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).
Amazing! So much to go through there, and this comment has already revolutionized the book for me in good ways. I think this is a book I'd absolutely need to reread to appreciate more. As I've said (and I think others have said as well), the book is destabilizing and when I didn't have my footing I wasn't sure I'd get much out of it. As the book progressed, I gained my footing to a large extent, but even then I think I was just more willing to be disoriented--it wasn't that I was connecting dots. But the ending absolutely rewrote the rest of the book for me, making so much that came before get reinterpreted. I'd love to reread soon because of this!
Thanks for such a wonderful, full comment, Angus. it makes me all the more excited that I read the book and have so much to think about!
Yeah, I can't remember how I felt the first time I read it but I don't think I was this passionate. I agree it's pretty disorienting for a couple hundred pages, you keep expecting a payoff and it's just rambling, disconnected stories. I feel the stakes are super high and then he delivers in full. Wonder how many people in the readalong thought they'd meet Cesárea, and how many that something bad would happen. Thanks for hosting the space to allow me to share something so personal.
Pulling out another comment of yours, "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."
And I am laughing because l think Bolaño’s end message here agrees with my worldview too. I always thought I was a realist but now I am learning that I may be a pessimist. ;-p
Gives added meaning to the term "visceral realist" for me.
All of his books have this underlying idea of evil, which is very real (serial murders, nazism, fascism, military coups and regimes, deadly diseases) but still feels ominous and almost otherworldy. Very very much like True Detective season 1, if you've seen it. And yeah, interesting, which word do you focus on, no? Visceral, raw, and from within or realism, trying to show the world. Like Detectives Salvajes, which word do you focus on? We focus a lot on the detective part, piecing together the story, and forget the savage part.
I have one comment, though - Belano did not become asexual - sure, he had some problems with recurring impotence (which I think someone -Laura J.?- also mentioned pre-Cesárea?), but it was not all the time, and he had plenty of sexual relationships and lovers before and after Sonora, including a marriage with a child. Did you mean Lima? I don't remember him having any lovers? Just the ongoing crush on Claudia which was not reciprocated?
There also seemed to be some actual ongoing physical threat involved with being back in DF, which was referred to by Piel Divina when Lima temporarily disappeared himself in Nicaragua; that something had happened to them in Sonora that meant they had to flee Mexico and could not return for fear of their lives (which Belano never did) - I was wondering if Alberto's pals were still after them for a while. (PD says "Lima was fleeing from an organization ... that intended to kill him, so upon finding himself in Managua he had probably decided not to return. ... Everything started, according to PD, with a trip that L and his friend B made to the north in 1976.")
Agus, I'm going to pull out a piece of what you said, "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."
Yes. When I finished the book, I thought, "It's all a joke." As in, life is a (cynical) joke and then you die.
Kind of like Don Quixote tilting at windmills or so many other pieces of art that capture the absurdity of life.
Thank you so much for explaining that Santa Teresa is fictionalized (although, Ciudad Juárez is in Chihuahua, not Sonora - is that for sure? Do you mean Ciudad Obregón?). I spent a bunch of time on Google maps looking up their Sonoran adventures, and most of the places are real - Hermosilla, Bahía Kino, Agua Prieta, Caborca, and many other towns they mention passing through - found them all but the only Santa Teresa in Sonora is a tiny, tiny place with like eight streets, and ironically just next to an even smaller town, called... La Tinajera, which was interesting! But the Santa Teresa he described seemed much larger, so I had been wondering if he'd fictionalized it, but kept second-guessing myself. The one place I could find no trace of at all is Villaviciosa; the only town of that name that Google gave me was in Asturias, Spain.
If you Google you'll find that the femicides epidemic is a very real thing in Ciudad Juarez, it was the direct inspiration for 2666. The maquiladoras even make the vast majority of victims. Beautiful coincidence about Tinajera, it means pot maker.
Ah, I haven't yet read 2666, and there are no femicides nor maquiladoras in this book (Cesárea dies rather accidentally/randomly at an old age as a lavandera along with Alberto and the policeman and not in Santa Teresa), so I didn't get that connection, nor realize he carried that fictionalized name over to the other book. Though Ciudad Juárez isn't far over the Chihuahua border, I also saw no indication here that they'd left Sonora, so I missed that completely! Interesting that all the other place names (other than the miniscule Villaviciosa) are actual places; wonder if he already had a specific place in mind when he wrote about this Santa Teresa, or had some of the plot threads of 2666 already in mind while writing SD?
In the English translation they do say that Cesárea worked as a maquiladora for a bit maybe after she was a teacher. It’s interesting that she brings the year 2666 and the first hint of the pain from that book
Do they use that word in the English edition? That word is never used in the original Spanish. The Spanish just says "trabajaba en la fábrica de conservas" - she worked in the canning factory, and then that she moved on when the factory closed. They never refer to that place of employment, or her job there, as 'maquiladora'. Interesting if they added it to the English; it seems to have connotations that 'fábrica' (factory) does not necessarily have.
It does seem like Bolaño was hinting at things here that he later developed in 2666; I wonder if he was already thinking of that as he wrote this, or he later picked up threads from this to weave into something new.
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 want to build off of Erin's and others' comments on the books open-endedness. This isn't to take away from Agus' deep research into keys to the novel and to relations to Bolano's oeuvre as a whole, but the novel is enjoyable also on the first read and I think would be to the more casual reader were that reader not too demanding for answers to unanswered questions. Bolano is excellent at exciting those questions, prompting research, sending us googling or at the time this was written to the research stacks. His skill at inspiring such scholarly activity is one of what I consider the marks of a great writer, with the more thought inspired, the more my appreciation. Bolano leaves us multiple ways to dig deep in this, depending on our interests or dedication and the reward I feel is the thought and scholarship that he has inspired. Having finished, I am reminded here of Gene Wolfe, a U.S. science fiction writer whose work also inspired study that has sent many readers down many rabbit holes chasing layers of meaning. Personally, I love this. It is why I still read Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust to name a few and it is what I appreciated most from this read. Poetic glossaries without end--yes! Pictograms ending the novel--yes! I do not as a reader find loving these things weird, and have to be thankful to Bolano for providing for my appetite more food for thought.
Also, thanks to our hosts for choosing this specific novel. It was great selection for a group read and hope they and everyone enjoyed it as much as I did. Looking forward to more Mookse and Gripes readalongs and I also intend to load up on more Bolano.
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.
Antwerp is one of the very few by him I haven't read. Nazi literature is pretty unique, it's very borgesian: an encyclopedia os biographies of writers that don't exist. 2666 is an exhausting book, but it's the idea. There's a section with dozens upon dozens of femicides narrated in detail, and most people either quit the book there, or become completely desensitized to the violence, which echoes what happens in real life. Just a heads up, it's an amazing book but very grueling.
Yeah, I have wondered how I will deal with reading 2666. It's been a major one on my to read list for years. But I never moved forward with it because of fear. I think this group read has given me the shove I need to try it.
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?
Also one more observation: the book constantly addresses themes of getting lost and found. Césarea disappears for many years, the people she knew only reflecting on her years later. The same thing happens years later with Belano and Lima, with everyone they knew remembering their relationship with them in their own ways. Amadeo is a sort of bridge between Césarea and the younger visceral realists who visit him, who ultimately are on the path to getting lost themselves. GM and Lupe intentionally get lost in the desert, repeating Césarea’s trajectory quite literally by living in her house. I suspect that’s why no one interviewed knows much about GM.
This finally clarifies a bit on the “detectives” portion of the title. Everyone in the book sort of becomes a detective. The youths visiting Amadeo on a search become the objects of a different type of search. Perhaps it suggests that the interviewers (who may be Belano/Lima but maybe not, I’m inclined to think not) are repeating that trajectory in their own way. Maybe a new generation of inquisitive visceral realists, trying to rebirth the movement in the same way Belano and Lima did.
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. :)
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!
Anything you want it to be? The dashed lines do give it kind of a 'fill-in-the-blank' sort of feel...
And now I wonder again what happens to GM - does he stay in Sonora with or without Lupe?(that boy seems to have the knack for falling in 'love' with anyone willing to have sex with him... well, I guess he is only 17...). His living in Cesárea's house does seem like he's almost a new generation of real visceralists kind of taking her place, passing the torch. Although we also never get clear on what Cesárea's motivations for staying out there were. Following a toreador who may have been her lover but may also have been her cousin (the fact that his second last name is the same as her first last name implies that the toreador could be her father's sister's son), then becoming a teacher, then working in a factory, then selling herbs at a market, then becoming a washwoman in some tiny bit of nowhere? Why???? GM finds her notebooks, but then after reading them decides they're not worth forwarding to B or L... what was in them?? Was that because of the content or because he thought his friends were fugitives (that remains a bit murky as well). GM is never mentioned again except for that very oblique reference in one of the last interviews. Is he one of or the main interviewers, or is he still in Sonora carrying the flame of Cesárea and the visceral realists on into obscurity and oblivion?
With all of these and other open questions, I still feel like we got more answers and closure in Sonora than I expected! I never expected they'd find Cesárea alive!
Also, to piggyback on what you were saying about JGM taking on being the new generation of visceral realists - I couldn't help but note the ending of the book is three similar drawings in a row, and an open-ended joke or puzzle of sorts, much like Cesarea's "only published poem". So I do think there's an element of carrying on her legacy, or maybe it's just what that Sonoran desert air does to one :)
I think they do leave Sonora though, because I was tracing all the towns he was listing in their order and the last few seem to go all over the place? Or maybe I should say, I couldn't find any towns by those names in Sonora for the last few. I might need to look harder. Maybe they vanished but I have a hard time believing it when some of the most obscure towns from the book are still around.
Villaviciosa isn't just not in Sonora, there isn't one in Mexico. Assuming they didn't fly to Spain in the Impala to find Cesárea, I'm going to assume those few names of tiny tiny towns are also fictionalized and the last showdown is in Sonora.
Ciudad Juárez/Santa Teresa is another thing altogether. I found this in another article online: "Ciudad Juárez, Santa Teresa’s original, is steps away from El Paso, Texas. But in moving his fictional avatar of Juárez several hundred miles west, Bolaño erased its American counterpart: Santa Teresa abuts not a fictional version of El Paso but the emptiness of the Arizona desert." So... fictional CJ/ST is still in Sonora?
I did some googling to see if anyone had done more 'detective work' and the only map I could find that someone made had them doing a big chunk of the trip in the US including driving through Tucson, AZ (!), in spite of the only one of the with a passport being Chilean Belano who wasn't even legally in Mexico and couldn't return if he left (and without passports, the others couldn't leave). They mention this when contemplating the border crossing in Agua Prieta. They did not enter the US, for sure. So, I wonder about people's reading comprehension sometimes - that (very inaccurate) map is even referred to by others without a single person pointing out this glaring error.
I will admit, I didn't even check for Villaviciosa! I was too sucked into the climactic moment by then :) So yeah, I could buy that Bolano just made up some of the towns at the end, too - he does it for authors and book titles so why not? Most of them are real, though. I thought I saw a Santa Teresa as I was looking around in Google Maps, but I didn't look too hard to see if it would make sense as a place to stop and get a hotel...
The bigger headache, map-wise, was whenever I tried to map any set of locations around Mexico City DF - that was pretty much impossible. I tried to do it for Amadeo giving directions for whiskey (just for fun) but it was not happening.
I went to México City five years ago and read the book while being there, and was able to find a few places. Most notably, I was having a beer and he mentioned Plaza Popocatepl, looked up and I was sitting half a block away from there. Also had chilaquiles at Café Quito / Café La Habana like they do.
I'm pretty sure I visited El Parque Hundido (The Sunken Park) when I was there, which was terrifyingly long ago, in 1980... I can't claim to have read such elevated literature at that time; I remember reading a lot of Mafalda!
Haha remember I said you were gonna love the ending? It's amazing how many questions you're asking about a poetess from whom we don't read a single poem. A book of poets, who talk about poetry, and the only one we read is a random poem by Rimbaud.
When those last drawings came up & the first answer was a star, it really took me a minute or two to figure it out. And that's because the perspective had changed from the previous drawings (which were shown from above). Somehow that 90 degree shift flummoxed me briefly.
My thought on the last drawing when reading the book -- was it even a window? I just took it as a very open-ended ending.
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).
Amazing! So much to go through there, and this comment has already revolutionized the book for me in good ways. I think this is a book I'd absolutely need to reread to appreciate more. As I've said (and I think others have said as well), the book is destabilizing and when I didn't have my footing I wasn't sure I'd get much out of it. As the book progressed, I gained my footing to a large extent, but even then I think I was just more willing to be disoriented--it wasn't that I was connecting dots. But the ending absolutely rewrote the rest of the book for me, making so much that came before get reinterpreted. I'd love to reread soon because of this!
Thanks for such a wonderful, full comment, Angus. it makes me all the more excited that I read the book and have so much to think about!
Yeah, I can't remember how I felt the first time I read it but I don't think I was this passionate. I agree it's pretty disorienting for a couple hundred pages, you keep expecting a payoff and it's just rambling, disconnected stories. I feel the stakes are super high and then he delivers in full. Wonder how many people in the readalong thought they'd meet Cesárea, and how many that something bad would happen. Thanks for hosting the space to allow me to share something so personal.
Pulling out another comment of yours, "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."
And I am laughing because l think Bolaño’s end message here agrees with my worldview too. I always thought I was a realist but now I am learning that I may be a pessimist. ;-p
Gives added meaning to the term "visceral realist" for me.
All of his books have this underlying idea of evil, which is very real (serial murders, nazism, fascism, military coups and regimes, deadly diseases) but still feels ominous and almost otherworldy. Very very much like True Detective season 1, if you've seen it. And yeah, interesting, which word do you focus on, no? Visceral, raw, and from within or realism, trying to show the world. Like Detectives Salvajes, which word do you focus on? We focus a lot on the detective part, piecing together the story, and forget the savage part.
Some great commentary!
I have one comment, though - Belano did not become asexual - sure, he had some problems with recurring impotence (which I think someone -Laura J.?- also mentioned pre-Cesárea?), but it was not all the time, and he had plenty of sexual relationships and lovers before and after Sonora, including a marriage with a child. Did you mean Lima? I don't remember him having any lovers? Just the ongoing crush on Claudia which was not reciprocated?
There also seemed to be some actual ongoing physical threat involved with being back in DF, which was referred to by Piel Divina when Lima temporarily disappeared himself in Nicaragua; that something had happened to them in Sonora that meant they had to flee Mexico and could not return for fear of their lives (which Belano never did) - I was wondering if Alberto's pals were still after them for a while. (PD says "Lima was fleeing from an organization ... that intended to kill him, so upon finding himself in Managua he had probably decided not to return. ... Everything started, according to PD, with a trip that L and his friend B made to the north in 1976.")
Agus, I'm going to pull out a piece of what you said, "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."
Yes. When I finished the book, I thought, "It's all a joke." As in, life is a (cynical) joke and then you die.
Kind of like Don Quixote tilting at windmills or so many other pieces of art that capture the absurdity of life.
Exactly, that feeling of "... And now what?"
Thank you so much for explaining that Santa Teresa is fictionalized (although, Ciudad Juárez is in Chihuahua, not Sonora - is that for sure? Do you mean Ciudad Obregón?). I spent a bunch of time on Google maps looking up their Sonoran adventures, and most of the places are real - Hermosilla, Bahía Kino, Agua Prieta, Caborca, and many other towns they mention passing through - found them all but the only Santa Teresa in Sonora is a tiny, tiny place with like eight streets, and ironically just next to an even smaller town, called... La Tinajera, which was interesting! But the Santa Teresa he described seemed much larger, so I had been wondering if he'd fictionalized it, but kept second-guessing myself. The one place I could find no trace of at all is Villaviciosa; the only town of that name that Google gave me was in Asturias, Spain.
If you Google you'll find that the femicides epidemic is a very real thing in Ciudad Juarez, it was the direct inspiration for 2666. The maquiladoras even make the vast majority of victims. Beautiful coincidence about Tinajera, it means pot maker.
Ah, I haven't yet read 2666, and there are no femicides nor maquiladoras in this book (Cesárea dies rather accidentally/randomly at an old age as a lavandera along with Alberto and the policeman and not in Santa Teresa), so I didn't get that connection, nor realize he carried that fictionalized name over to the other book. Though Ciudad Juárez isn't far over the Chihuahua border, I also saw no indication here that they'd left Sonora, so I missed that completely! Interesting that all the other place names (other than the miniscule Villaviciosa) are actual places; wonder if he already had a specific place in mind when he wrote about this Santa Teresa, or had some of the plot threads of 2666 already in mind while writing SD?
In the English translation they do say that Cesárea worked as a maquiladora for a bit maybe after she was a teacher. It’s interesting that she brings the year 2666 and the first hint of the pain from that book
Do they use that word in the English edition? That word is never used in the original Spanish. The Spanish just says "trabajaba en la fábrica de conservas" - she worked in the canning factory, and then that she moved on when the factory closed. They never refer to that place of employment, or her job there, as 'maquiladora'. Interesting if they added it to the English; it seems to have connotations that 'fábrica' (factory) does not necessarily have.
It does seem like Bolaño was hinting at things here that he later developed in 2666; I wonder if he was already thinking of that as he wrote this, or he later picked up threads from this to weave into something new.
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 want to build off of Erin's and others' comments on the books open-endedness. This isn't to take away from Agus' deep research into keys to the novel and to relations to Bolano's oeuvre as a whole, but the novel is enjoyable also on the first read and I think would be to the more casual reader were that reader not too demanding for answers to unanswered questions. Bolano is excellent at exciting those questions, prompting research, sending us googling or at the time this was written to the research stacks. His skill at inspiring such scholarly activity is one of what I consider the marks of a great writer, with the more thought inspired, the more my appreciation. Bolano leaves us multiple ways to dig deep in this, depending on our interests or dedication and the reward I feel is the thought and scholarship that he has inspired. Having finished, I am reminded here of Gene Wolfe, a U.S. science fiction writer whose work also inspired study that has sent many readers down many rabbit holes chasing layers of meaning. Personally, I love this. It is why I still read Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust to name a few and it is what I appreciated most from this read. Poetic glossaries without end--yes! Pictograms ending the novel--yes! I do not as a reader find loving these things weird, and have to be thankful to Bolano for providing for my appetite more food for thought.
Also, thanks to our hosts for choosing this specific novel. It was great selection for a group read and hope they and everyone enjoyed it as much as I did. Looking forward to more Mookse and Gripes readalongs and I also intend to load up on more Bolano.
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.
Distant star and Chile by night are excellent excellent nouvelles, don't sleep on those.
Thanks. I will definitely check them out. I bought what the store had on its shelves.
Antwerp is one of the very few by him I haven't read. Nazi literature is pretty unique, it's very borgesian: an encyclopedia os biographies of writers that don't exist. 2666 is an exhausting book, but it's the idea. There's a section with dozens upon dozens of femicides narrated in detail, and most people either quit the book there, or become completely desensitized to the violence, which echoes what happens in real life. Just a heads up, it's an amazing book but very grueling.
Yeah, I have wondered how I will deal with reading 2666. It's been a major one on my to read list for years. But I never moved forward with it because of fear. I think this group read has given me the shove I need to try it.
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?
Also one more observation: the book constantly addresses themes of getting lost and found. Césarea disappears for many years, the people she knew only reflecting on her years later. The same thing happens years later with Belano and Lima, with everyone they knew remembering their relationship with them in their own ways. Amadeo is a sort of bridge between Césarea and the younger visceral realists who visit him, who ultimately are on the path to getting lost themselves. GM and Lupe intentionally get lost in the desert, repeating Césarea’s trajectory quite literally by living in her house. I suspect that’s why no one interviewed knows much about GM.
This finally clarifies a bit on the “detectives” portion of the title. Everyone in the book sort of becomes a detective. The youths visiting Amadeo on a search become the objects of a different type of search. Perhaps it suggests that the interviewers (who may be Belano/Lima but maybe not, I’m inclined to think not) are repeating that trajectory in their own way. Maybe a new generation of inquisitive visceral realists, trying to rebirth the movement in the same way Belano and Lima did.
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. :)
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?
Anything you want it to be? The dashed lines do give it kind of a 'fill-in-the-blank' sort of feel...
And now I wonder again what happens to GM - does he stay in Sonora with or without Lupe?(that boy seems to have the knack for falling in 'love' with anyone willing to have sex with him... well, I guess he is only 17...). His living in Cesárea's house does seem like he's almost a new generation of real visceralists kind of taking her place, passing the torch. Although we also never get clear on what Cesárea's motivations for staying out there were. Following a toreador who may have been her lover but may also have been her cousin (the fact that his second last name is the same as her first last name implies that the toreador could be her father's sister's son), then becoming a teacher, then working in a factory, then selling herbs at a market, then becoming a washwoman in some tiny bit of nowhere? Why???? GM finds her notebooks, but then after reading them decides they're not worth forwarding to B or L... what was in them?? Was that because of the content or because he thought his friends were fugitives (that remains a bit murky as well). GM is never mentioned again except for that very oblique reference in one of the last interviews. Is he one of or the main interviewers, or is he still in Sonora carrying the flame of Cesárea and the visceral realists on into obscurity and oblivion?
With all of these and other open questions, I still feel like we got more answers and closure in Sonora than I expected! I never expected they'd find Cesárea alive!
Also, to piggyback on what you were saying about JGM taking on being the new generation of visceral realists - I couldn't help but note the ending of the book is three similar drawings in a row, and an open-ended joke or puzzle of sorts, much like Cesarea's "only published poem". So I do think there's an element of carrying on her legacy, or maybe it's just what that Sonoran desert air does to one :)
I think they do leave Sonora though, because I was tracing all the towns he was listing in their order and the last few seem to go all over the place? Or maybe I should say, I couldn't find any towns by those names in Sonora for the last few. I might need to look harder. Maybe they vanished but I have a hard time believing it when some of the most obscure towns from the book are still around.
Villaviciosa isn't just not in Sonora, there isn't one in Mexico. Assuming they didn't fly to Spain in the Impala to find Cesárea, I'm going to assume those few names of tiny tiny towns are also fictionalized and the last showdown is in Sonora.
Ciudad Juárez/Santa Teresa is another thing altogether. I found this in another article online: "Ciudad Juárez, Santa Teresa’s original, is steps away from El Paso, Texas. But in moving his fictional avatar of Juárez several hundred miles west, Bolaño erased its American counterpart: Santa Teresa abuts not a fictional version of El Paso but the emptiness of the Arizona desert." So... fictional CJ/ST is still in Sonora?
I did some googling to see if anyone had done more 'detective work' and the only map I could find that someone made had them doing a big chunk of the trip in the US including driving through Tucson, AZ (!), in spite of the only one of the with a passport being Chilean Belano who wasn't even legally in Mexico and couldn't return if he left (and without passports, the others couldn't leave). They mention this when contemplating the border crossing in Agua Prieta. They did not enter the US, for sure. So, I wonder about people's reading comprehension sometimes - that (very inaccurate) map is even referred to by others without a single person pointing out this glaring error.
I will admit, I didn't even check for Villaviciosa! I was too sucked into the climactic moment by then :) So yeah, I could buy that Bolano just made up some of the towns at the end, too - he does it for authors and book titles so why not? Most of them are real, though. I thought I saw a Santa Teresa as I was looking around in Google Maps, but I didn't look too hard to see if it would make sense as a place to stop and get a hotel...
The bigger headache, map-wise, was whenever I tried to map any set of locations around Mexico City DF - that was pretty much impossible. I tried to do it for Amadeo giving directions for whiskey (just for fun) but it was not happening.
I went to México City five years ago and read the book while being there, and was able to find a few places. Most notably, I was having a beer and he mentioned Plaza Popocatepl, looked up and I was sitting half a block away from there. Also had chilaquiles at Café Quito / Café La Habana like they do.
I'm pretty sure I visited El Parque Hundido (The Sunken Park) when I was there, which was terrifyingly long ago, in 1980... I can't claim to have read such elevated literature at that time; I remember reading a lot of Mafalda!
Haha remember I said you were gonna love the ending? It's amazing how many questions you're asking about a poetess from whom we don't read a single poem. A book of poets, who talk about poetry, and the only one we read is a random poem by Rimbaud.
When those last drawings came up & the first answer was a star, it really took me a minute or two to figure it out. And that's because the perspective had changed from the previous drawings (which were shown from above). Somehow that 90 degree shift flummoxed me briefly.
My thought on the last drawing when reading the book -- was it even a window? I just took it as a very open-ended ending.
But the boats were shown in the same perspective, from the front and not above.
And yeah, what's behind the window? there's no window. Beautiful ending.
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.