savageI think I’ve written before about my current love for Roberto Bolaño. I’ve read many of his books, enjoyed most of them, and loved a few of them (Nazi Literature in the Americas, Last Evenings on Earth, and especially By Night in Chile). I remember starting to read The Savage Detectives last year but something — like life — must have shoved its way in. I probably got about 120 pages in that time. Now that I’m 300+ pages into it I’m willing to say that it’s by far the best book I have read by him, easily the best book I’ve read in 2008, and has pages of writing that appraoch perfection.

I explained to Molly that “I think I’ve learned how to read him as an author and I didn’t know how before.” That’s a strange comment from an English teacher but one that is fitting. I had to understand that Bolaño wrote his books on multiple levels without appearing to favor one level over another. Thus every book contains multiple angles, and if you latch on to one approach the books quickly frustrate you. Thus you get the plot developed around the characters, usually containing moments of stunning insight, but also a meandering plot that’s eventually unsatisfying if that’s all you want. You get commentary about Latin American literature and the poetry of revolutionary Chile or Mexico and the nature of exile literature. You get overlapping characters and events that have to be bits of autobiography, usually expanded into metaphorical reflections on the hazards of writing. It’s all there and blended together. It’s absolutely stunning.

So here’s an example of a page from The Savage Detectives that approaches perfection:

There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we’ll soon see. Let’s take, for example, an average reader, a cool-headed, mature, educated man leading a more or less healthy life. A man who buys books and literary magazines. So there you have him. This man can read things that are written for when you’re calm, but he can also read any other kind of book with a critical eye, dispassionately, without absurd or regrettable com­plicity. That’s how I see it. I hope I’m not offending anyone. Now let’s take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He’s the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther. Second: he’s a limited reader. Why limited? That’s easy: because he can only read the literature of desperation, or books for the desperate, which amounts to the same thing, the kind of person or freak who’s unable to read all the way through In Search of Lost Time, for example, or The Magic Mountain (a para­digm of calm, serene, complete literature, in my humble opinion), or for that matter, Les Miserables or War and Peace. Am I making myself clear? Good. So I talked to them, told them, warned them, alerted them to the dangers they were facing. It was like talking to a wall. Furthermore: desperate readers are like the California gold mines. Sooner or later they’re exhausted! Why? It’s obvious! One can’t live one’s whole life in desperation. In the end the body rebels, the pain becomes unbearable, lucidity gushes out in great cold spurts. The desperate reader (and especially the desperate po­etry reader, who is insufferable, believe me) ends up by turning away from books. Inevitably he ends up becoming just plain des­perate. Or he’s cured! And then, as part of the regenerative process, he returns slowly — as if wrapped in swaddling cloths, as if under a rain of dissolved sedatives — he returns, as I was saying, to a litera­ture written for cool, serene readers, with their heads set firmly on their shoulders. This is what’s called (by me, if nobody else) the passage from adolescence to adulthood. And by that I don’t mean that once someone has become a cool-headed reader he no longer reads books written for desperate readers. Of course he reads them! Especially if they’re good or decent or recommended by a friend. But ultimately, they bore him! Ultimately, that literature of resent­ment, full of sharp instruments and lynched messiahs, doesn’t pierce his heart the way a calm page, a carefully thought-out page, a technically perfect page does. I told them so. I warned them. I showed them the technically perfect page. I alerted them to the dangers. Don’t exhaust the vein! Humility! Seek oneself, lose oneself in strange lands! But with a guiding line, with bread crumbs or white pebbles. And yet I was mad, driven mad by them, by my daughters, by Laura Damián, and so they didn’t listen.

My God, that’s incredible! It’s absolutely right, and anyone who has ever wallowed in the literature of desperation, and then partly grown out of it, knows it’s true. Anyone with an artistic temperament and a love of reading at 21 can rattle off books and see themselves in Bolaño’s description. My own history: Jack Kerouac, the literature of desperation hidden beneath a veneer of “kicks” and temporary enlightenment; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, both covering up desperation by locking on to Slavophilism and Christianity yet unable to write about anything except religious desperation; Herman Hesse, forever haunted by a desperation that feels only vaguely part of the past.

(Note that neither Bolaño nor I are speaking of desperation in a survival sense. This isn’t the literature of depression. It’s the literature of gasping for breath and trying to pull the whole world and all its experiences and meaning inside you at once. It’s the literature of lust and greed and restlessness and a demand to absorb life.)