And for the big question: who’s doing the interviews and why? Many people in the readalong have noticed the date discrepancies, so that’s one thing, but a tiny detail I can’t get over: when the self proclaimed expert on RV is interviewed he says that he’s never heard of Madero, so it’s likely Madero himself is doing the interviews, obsessed with his youth or whatever might have happened and this is his way of atoning. Cesárea wasn’t his obsession like it was for the other poets, but still. But the guy who could see numbers and wins the lottery calls the interviewer Belano, and I don’t know if it was a slip on Bolaño and his editor's part, as in he changed his mind midway through and forgot, or the interviewers are several people. The lawyer that speaks in latin hates Belano’s guts, there’s no way he’d accept being interviewed by him, so this is the only clue I feel could support that theory, although it doesn’t make a lot of sense that Belano would interview people so long after the events. Besides, how would he frame it? “I’m gonna ask you about your relationship to me / us, but talk about me in the third person, not the second”? They are the detectives looking for Cesárea, the interviewer/s is/are the detectives looking for them, we are the detectives trying to piece everything together.
I always look forward to coming to this comment section after i read the weekly pages. It genuinely makes me happy to read what you all have enjoyed, it makes me stop and rethink things i’ve read during the week.
But i also can’t help feeling a little disappointed with myself for not finding the same enjoyment on my own.
Last week, I nearly convulsed out of boredom when the duel scene switched to focussing on a dirty hankie but reading your enjoyment helps me changing my mindset a bit.
I think, in hindsight, I can conceptually see the slapstickness of it but I can’t say that it works for me *while* reading it. I don’t know if it’s a cultural difference or the translation or that I’m just a humourless droid.
I think ultimately Bolaño’s tendency to load up his narrative with an inane amount of seemingly useless details is doing my head in a bit. Or when he painstakingly describes a scene then backtracks by saying ‘maybe it didn’t happen that way, or maybe I misheard it or dreamt it’ it properly drives me up the wall. Like why mate?
I think what really frustrates me is that I know he’s obviously capable of telling a good yarn, I was really engaged by the Valley-of-the-dolls-esque section of Edith Oster for instance (someone mentioned she was the girl who broke his heart but then he calls her the Andalusian girl, is that the same woman? Did we even meet her?).
Some sections do work for me but mostly it still feels like a slog, which I didn’t expect to feel in the latest stages of the novel. I have to say I’m happy we’re going back to the diary form next week, I missed that narration style.
I was told that the pay off was really good, so I’m hoping this will be all worth it.
From what I have heard, Bolaño created many myths about his own life. Some were partially true others seem to be total fabrications. Some examples are that he was a habitual drug user and another was that he was jailed during during Pinochet’s coup and was only released because his jailers were childhood friends. At the beginning of chapter 25, when Jacobo was in disbelief about the duel story, I was struck by the narrator not believing the duel story. So many layers upon layers with this book. Seems so very meta to have a narrator not believe a story that was told from multiple perspectives, so I am guessing we should believe the duel actually happened.
Just finished up. Some of the later parts of Belano's life were obscure and kind of confusing to me, which is unfortunate considering once Lima fades into obscurity in Mexico City, and all the other visceral realists just sort of settled into their lives, Bolano is all that's left. I don't even know if he's carrying that Visceral Realist torch in Spain, but he becomes almost the sole focus of the interviews aside from a couple breaks.
How you interpret his fate seems up to how you interpreted him as a person. I saw him as a generally good-intentioned guy, with mental health issues (depression?), who as time went on lost sight of what he actually wanted - something that happens to most of us as time wears us out. The myriad of other health problems had to have worn him down, too. As a result he kind of floated around here and there just getting by.
In Africa, it seems he reached some kind of ephiphany, or understanding of himself, but here's where I got a bit of a disconnect: Belano said "...I wanted to die, but I realized it was better not to." Urenda then follows this with "Only then did I fully understand that Lopez Lobo was going to go with the soldiers the next day, not the civilians, and that Belano wasn't going to let him die alone."
Honestly, it seems perfectly in character for Belano to stick by someone until the bitter end, but why choose to join someone in their suicide if you realize it's better to live? I'd be interested to hear how other people interpreted Belano's fate!
I also didn't quite grasp the significance of the final Salvatierra section. I looked up Simonel and all I found was that it could be a variant of Simon (of course), from Shimeon, Hebrew for "one who harkens." But if that's what it is, I still don't quite get it. Insight on that would be nice to see too.
I fell behind by one week’s section because of a conference I was preparing for so I will try to catch up in the next day or so! Have missed the characters a lot, it’s so easy to get attached to them.