Sunday With Books: The Savage Detectives

With this column, I try and avoid diving too deep into the realm of biography with the writers we choose to highlight. It’s true - the author’s life shouldn’t necessarily be a selling point for their books, but in this case, there’s a certain catharsis one obtains from understanding the life of Roberto Bolaño and his motives for writing that only adds to the experience of reading his work.

After a short-lived career and subsequent imprisonment as a socialist revolutionary during his youth in Chile, Bolaño moved to a Mediterranean village outside of Barcelona with the intent of dedicating his to life to poetry, which is exactly what he did for the next 23 years, pursuing a true beatnik existence, working - amongst other odd jobs - as a garbage collector to support his writing career. To live like this for the rest of his life would’ve sufficed: “Poetry is more than enough for me,” he writes in The Savage Detectives, "although sooner or later I’m bound to commit the vulgarity of writing stories.”

At the age of 38, two things happened that changed the course of Bolaño’s life: first, his wife gave birth to the couple’s first child. And less than a year later, Bolaño was diagnosed with an incurable liver disease. Garbage collecting would no longer pay the bills; Bolaño was forced to exploit his talent as a writer through what he considered a lower form of the art: the novel.

Luckily for Bolaño, he quickly became canonized as one of the all-time greats of Latin literature, right up there with Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges. His fourth novel, The Savage Detectives, was his magnum opus; it traces the history of a bizarre poetry movement called visceral realism, as told firsthand by a eccentric cast of weirdos, architects, students, stowaways, duchesses, and private investigators - personalities the likes of which only Bolaño could bring into being. — Jackson Todd