And just like that, this is all done. I want to thank Sam Moon for his lovely comment he left on last week’s post about how enjoyable it has been to get to know all of you and read your thoughts everything. I have read all Bolaño’s works now. I number a few of them among my favorites. And yet, as I read The Savage Detectives every week I wondered if I’d have finished it if it weren’t for you all. I have learned so much!
But there’s no need for this top post to be all about an ending. This is the beginning of the first times we can discuss the book from start to finish with no worries about spoilers!
I’ve read the book 4 or 5 times in the past 17 years, and with it I have learned to love rereads, not focusing on plot and spoilers but rather how a book is structured, events foreshadowed and ultimately how inevitable they seem when a book is well planned and written. Knowing that Cesárea dies because of them sheds a new light on the middle part: they aren’t traveling because they are vagabond, they are doing it to literally go to the end of the world in search for atonement, or death. Hence the absurd duel in the beach, Nicaragua, Africa (Belano says he wants to die because of something he lost), even the name of the mezcal they drink in the night that anchors the interviews (“Mezcal Los Suicidas, curious name, isn’t it?”). Something broke inside them so profoundly Belano becomes asexual, a teetotaler.
Now, Auxilio Lacouture’s story is retold in the nouvelle Amulet, almost verbatim. Bolaño mentions Juárez Street in Santa Teresa, so he already had the idea of fictionalizing Ciudad Juárez as Santa Teresa in 2666. And speaking of those books, without spoiling much, there’s a quote in Detectives that goes "And Cesárea said something about days to come, although the teacher imagined that if Cesárea had spent time on that senseless plan it was simply because she lived such a lonely life. But Cesárea spoke of times to come and the teacher, to change the subject, asked her what times she meant and when they would be. And Cesárea named a date, sometime around the year 2600. Two thousand six hundred and something. And then, when the teacher couldn’t help but laugh at such a random date, a smothered little laugh that could scarcely be heard, Cesárea laughed again, although this time the thunder of her laughter remained within the confines of her own room." There’s another one in Amulet that goes “...and then we began to walk along Guerrero avenue, they a little slower than before, me a little faster than before, the Guerrero looks above all like a cemetery, but not a cemetery from 1974, nor a cemetery from 1968, nor a cemetery from 1975, but like a cemetery from the year 2666, a cemetery forgotten underneath a dead or unborn eyelid, the dispassioned aquosities of an eye that for wanting to forget something has ended up forgetting everything”.
Auxilio is a larger than life writer, like Arcimboldi in 2666 or Cesárea in SD, and coincidentally she says she’s the mother of mexican poetry although she’s childless, Cesárea means assisted birth, and the RV are their kids in a way. Ernesto San Epifanio shows up in Amulet, and so does Belano, who is a thinly veiled alter ego of Bolaño. He has a pessimism that goes right across all of his works: his knowledge as a latin american (not as a chilean, not as a mexican) that everything is fucked up everywhere and is not likely to get better, and this pessimism as opposed to the frivolity or ridiculousness of life. I won't say he is a pessimist necessarily, but I feel it's definitely one of his big themes, the meaninglessness of everything/a lot of things.
See, for instance, how 2666 is a brutal, unrelenting book in the crimes part, but has an absolutely frivolous first part, with (to me) frivolous people and the main concern being a threesome, and ends on a completely trivial note (the ice cream thing). Being posthumous, I don't know if that's the ending or order of stories that he would've wanted, maybe I place such a strong meaning to the ice cream being the ending and he wouldn't have wanted it.
But anyway, on to what I realized, a little fan theory or just a thought: Auxilio sees all of her life at once in the bathroom stall, she literally remembers the future, so what if the cemetery in 2666 is where she is buried? She, the mother of poetry, the mother of Arturo Belano -who is part of the "they" in that quote, he's walking with her- dead and buried by that time and along her everyone else, and all of literature with them. If this is the case, does 2666 mean the death of literature? it would go well with this overarching pessimism of his works. I just feel that it's such a tiny and forgettable quote in a minor novel of his, that if he revisited it for his magnum opus it had to mean something. And yeah, reading it with no context you see he mentions a cemetery, sounds apocalyptic and creepy, but if you consider it to be a cemetery where the mother of mexican poetry, his own symbolical mother is buried, I feel it gains a new level of meaning.
I think the core statement of 2666 can be found in this quote: “What a sad paradox, Amalfitano thought. Nowadays not even the illustrated pharmacists dare to tackle the big works, imperfect, torrential, the ones that open way to the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what is the same: they want to see the great masters in sessions of fencing training, but don't want to know anything with real combats, where the great masters fight against that, that something that frightens us all, that something that scares us and confronts us, and there's blood and mortal wounds and stench”.
I love that quote, and have actually sometimes started thinking of other books as fencing excercises or real combats. And it got me thinking, what does it mean if he fought his real combat, the ultimate combat which is 2666, a combat that killed him (in his letters he mentions that the cancer that took him was directly related to how tolling writing the book was to him) and realized he couldn't win that combat, that literature can never win against 'the something', and thus decided to name it after the death of literature, and his own death?
All in all, I feel the book captures so well the allure of youth, I wanna be a real visceralista and write poetry, even though it's never really portrayed as alluring. One of the 3 most important books in my life, it's honestly moving every time I find someone who's read it. I've gifted it ten times. On my first date with my current girlfriend we had been talking the previous weeks about books and she kept saying she had nothing to read. When the date ended, after like four hours, I gave her the book. Bold move but it payed out, cause five years later we're living together and we have the original cover art of the book framed in our house (Billy boys by jack vettriano, Google detectives salvajes anagrama if you wanna see).
I wanted to echo what Sam said and say what a rewarding experience this readalong has been for me. I've so much appreciated all the discussion; this book leaves so much open-ended with so many tantalizing clues that can be interpreted in different ways but without a 'correct' answer - I wonder if I would have been a bit frustrated just reading it through alone. With all of the back-and-forth of other engaged readers digging into some of those loose threads, it's made this a highlight reading experience.
I will echo Sam's sentiments and say thank you to everyone who has participated and shared thoughts. I have learned a lot and your comments always give me new eyes for pondering this work.
I think I tend to be a literal reader and it's not until I get to the end of a work, knowing the big picture, that I begin to understand the parts and the roles they play in creating the whole.
This group read has been a big success for me because my first two attempts ended pretty early and gave me the conviction I wouldn't read this book. This time, though, I pushed through my initial reservations and am so glad I did. So thank you all.
Also, I was recently in the bookstore and picked up 3 more Bolaño books (Antwerp, Nazi Literature in America, and 2666). Those who know me will realize how unusual that is -- I don't tend to read widely from a single author nor do I tend to reread often. Bolaño is breaking me out of that rut.
Final thoughts: This book surprised me. The first section was a good, funny attention-grabbing opener. The second part was very cool, structurally, and the more I read the more the book sunk its claws in w.r.t its themes and characters and I found myself gripped. There were some chapters and characters that I had to muscle through, but this readalong and reading all your thoughts and comments and hearing about the original Spanish publication and the slight differences in translation, as well as general Mexican culture, was really enriching. I think this is a book that invites that progressive discussion.
I think this final section was interesting, as noted by others here for the way that it flips Belano and Lima's personal journeys on its head, but also for the way that it ultimately presents Tinajero the same way Belano and Lima were portrayed in Part 2 - a collection of second-hand accounts from people all over Sonora, chasing what might be a ghost across the whole desert. It's essentially Part 2 in miniature. Garcia Madero barely interacts with Tinajero at all, and so just like B&L, we never really get to "know" her for her - except for the bravery she shows in the climactic showdown and JGM's imagery of her.
I do think it's possible that JGM is the interviewer for (most of) Part 2 (though I feel like the Mexico City poets would act differently telling stories to someone they would know?), but I also don't know if I really care? Feels weird to say, after all that. It might as well be a "what's outside the window?" puzzle.
Thanks everyone for letting me join in on this, it was loads of fun. :)
I just finished the book and couldn't wait to come to the comments. I feel such a heavy weight about the ending. Belano and Lima did have good intentions, as misguided as they ultimately became, and of course with an unimaginable sense of loss and guilt at what happened to Césarea, whom they'd traveled across the entire Sonora trying to find. I get the impression now that I reflect that the main character of the book is really Belano. Although Ulises Lima appears frequently in the book, I feel out of everyone that we've come to know (indirectly), Belano is the one I feel closest to, which makes sense considering he's clearly an alter ego for Bolaño, as others have pointed out.
I think more than anything I feel sorrow for Belano, Lima, and GM (I wish we knew at least what happened to them, although it seems they remained somewhere in the remote depths of the desert). As was pointed out in Part 3 with the idiom of becoming associated with something by getting involved (I wish I could find the page), they got sucked into this horrible chase and running for the rest of their lives in search of something by choosing to help Lupe.
I also find myself thinking about the description on Goodreads: "New Year’s Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run." Of course, for the prospective reader, they need some sort of description to entice them, but I realize that the sort of "crime on the run" plot this description provides almost entirely misses the point. While this does happen, somehow it's really the journey of the characters, the progression of an artistic movement, the decay of youth and its romantic ideals, that could describe the book. Of course, this kind of novel is difficult to encapsulate in just a paragraph, but it feels to me like the events that happen in part 1 and part 3 are really just catalysts for something deeper. There are evil people out there, but they almost serve as a way for us to see the way that people try to live because and in spite of it.
These are just some preliminary rushed thoughts, sparked by the whirlwind you feel when you finish a long novel after spending so much time with its characters. I'm so sad to part with the characters and the world Bolaño constructed. We become like the others interviewed in the novel—witnesses, with the added advantage of having all the different accounts and knowing what others could not know. I will miss them deeply. Thank you all for this wonderful experience, it's been such a delight! Maybe another group read will be in the works down the road?
Just wanted to thank all my fellow readers for inspiring me to keep up so I could hop in and read their comments each week. I just finished 2666 in February and was not planning to pick up this one for a few years. Couldn’t resist and I’m glad I jumped in.
Also big thank you to Paul and Trevor for collecting us here together and graciously opening up their Substack to our weekly comments. ❤️❤️
Fantastic book that gets better with each read. Like Cesarea’s poem in reverse- chaotic first time then by this time,my third time, a calm flat line and pure enjoyment. Loved reading it and reading the comments from everyone!
I am going to go back a bit to chapter 23 in book 2 and I will paste some of my goodreads review here:
Book 2, Chapter 23 has each narrator's interlude close with a variation on the same sentence:
Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy.
Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy.
Everything that begins as comedy ends as comedy.
Everything that begins as comedy ends as a cryptographic exercise.
Everything that begins as a comedy ends as a horror movie.
What begins as a comedy ends as a triumphal march, wouldn’t you say?
Everything that begins as a comedy inevitably ends as a mystery.
Everything that begins as a comedy ends as a dirge in the void.
Everything that begins as a comedy ends as a comic monologue, but we aren’t laughing anymore.
Any one of those sentences could ultimately be the key, the real meat of the book. Or not. Perhaps they are a general outline of the structure of the book. Or not. They do feel like important sentences that are scratching at the soul of this book.
All right, buckle up.
I’ve read the book 4 or 5 times in the past 17 years, and with it I have learned to love rereads, not focusing on plot and spoilers but rather how a book is structured, events foreshadowed and ultimately how inevitable they seem when a book is well planned and written. Knowing that Cesárea dies because of them sheds a new light on the middle part: they aren’t traveling because they are vagabond, they are doing it to literally go to the end of the world in search for atonement, or death. Hence the absurd duel in the beach, Nicaragua, Africa (Belano says he wants to die because of something he lost), even the name of the mezcal they drink in the night that anchors the interviews (“Mezcal Los Suicidas, curious name, isn’t it?”). Something broke inside them so profoundly Belano becomes asexual, a teetotaler.
Now, Auxilio Lacouture’s story is retold in the nouvelle Amulet, almost verbatim. Bolaño mentions Juárez Street in Santa Teresa, so he already had the idea of fictionalizing Ciudad Juárez as Santa Teresa in 2666. And speaking of those books, without spoiling much, there’s a quote in Detectives that goes "And Cesárea said something about days to come, although the teacher imagined that if Cesárea had spent time on that senseless plan it was simply because she lived such a lonely life. But Cesárea spoke of times to come and the teacher, to change the subject, asked her what times she meant and when they would be. And Cesárea named a date, sometime around the year 2600. Two thousand six hundred and something. And then, when the teacher couldn’t help but laugh at such a random date, a smothered little laugh that could scarcely be heard, Cesárea laughed again, although this time the thunder of her laughter remained within the confines of her own room." There’s another one in Amulet that goes “...and then we began to walk along Guerrero avenue, they a little slower than before, me a little faster than before, the Guerrero looks above all like a cemetery, but not a cemetery from 1974, nor a cemetery from 1968, nor a cemetery from 1975, but like a cemetery from the year 2666, a cemetery forgotten underneath a dead or unborn eyelid, the dispassioned aquosities of an eye that for wanting to forget something has ended up forgetting everything”.
Auxilio is a larger than life writer, like Arcimboldi in 2666 or Cesárea in SD, and coincidentally she says she’s the mother of mexican poetry although she’s childless, Cesárea means assisted birth, and the RV are their kids in a way. Ernesto San Epifanio shows up in Amulet, and so does Belano, who is a thinly veiled alter ego of Bolaño. He has a pessimism that goes right across all of his works: his knowledge as a latin american (not as a chilean, not as a mexican) that everything is fucked up everywhere and is not likely to get better, and this pessimism as opposed to the frivolity or ridiculousness of life. I won't say he is a pessimist necessarily, but I feel it's definitely one of his big themes, the meaninglessness of everything/a lot of things.
See, for instance, how 2666 is a brutal, unrelenting book in the crimes part, but has an absolutely frivolous first part, with (to me) frivolous people and the main concern being a threesome, and ends on a completely trivial note (the ice cream thing). Being posthumous, I don't know if that's the ending or order of stories that he would've wanted, maybe I place such a strong meaning to the ice cream being the ending and he wouldn't have wanted it.
But anyway, on to what I realized, a little fan theory or just a thought: Auxilio sees all of her life at once in the bathroom stall, she literally remembers the future, so what if the cemetery in 2666 is where she is buried? She, the mother of poetry, the mother of Arturo Belano -who is part of the "they" in that quote, he's walking with her- dead and buried by that time and along her everyone else, and all of literature with them. If this is the case, does 2666 mean the death of literature? it would go well with this overarching pessimism of his works. I just feel that it's such a tiny and forgettable quote in a minor novel of his, that if he revisited it for his magnum opus it had to mean something. And yeah, reading it with no context you see he mentions a cemetery, sounds apocalyptic and creepy, but if you consider it to be a cemetery where the mother of mexican poetry, his own symbolical mother is buried, I feel it gains a new level of meaning.
I think the core statement of 2666 can be found in this quote: “What a sad paradox, Amalfitano thought. Nowadays not even the illustrated pharmacists dare to tackle the big works, imperfect, torrential, the ones that open way to the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what is the same: they want to see the great masters in sessions of fencing training, but don't want to know anything with real combats, where the great masters fight against that, that something that frightens us all, that something that scares us and confronts us, and there's blood and mortal wounds and stench”.
I love that quote, and have actually sometimes started thinking of other books as fencing excercises or real combats. And it got me thinking, what does it mean if he fought his real combat, the ultimate combat which is 2666, a combat that killed him (in his letters he mentions that the cancer that took him was directly related to how tolling writing the book was to him) and realized he couldn't win that combat, that literature can never win against 'the something', and thus decided to name it after the death of literature, and his own death?
All in all, I feel the book captures so well the allure of youth, I wanna be a real visceralista and write poetry, even though it's never really portrayed as alluring. One of the 3 most important books in my life, it's honestly moving every time I find someone who's read it. I've gifted it ten times. On my first date with my current girlfriend we had been talking the previous weeks about books and she kept saying she had nothing to read. When the date ended, after like four hours, I gave her the book. Bold move but it payed out, cause five years later we're living together and we have the original cover art of the book framed in our house (Billy boys by jack vettriano, Google detectives salvajes anagrama if you wanna see).
I wanted to echo what Sam said and say what a rewarding experience this readalong has been for me. I've so much appreciated all the discussion; this book leaves so much open-ended with so many tantalizing clues that can be interpreted in different ways but without a 'correct' answer - I wonder if I would have been a bit frustrated just reading it through alone. With all of the back-and-forth of other engaged readers digging into some of those loose threads, it's made this a highlight reading experience.
I will echo Sam's sentiments and say thank you to everyone who has participated and shared thoughts. I have learned a lot and your comments always give me new eyes for pondering this work.
I think I tend to be a literal reader and it's not until I get to the end of a work, knowing the big picture, that I begin to understand the parts and the roles they play in creating the whole.
This group read has been a big success for me because my first two attempts ended pretty early and gave me the conviction I wouldn't read this book. This time, though, I pushed through my initial reservations and am so glad I did. So thank you all.
Also, I was recently in the bookstore and picked up 3 more Bolaño books (Antwerp, Nazi Literature in America, and 2666). Those who know me will realize how unusual that is -- I don't tend to read widely from a single author nor do I tend to reread often. Bolaño is breaking me out of that rut.
Final thoughts: This book surprised me. The first section was a good, funny attention-grabbing opener. The second part was very cool, structurally, and the more I read the more the book sunk its claws in w.r.t its themes and characters and I found myself gripped. There were some chapters and characters that I had to muscle through, but this readalong and reading all your thoughts and comments and hearing about the original Spanish publication and the slight differences in translation, as well as general Mexican culture, was really enriching. I think this is a book that invites that progressive discussion.
I think this final section was interesting, as noted by others here for the way that it flips Belano and Lima's personal journeys on its head, but also for the way that it ultimately presents Tinajero the same way Belano and Lima were portrayed in Part 2 - a collection of second-hand accounts from people all over Sonora, chasing what might be a ghost across the whole desert. It's essentially Part 2 in miniature. Garcia Madero barely interacts with Tinajero at all, and so just like B&L, we never really get to "know" her for her - except for the bravery she shows in the climactic showdown and JGM's imagery of her.
I do think it's possible that JGM is the interviewer for (most of) Part 2 (though I feel like the Mexico City poets would act differently telling stories to someone they would know?), but I also don't know if I really care? Feels weird to say, after all that. It might as well be a "what's outside the window?" puzzle.
Thanks everyone for letting me join in on this, it was loads of fun. :)
I just finished the book and couldn't wait to come to the comments. I feel such a heavy weight about the ending. Belano and Lima did have good intentions, as misguided as they ultimately became, and of course with an unimaginable sense of loss and guilt at what happened to Césarea, whom they'd traveled across the entire Sonora trying to find. I get the impression now that I reflect that the main character of the book is really Belano. Although Ulises Lima appears frequently in the book, I feel out of everyone that we've come to know (indirectly), Belano is the one I feel closest to, which makes sense considering he's clearly an alter ego for Bolaño, as others have pointed out.
I think more than anything I feel sorrow for Belano, Lima, and GM (I wish we knew at least what happened to them, although it seems they remained somewhere in the remote depths of the desert). As was pointed out in Part 3 with the idiom of becoming associated with something by getting involved (I wish I could find the page), they got sucked into this horrible chase and running for the rest of their lives in search of something by choosing to help Lupe.
I also find myself thinking about the description on Goodreads: "New Year’s Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run." Of course, for the prospective reader, they need some sort of description to entice them, but I realize that the sort of "crime on the run" plot this description provides almost entirely misses the point. While this does happen, somehow it's really the journey of the characters, the progression of an artistic movement, the decay of youth and its romantic ideals, that could describe the book. Of course, this kind of novel is difficult to encapsulate in just a paragraph, but it feels to me like the events that happen in part 1 and part 3 are really just catalysts for something deeper. There are evil people out there, but they almost serve as a way for us to see the way that people try to live because and in spite of it.
These are just some preliminary rushed thoughts, sparked by the whirlwind you feel when you finish a long novel after spending so much time with its characters. I'm so sad to part with the characters and the world Bolaño constructed. We become like the others interviewed in the novel—witnesses, with the added advantage of having all the different accounts and knowing what others could not know. I will miss them deeply. Thank you all for this wonderful experience, it's been such a delight! Maybe another group read will be in the works down the road?
Just wanted to thank all my fellow readers for inspiring me to keep up so I could hop in and read their comments each week. I just finished 2666 in February and was not planning to pick up this one for a few years. Couldn’t resist and I’m glad I jumped in.
Also big thank you to Paul and Trevor for collecting us here together and graciously opening up their Substack to our weekly comments. ❤️❤️
Fantastic book that gets better with each read. Like Cesarea’s poem in reverse- chaotic first time then by this time,my third time, a calm flat line and pure enjoyment. Loved reading it and reading the comments from everyone!
So what does everyone think? What's behind the window at the very end?
I am going to go back a bit to chapter 23 in book 2 and I will paste some of my goodreads review here:
Book 2, Chapter 23 has each narrator's interlude close with a variation on the same sentence:
Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy.
Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy.
Everything that begins as comedy ends as comedy.
Everything that begins as comedy ends as a cryptographic exercise.
Everything that begins as a comedy ends as a horror movie.
What begins as a comedy ends as a triumphal march, wouldn’t you say?
Everything that begins as a comedy inevitably ends as a mystery.
Everything that begins as a comedy ends as a dirge in the void.
Everything that begins as a comedy ends as a comic monologue, but we aren’t laughing anymore.
Any one of those sentences could ultimately be the key, the real meat of the book. Or not. Perhaps they are a general outline of the structure of the book. Or not. They do feel like important sentences that are scratching at the soul of this book.