A book-length poem of infrarrealismo

Publisher's page (via (via))

B/w covers

Picador 40th Anniversary Editions, 2012

(via The Automaton)

A wild poet chase: The Savage Detectives Group Read

Last week participants began posting reviews for The Savage Detectives group read hosted by Richard and me. It's been a great week of reading the variety of ideas and thoughts on a text rich with ideas and references. Though not everyone finished the novel, the posts offered different ways of looking at a pillow book. Here then are the links to reviews.

Richard / Caravana de recuerdos 1 , 2, 3

Caroline / Beauty is a Sleeping Cat

Bellezza / Dolce Bellezza

Sarah / what we have here is a failure to communicate

Bettina / Liburuak

nicole / bibliographing 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Séamus / Vapour Trails 1 , 2

Amateur Reader (Tom) / Wuthering Expectations 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Gavin / Page247

Selena / luxe hours

Sarah / A Rat in the Book Pile

Scott / seraillon

amanda / Simpler Pastimes

Rise / in lieu of a field guide

Jeremy read the book in advance and shared his thoughts and linked with us at READIN.

Image by Jenny Volvovski.

Catachresis

   "Keep going," said Belano, "we'll get one."
   "What is a catachresis?" I said.
   "That one I used to know, but I've forgotten," said Lima.
   "It's a metaphor that's become part of common everyday speech and is no longer perceived as a metaphor. For example: needle's eye, bottleneck."

   - The Savage Detectives

Catachresis #9 (legs of the table, the neck of the bottle,
the elbow of the pipe, the leg of the chair), 2011

How did you translate that into sculptural form?

To make these sculptures I produced assemblages to represent these metaphors, which could resemble early Surrealist sculptures, in that the link that brings objects together into one form comes across as absurd. The ‘hidden’ meaning of these sculptures operates just like the metaphors themselves, as the complicity of the viewer is needed to find the hidden thread that binds these objects together.

- Argentine artist Amalia Pica talks about her Savage Detectives-inspired installation artworks (read more)


 Is "doorstop" a catachresis?

More thoughts by Natasha

Here's what I linked to last time.

Here's more of Natasha's thoughts on RB. (Why didn't they just post the whole thing?)

The First Infrarealist Manifesto

“It’s four light hours to the confines of the solar system; to the closest star, four light years. An excessive ocean of emptiness. But are we really sure there’s only emptiness? We only know that there are no stars shining in that space. If they exist, would they be visible? And if there are bodies that are neither luminous nor dark? Couldn’t it be that on the celestial maps, the same as on those of Earth, the star-cities are indicated and the star-villages are omitted?”
— Soviet science fiction writers scratching their faces at midnight.
— The infrasuns (Drummond would say the happy proletarian fellows).
— Peguero and Boris alone in a lumpen room having premonitions of the wonder behind the door.
— Free money.

In 1976, when Roberto Bolaño was 23, 24 years old and living in Mexico, he drafted the first* manifesto of Movimiento Infrarrealista de Poesia, a poetry movement that inspired the visceral realism (or vicerealism) movement in The Savage Detectives. Along with other poets, Bolaño and Mario Santiago banded together to form and lead the infrarrealistas; their acknowledged stand-ins in the novel were Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima.

The manifesto was titled “Déjenlo Todo, Nuevamente” and could be found in original Spanish here.

Excerpts of the manifesto in English were quoted in many reviews of Bolaño’s books. The only complete English translations that I found online were in two sites:

Abandon Everything, Again
Give It All Up Again

The activities of the infrarrealistas in their heyday were described in the following links:

“Bolaño in Mexico” by Carmen Boullosa
Interview with Mario Santiago
“The Great Bolaño” (pdf) by Francisco Goldman
“Interviewees” (Spanish links) by Jeremy
Review of Bolaño Infra in Caravana de recuerdos

* There’s another manifesto (“Por un arte de vitalidad sin límites”) written earlier in 1975 by José Vicente Anaya.

What happened in Philoctetes Center, December 2009?

The poetry reading was called "Madmen, Exiles, and Savage Detectives: Latin American Poetry from Arenas to Bolaño". The readers were Jaime Manrique and Laura Healy.

Healy will read from her translations of work by Mario Santiago Papasquiaro and Roberto Bolaño, cofounders of the poetic movement Infrarealism, which was immortalized in Bolaño's Savage Detectives. Like the fictional characters Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, Bolaño and Papasquiaro tried to infuse their poetry with life as much as they infused their lives with poetry. The evening will serve as an introduction to the work of Latin American poets who spent their lives in the margins, whether by choice or as a matter of circumstance.

Words Without Borders had a review of the event here.

The entire reading was posted in YouTube.

P.S. This is Bifurcaria bifurcata's 101st post!

Natasha's thoughts on The Savage Detectives

The Savage Detectives, the un-movie

 
Gael in talks for “The Savage Detectives”

The Mexican actor Gael García Bernal could be the protagonist of the film “The Savage Detectives” (Los Detectives Salvajes in Spanish), based on the book of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, announced today the newspaper “La Nacion”.

The director, Carlos Sama, said in an interview with the Chilean newspaper that he’s “in talks” with Gael Garcia Bernal to play the protagonist of the film that could premiere in late 2009.

“The Savage Detectives”, published in Chile in 1998, relates the search for Mexican poet Cesárea Tinajero by two young poets: The Chilean Arturo Belano, who would be interpreted by Garcia Bernal, as well as the Mexican Ulises Lima.

Sama, aged of 41, who wrote the screenplay for the movie with Luis Felipe Fabre and Arcadi Palerm-Artís, said the shooting will start this year in northern Mexico in the Sonoran Desert, “which is a very special place”.

...

That was in 2008.

But it turned out to be more a film pitch than a done deal. Horacio Castellanos Moya couldn't help making a reference to this film in his essay on the "Bolaño myth": "the old mythology of the road trip, which came from Kerouac, has now been recycled with the face of Gael García Bernal (who will also portray Bolaño in an upcoming film, by the way)." Castellanos Moya traced the road trip myth from García Bernal portraying Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries.

Carolina López, Bolaño's widow, said that no contract for a film adaptation of the novel was actually made.

The movie that could somehow approximate the novel's eroticism and 'artlessness' was probably Y tu mamá también (And Your Mother Too), directed by Alfonso Cuarón. The movie, which also starred García Bernal, is about two teenage friends and an older woman who went on a road trip in search of a lost beach.
 
 

The construction of the Bolaño backlash

Horacio Castellanos Moya (Image from Sampsonia Way)

 

If Jorge Volpi presented a novel take on the "Bolaño phenomenon", then Horacio Castellanos Moya wrote something misinformed and misleading about it. The infamous essay was called "Bolaño Inc." and a translation of it appeared in Guernica in November 2009.

I had told myself I wasn’t going to say or write anything more about Roberto Bolaño. The subject has been squeezed dry these last two years, above all in the North American press, and I told myself that there was already enough drunkenness. But here I am writing about him again, like a vicious old man, like the alcoholic who promises that this will be the last drink of his life and who, the next morning, swears that he will only have one more to cure his hangover. The blame for my relapse goes to my friend Sarah Pollack, who sent me her insightful academic essay on the construction of the “Bolaño myth” in the United States. Sarah is a professor at The City University New York and her text “Latin America Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in the United States” was published in the summer issue of the journal Comparative Literature.

Albert Fianelli, an Italian fellow journalist, parodies a quote often attributed to Herman Goering and says that every time someone mentions the word “market,” he reaches for his revolver. I’m not so extreme, but neither do I believe the story that the market is some kind of deity that moves on its own according to mysterious laws. The market has its landlords, like everything on this infected planet, and it’s the landlords of the market who decide the mambo that you dance, whether it’s selling cheap condoms or Latin American novels in the U.S. I say this because the central idea of Pollack’s work is that behind the construction of the Bolaño myth was not only a publisher’s marketing operation but also a redefinition of the image of Latin American culture and literature that the U.S. cultural establishment is now selling to the public.

I don’t know if it’s my bad luck or if it happens to my colleagues as well, but every time that I’ve found myself on American soil—at the airport bar, at a social gathering, wherever—and I’ve made the mistake of admitting to a citizen of that country that I’m a fiction writer who comes from Latin America, that person will immediately pull out García Márquez, and will do it, what’s more, with a self-satisfied smile, as if he were saying to me, “I know you, I know where you come from.” (Of course, I’ve found myself with wilder ones who boast about Isabel Allende or Paolo Coelho, which, ultimately, makes no difference at all, since Allende and Coelho are little more than the light and self-help versions of García Márquez.) As time goes by, however, those same North Americans, at those same bars and social gatherings, have begun to pull out Bolaño.

The key idea is that for thirty years, the work of García Márquez, with its magical realism, represented Latin American literature in the imagination of the North American reader. But since everything tarnishes and ends up losing its luster, the cultural establishment eventually went looking for something new. It sounded out the guys in the literary groups called McOndo and Crack, but they didn’t fit the enterprise—above all, as Sarah Pollack explains, it was very difficult to sell the North American reader on the world of iPods and Nazi spy novels as the new image of Latin America and its literature. Then Bolaño appeared with his The Savage Detectives and his visceral realism.

Castellanos Moya's full essay was published here.

There were several strong reactions to this essay, but I think Garth Risk Hallberg at The Millions offered the most cogent refutation of Castellanos Moya's thesis which was inspired by Sarah Pollack's analysis of Latin American literature.

A year after his essay appeared, Castellanos Moya was still patting himself on the back. From his interview in Sampsonia Way:

In “Bolaño Inc,” which appeared in Guernica in 2009, you bemoan publishers’ marketing of Latin-American literature in the U.S and the mythologized image they assign to popular writers such as Roberto Bolaño. Did you see some of the responses you got when that was published?

Yes. Some people sent me emails. But all the anger of these people is normal. Bolaño is an idol, so people don’t read him as a writer. We live in very empty times, so you look for someone to fill your emptiness, and some people read fiction looking for truth, for a kind of salvation, which is why a writer like Paulo Coelho is so popular. And it’s funny, these attacks on that article, most of them came from Latin American residents in the USA, because those are the ones who feel much more vulnerable when you attack all this celebrity crap of American culture that they believe in. [Laughs] When the article was first published in the daily newspaper La Nación from Buenos Aires, the reactions were very positive.

Castellanos Moya is a Salvadoran novelist. He is the author of Senselessness, Dance With Snakes, The She-Devil in the Mirror, and Tyrant Memory. According to Bolaño, who read four of his books, his best novel—"or at least the darkest, a long tirade against El Salvador that caused Castellanos Moya to receive death threats obliging him to go into exile yet again"—was El asco. Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador ("Nausea: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador"). Bolaño wrote further in Between Parentheses:

El asco, of course, isn't just a settling of scores or a writer's response to a moral and political situation that he finds profoundly discouraging, it's also a stylistic exercise, a parody of certain works by Bernhard, and the kind of book that makes you laugh out loud. Sadly, very few people in El Salvador have read Bernhard, and fewer still have a sense of humor. One's country is no laughing matter. [...] Herein lies one of the book's many virtues: nationalists can't abide it. Its acid humor, like a Buster Keaton movie or a time bomb, threatens the hormonal stability of the idiots who, upon reading it, feel an irresistible urge to string the author up in the town square. Truly, I know of no greater honor for a real writer.

I'm not sold on "Bolaño Inc.", but I'm game with El asco. Anything that invoked Bernhard, even in a mode of parody, and apparently doing so with skyrocketing humor, and politically motivated, should have a place in the reading list.



Related links:

"The Peculiar Art of Cultural Formations" by Sarah Pollack (pdf)
"Snatch" (fiction)
Excerpt from the novel Senselessness (1)
Excerpt from the novel Senselessness (2)
"A Dangerous Homage"—appendix to El asco
"Notes/Wanderings"
Interview and excerpts from "Revulsion"
The Nation profile written by Natasha Wimmer
Q&A With Horacio Castellanos Moya
On Heinrich von Kleist
The Poet Versus Lady Macbeth
Read This Next: Tyrant Memory
Snapshot: El Salvador
A Conversation With Horacio Castellanos Moya

By night in Mexico

Among the novels written by Roberto Bolaño, translator Natasha Wimmer was quick to identify The Savage Detectives as her favorite. According to her, it is "just the easiest one to fall for". While working on her translation of the novel, she personally went to Mexico and visited the places mentioned in the book. She talked about it in an interview posted in Granta Online Only:

I know that you spent some time in Mexico City when working on The Savage Detectives, Bolaño’s debut novel – in what way did this affect your interpretation of the book?

Natasha Wimmer: [T]he time I spent there completely transformed my understanding of the book. The Savage Detectives is a love song to Mexico City, and to walk the same streets that Bolaño and his characters walked gave me a very intimate, visceral sense of the city and the novel. There’s something about Mexico City at night, in particular, that’s distinctive. For one thing, it’s darker than most other cities I know, which means that things seem to loom out at you as you walk, and you have the sense that you’re on the verge of the kind of bizarre encounter that Bolaño’s characters have all the time. I also spent time at Café La Habana (the original of Café Quito in the novel), which hasn’t changed much since Bolaño hung out there, and I stumbled over all kinds of cultural details that saved me from translation pitfalls (‘El Santo’??? for example, was one of the notes scribbled on my first draft of the translation; he is, of course, Mexico’s most famous masked wrestler, as I soon discovered).

EL SANTO

Premio Herralde; Premio Rómulo Gallegos

Los detectives salvajes won two major awards in Latin America. One was the Premio Rómulo Gallegos which put Roberto Bolaño's name alongside those of the Boom writers Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes. The other was the Premio Herralde de Novela, awarded yearly by the Editorial Anagrama to an unpublished novel in Spanish language by a writer of any nationality. The prize, given every November, comes with a purse of 18,000 euros.


Selected winners of Premio Herralde:

1985 Adelaida García Morales (El silencio de las sirenas / Silence of the Sirens)
1986 Javier Marías (El hombre sentimental / The Man of Feeling)
1992 Paloma Díaz-Mas (El sueño de Venecia)
1997 Jaime Bayly (La noche es virgen)
1998 Roberto Bolaño (Los detectives salvajes / The Savage Detectives)
2002 Enrique Vila-Matas (El mal de Montano / Montano's Malady, also published as Montano)
2003 Alan Pauls (El pasado / The Past)
2004 Juan Villoro (El testigo)
2006 Alberto Barrera Tyszka (La enfermedad / The Sickness)
2008 Daniel Sada (Casi nunca / Almost Never)
2010 Antonio Ungar (Tres ataúdes blancos)


The complete list of winners of the Herralde Prize is found here, that of Rómulo Gallegos is here.

Bolaño Infra

A great little find for fans (and maybe even future fans) of a certain 1998 Roberto Bolaño novel, Bolaño Infra.  1975-1977: Los años que inspiraron Los detectives salvajes [Infra Bolaño, 1975-1977: The Years That Inspired The Savage Detectives] provides a short but thoroughly satisfying account of Bolaño's mid-twenties in Mexico during the time when the then aspiring poet was co-founding the Infrarrealist movement and raising hell with a gang of bohemian friends and sympathizers who would later become immortalized within the pages of The Savage Detectives as the "visceral realists."

What a find! By Richard's positive review at Caravana de recuerdos, this book by Montserrat Madariaga Caro looks like a fine addition to the ever expanding shelf devoted to Bolaniana. Let it be translated and the world will be right.

MONTSERRAT MADARIAGA CARO (PHOTO)

The Savage Detectives Group Read

Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me, says one Juan García Madero. A book is the best pillow there is, says Roberto Bolaño.

Richard of Caravana de recuerdos and I think one of these notable pillow books could be Bolaño's cult object Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives, translated by Natasha Wimmer). We are hosting a group read of this novel in January 2012.

All are cordially invited – rebels, poets, bloggers, slackers. It's not poetry reading but it could have the same effect.

Savagery or previous experience as detective isn't required to participate. Nor is one expected to be a member of an avant-garde group like the visceral realists.

All one needs to do is sleep on the book and maybe join in on the discussion. Readers become "salvajes" in their own right.

Bloggers may post reviews and impressions anytime in January but "official" discussion starts on the last weekend of the month (Jan. 27-29). We'll link to your reviews.

About the book. At around 600 pages, it's a hefty pillow. We can't promise a wild poet chase, but wildness and unwieldiness shouldn't be in short supply. (Here's an excerpt.)

This early announcement should give readers plenty of headway. It's probably best to start early with the detective work. Or you can wait till All Souls Day, when our narrator began to write his adventures. Or the new year. It may turn out to be a firecracking yearstarter.

You can read this as part of the Bolaño Reading Challenge. It's supposed to end this year, but we'll count this toward your future Godzilla status.

"Detectives-Readers"

Richard, Caravana de recuerdos

mel u, The Reading Life

Amateur Reader (Tom), Wuthering Expectations

Emily, Evening All Afternoon

Scott, seraillon

Frances, Nonsuch Book

Stu, Winstonsdad's Blog

Anthony, Time's Flow Stemmed

Bettina, Liburuak
Gavin, Page247
Sarah, A Rat in the Book Pile 
Caroline, Beauty is a Sleeping Cat
Jeremy, READIN
Becky, Page Turners
Séamus, Vapour Trails
Amy, The House of the Seven Tails
nicole, bibliographing
Bellezza, Dolce Bellezza
Sarah, what we have here is a failure to communicate
Col, Col Reads
Selena, luxe hours
Claire, kiss a cloud

The red image is from a design by Jenny Volvovski (From Cover to Cover). It is used with permission. You may copy and insert this badge in your blog.

 
(cross-posted)

What Ishiguro read in 2009

My reading this year was dominated by Roberto Bolaño's two massive novels, The Savage Detectives and 2666 (both Picador). The first is the superior, but 2666, for all its occasional longueurs, is still quite magnificent. Bolaño links seamlessly South American, US and European traditions; modernism with gritty realism and the crime thriller. These are both important works and the advent of Bolaño is a significant moment in the history of modern fiction.

– Kazuo Ishiguro, Books of the year 2009, The Observer

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/22/books-of-the-year-2009