Book Review: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

Marcelo Ballvé reviews Roberto Bolaño's "Savage Detectives".

There are certain books that mark generations. That is the case, in the English-speaking world, with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which left an indelible imprint on the generation that came of age before World War II. It is also the case with David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which more than any work seems to capture the self-obsessed, hyper-kinetic madness of the ‘90s.

Such milestone books don’t come along that often, and it is always a risky proposition to try to single them out. It’s possible that in another decade, Infinite Jest will seem less relevant, and another novel will rise to take its place as the book that marked Generation X or Y, whichever ends up being the paradigmatic millennium-straddling class.

The English-speaking world, though, is only a slice of the literary universe. I have lived my entire life in a state of linguistic schizophrenia, dividing my brain between English and Spanish. That means I am a confused person, but there are also compensations to be had for living with such duel-mindedness.

One of the most rewarding experiences in my reading life has been to observe the meteoric posthumous ascent of Chile-born novelist Roberto Bolaño, who died at age 50 in 2003. Even before he died, his 1998 novel Los Detectives Salvajes (just published by FSG in English as The Savage Detectives) was being hailed as a literary landmark, of the kind that only comes along once in a generation. At this point, it seems safe to say it will exercise a dominant influence on Spanish-language readers for many years to come. Curiously, for a generation-marking novel, it is not so much about the times in which it was written as it is about the disillusionments of the late 20th century, namely the foundering utopias of the ‘70s, decades of ugly violence in Latin America. Read More

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Latin American Literature

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón

John Freeman reviews Daniel Alarcón's "Lost City Radio".

This novel could feel like a political tract, were it not so skilful at portraying the moral insanity of war. Lost City Radio reveals how hard it is to separate villains from victims, killers from the killed.

The novel's key plot revolves around a boy who is sent from a village to the city to have a list of names read on Norma's show. His appearance sets off a chain of events that show how all the characters are more connected than at first appears.

Alarcón is still in his late 20s, but he has a veteran's control of the complicated plot mechanisms this storyline requires. More impressively, time and again he resists the urge to bring the hammer of judgment down upon any of his characters.

We emerge from this impressive political fable with a profound sense of loss and rage, and a clarifying glimpse into the futility of violence.

"What does the end of a war mean," Alarcón writes, early in the novel, "if not that one side ran out of men willing to die?" Read More

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Latin American Literature

Interview with Isabel Allende

Aida Edemariam wrote a biographical piece on Isabel Allende.

It wasn't until she had published her third book, Eva Luna (1989), that she left her day job at a school for the disabled, and, for good measure, her marriage. Allende has an unusual willingness to make her private life public. Her website contains a selection of personal photographs; she has written without reservation (though with self-mockery, too) of the way in which she met her second husband, "an Irish-looking North American lawyer with an aristocratic appearance and a silk tie who spoke Spanish like a Mexican bandido and had a tattoo on his left hand" at an event for Of Love and Shadows (1987). Within a couple of weeks she had mailed him a contract detailing her demands, and what she was prepared to offer in a relationship, even though she was "absolutely shocked by the way he lived - by how awful his family was. He had three biological children, all of them drug addicts. How can you have three children, all of them drug addicts? No sense of family, everybody disconnected." He soon found himself the subject of a novel, The Infinite Plan (1993); she found that his often invented Spanglish was creeping into her writing; these days she has her work trawled for linguistic and grammatical oddities.

"If I had to choose between a relative and a good story, I would take the story," she says of the outrage that The House of the Spirits provoked among her relatives in Chile. This tendency produced a 1995 memoir that has been called - with good reason - her masterpiece. It was written at her daughter Paula's bedside, after the 29-year-old had fallen into a year-long coma following complications due to porphyria. Intended at first as a way to fill in the gaps for her daughter when she woke, Paula is furious, grieving, recklessly honest; occasionally, when Allende begins to realise that her daughter will never return, is in fact dying, it is unbearably so. Her mother, who was her trusted editor, was horrified and wanted her to turn it into a novel. Allende tried; it felt wrong, a betrayal of Paula, and she refused.

A year later Gordon's daughter disappeared, presumed murdered. (The oldest child has been in and out of prison his whole life; the youngest, after eight years of heroin, is clean.) It was nearly the end of their marriage. "But every time I mentioned the word divorce, Willie would drag me to therapy. He was determined to keep this thing going. And he won. It was very funny, because I remember once we made a deal that for three weeks we would not mention the word divorce, no matter what. We could kill each other, but that word was not going to be mentioned. And it saved us, because we realised that if you put your energy into solving the problem instead of running away, everything shifts." It was five years before she could write again, and she tested the water with Aphrodite (1998), a book of recipes and aphrodisiacs. She had started Daughter of Fortune (1999), about Chileans in the California gold rush, before Paula fell ill, but didn't finish it for another seven years. It's a sweeping melodrama, full of flashing eyes and pirates and love at first sight.

Allende knows this sort of thing means she doesn't often get reviewed - especially in Chile, where she is nevertheless popular (Inés has been at the top of the bestseller lists since it was published there in August) - but she is defiant. "I think that any writer who is commercial, who sells a lot of books, has to face criticism. Because the more hermetic and the more difficult your book is, supposedly it's better. But as a journalist you learn that you have a readership, and you have to connect with that readership no matter what. If your readers do not pick up your book and read it, you've wasted your time. I want people to identify with the characters, to know that other people feel the same way. To know that what is happening to them at a particular point - a child dying or something - has happened before and will happen again." Read More

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Chilean Literature

Bogota39

Bogotá, this year's World Book Capital, and the Hay Festival presented a list of the new generation of Latin American Novelists.

This selection was made by a jury composed three Colombian novelists Piedad Bonnet, Oscar Collazos y Héctor Abad Faciolince, from the suggestions made by readers, editors and literary agents in the Hay Festival web site.

Here's the Bogotá39 list of 39 Latin American novelists under 39 years:

• Andrés Neuman, Argentina - 30 years.
• Pedro Mairal, Argentina - 37 years.
• Gonzalo Garcés, Argentina - 33 years.
• Rodrigo Hasbún, Bolivia - 27 years.
• Veronica Stigger, Brasil - 34 years.
• Santiago Nazarian, Brasil - 30 years.
• Adriana Lisboa, Brasil - 37 years.
• João Paulo Cuenca, Brasil - 29 years.
• Alejandro Zambra, Chile - 32 years.
• Alvaro Bisama, Chile - 32 years.
• Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Colombia - 34 years.
• Antonio Ungar, Colombia - 30 years.
• Ricardo Silva, Colombia - 32 years.
• Pilar Quintana, Colombia - 35 years.
• John Junieles, Colombia - 37 years.
• Antonio García, Colombia - 35 years.
• Karla Suárez, Cuba - 38 years.
• Ena Lucía Portela, Cuba - 35 years.
• Rolando Menéndez, Cuba - 37 years.
• Wendy Guerra, Cuba - 37 years.
• Leonardo Valencia, Ecuador - 38 years.
• Gabriela Alemán, Ecuador - 39 years.
• Claudia Hernández, El Salvador - 32 years.
• Eduardo Halfon, Guatemala - 36 years.
• Jorge Volpi, México - 39 years.
• Guadalupe Nettel, México - 35 years.
• Fabrizio Mejía Madrid, México - 39 years.
• Álvaro Enrigue, México - 38 years.
• Carlos Wynter Melo, Panama - 36 years.
• José Pérez Reyes, Paraguay - 34 years.
• Ivan Thays, Peru - 39 years.
• Santiago Roncagliolo, Perú - 32 years.
• Daniel Alarcón, Perú - 30 years.
• Yolanda Arroyo, Puerto Rico - 37 years.
• Junot Díaz, Dominican Republic - 39 years.
• Pablo Casacuberta, Uruguay - 38 years.
• Claudia Amengual, Uruguay - 38 years.
• Slavko Zupcic, Venezuela - 37 years.
• Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, Venezuela - 26 years.

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Latin American Literature

Scott Esposito reviews Roberto Bolaño's "The Savage Detectives".

In January, New Directions published a translation of the short, lyric and stunning Amulet. Now Farrar, Straus & Giroux has published The Savage Detectives, the first of Bolaño's big books. Upon its original publication in 1998, this sprawling, 600-page ode to Latin America's lost generation of post-boom writers won the Romulo Gallegos Prize and launched Bolaño into the Spanish-language stratosphere.

The novel consists of two main parts. Squat in the middle is a bulky series of monologues. Bookending the monologues are two 100-page segments from the journal of a 17-year-old poet living in 1970s Mexico City. What ties it all together are Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, two poets trying to promote "visceral realist" writing. The book traces their flight from Mexico City to wander the world, desperately clinging to the only things that matter to them: poetry and true, perhaps forlorn, love. [...]

The Savage Detectives embraces pain as something essential and unavoidable, and renewal as pain's logical companion. Ulises and Arturo forge a sense of who they are that props them up and helps them embrace the lives they have chosen. Moreover, though their generation may be lost, there will be others: At one point a character tells a science-fiction story about a rich heiress and a naive tramp who fall deeply into an ideal love. Their perfect bond is cut short by cancer, and the heiress constructs a garden of Eden where a clone of the tramp and herself will be brought up to fall in love. What if the experiment fails? a scientist asks. Another responds: It doesn't matter. The experiment will be endlessly repeated. "Sublime, in a way, but creepy too," opines the teller. "Like all crazy loves, don't you think?"

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Chilean Literature

A few extracts of reviews on Alberto Manguel's biographical novel depicting Robert Louis Stevenson's final days in Samoa.

Alberto Manguel, who evidently shares the enthusiasm for Robert Louis Stevenson of his friend Borges, has written this short tale of the RLS of the Samoa days. This is the very end, with Stevenson barely fit for firing off missives to the Times about Germans or any other nationality. Known as Tusitala, “the teller of tales”, Stevenson is a benign presence on the island. He defended the native people against the interests of colonialists and the more aggressive missionaries, as well as defending the reputation of Father Damien, “the leper priest of Molokai” from rivals from other denominations (although his defence would offend the pious Damien enthusiast as much as the attacks)

This novella - short story really - is a beguiling fiction weaved around those last days. Robert Louis Stevenson, wracked by the final stages of tuberculosis, filled with “nostalgia for places he had never been.” Mr Baker, a missionary, whose increasingly psychotic preachings resemble less and less the gospels and more and more a dark, genocidal vision of destruction, makes his appearance on the island. Repelled by his rhetoric, Stevenson is nevertheless beguiled by Baker’s accent, taking him back to the Edinburgh of his youth. Baker, however, has nothing but scorn for Tusitala, to the writer that: “you would be better employed reading to them from the Scriptures. That is the only truth.”
by Seamus Sweeney

Manguel's Stevenson went to Samoa to be able to breathe but is oppressed by a combination of status and inertia. He comes across Baker, a missionary from Edinburgh, who is delighted to meet Samoa's "chief celebrity", and they reminisce about Scotland while watching the sun go down. After this convivial start, the story becomes one of shadows: a girl whom Stevenson has publicly admired is raped and killed. His hat (a famous attribute) is found nearby.

Trapped heat suffuses everything: the movements of a crowd, which are "unpredictable and strong as a blaze"; the obscenely rotting papayas, the mouldering books and clothes, Stevenson's inexpressible desire, and the extreme red of the blood he coughs up, which is the same colour as the flower in the murdered girl's hair. Baker, who loathes the island's "poisonous brightness", proves to be a fanatic and a drunk. Stevenson is implicated by the evidence of people who swear that they saw him in places he couldn't have been - or could he? Rumours and accusations thicken the toxic atmosphere, and no one's version of events adds up.

This contrived fiction works well as a novella, a form which can bring out the artifice in a writer to remarkable, or rococo, effect. Here, plain speech bumps up against formal debate and undigested biographical matter, while people act according to the information they have to convey. Syntactical oddities make the book read at times as if it were in translation, but this adds to the general air of mediation.
from Telegraph.co.uk

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Hyde in Bournemouth in 1885, and died in Samoa 10 years later. Alberto Manguel, of Argentinian descent, author of a notable History of Reading, has read into Stevenson's last days a gothic drama that places the writing of the novel at the end of his life, and makes use of the report that his wife Fanny caused him to burn his first draft on the grounds that it had made a story out of an allegory. Stevenson's second shot stresses the "thorough and primitive duality of man", the idea that every thinking fellow feels himself at times to be two fellows. Manguel's novella borrows from Stevenson's letters, from the expurgated edition of 1899: the story it tells is about the writer of the letters, but it could also be considered counterfactual. It seems to point a dualistic moral, and it bears a faint likeness to the stories of the Argentinian (and Stevensonian) allegorist, Borges.

Juxtaposing Jekyll with Stevenson's unfinished novel Weir of Hermiston, which he was writing at the time of his death, brings out a duality in his art. The first of these novels is in English. Parts of the second are in Scots. He was a writer who excelled when he turned to the language of his youth. A fair number of his critics miss the point, and lack feeling for the Scots tongue.

The exiled Stevenson was both a laird and a scarecrow. To protect his lungs he had cast himself away in the thick of a tropical rain forest. "We are a very crazy couple to lead so rough a life." But he wrote some of his very best and most Scottish things in a Samoa of tribal chiefs, diplomats, missionaries, servants, labourers, lotus-eaters. There he would sit lustrous-eyed, in his moustaches, playing his flageolet, a touching sight. Horrid Henry Adams, the American historian and snob, called him a filthy "bundle of sticks in a bag". But he also walked with kings, while the European powers quarrelled over the islands' natural resources. A relative of mine, a British colonial servant stationed in Fiji, saw him as "a meddling conceited fool, who thinks as a successful novelist he should be allowed to try to rule Samoa".
by Karl Miller, The Guardian

In this uncluttered novella illustrated by Stevenson's own woodcuts, I had the strange sensation of stumbling across an oasis in a desert of too many words. Reading felt as soothing as exhaling. Which is both ironic and to the point, given Manguel's subject matter: the final months of Stevenson's sickly life in Samoa, where he went to breathe more easily. Manguel prefaces his work with Goethe's caveat: "No one wanders under palm trees unpunished." When the author finds himself drawn to a young girl at a ceremony, he recalls St Augustine thanking God for "not making him responsible for his dreams". The girl is later found raped and murdered, with Stevenson's hat in the vicinity. The fiction of his mind finds increasingly alarming ways of crawling out. Far from Edinburgh Presbyterianism, in a land where "the stories you tell become part of reality", Manguel offers a terrifying defence for and indictment of the "claptrap of fiction".
by Sarah Adams, The Guardian

In Stevenson Under the Palm Trees, the Argentine literary critic Alberto Manguel (who describes readers as "post-mortem creators") resuscitates the Victorian author, creating a murder mystery based on his final days in Samoa. Much has been made of Stevenson's atheism (particularly in contrast with his father's Calvinism), and in this taut novella, the spiritual struggle comes to a head: Stevenson falls victim to a malady he could reasonably be credited with inventing—a split personality à la Jekyll and Hyde. "Open—brash, unhidden," he is haunted by a ghost-like missionary, "reserved, whispered, buttoned-up." When a young girl on the island is raped, the reader is not sure whether the writer did it, or the missionary, or whether—as Stevenson puts it in his 1886 classic—"these incongruous faggots were . . . bound together."
by Rachel Aviv, Village Voice

In the novella, the ailing Stevenson, out watching a beautiful island sunset, encounters a stranger, a Scottish missionary who straightaway announces his disgust with the easy morality and vices of the natives. A short time later, with that sudden compression that fables specialize in, the body of a beautiful young girl is found in the hills, and the author's hat is discovered nearby. There is just enough ambiguity -- abetted by Stevenson's delirious fevers -- to direct our thoughts to the theme of the double. As it turns out, Stevenson himself is involved with this theme in the work he is struggling with, a grim Scottish fantasia that bears a distinct resemblance to his famous Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Manguel's spare storybook style keeps us from deeper engagement with the plot but serves him well at the end, when the suggestions and implications are most densely woven. Then he can create a sonorous cadence in keeping with the dark intention of this little work: "He tried not to think of what had happened. Here, in the green heat, that which was forbidden was not mentioned. Evil was tabu, unuttered, it was not given existence in words. On the stones of Edinburgh was written, in the Gothic script that had so delighted Sir Walter Scott in his youth, the Old Testament warning, Thou Shalt Not, so that during Stevenson's wanderings through the city his eye would always land, unbidden, on the outlawed temptations, the sins spelled out for all to know, offered as in a dark mirror even to those who had not yet conceived them, like an inverted pleasure." Though we do hear the Stevensonian echo throughout, only in these last pages does the note ring clear.
by Sven Birkerts, Washington Post

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Argentine Literature

Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa revealed on Monday that he is currently writing a new novel which will be the last part of his trilogy he started in 1988 with the release of “Elogio a la madrastra” (In Praise of the Stepmother) and continued in 1997 with “Los cuadernos de Don Rigoberto” (Notebooks of Don Rigoberto).

The probable title of his latest work in progress will be “Las cartas de Doña Lucrecia” (The letters of Doña Lucrecia), Vargas Llosa advanced in an interview with Mexican W Radio. The new novel will include the same characters of its two predecessors - Don Rigoberto, his son Alfonso and second wife Lucrecia. Read More

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Peruvian Literature

Susan Wyndham reviews The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1 which includes the Jorge Luis Borges 1967 interview.

Jorge Luis Borges, on the other hand, enjoyed the interview so much that he ignored his secretary's frequent reminders that a Senor Campbell was waiting for him. "The Campbells are coming!" he cheers as he ploughs on in his demolition of English-language writers from Shakespeare onwards. The text is footnoted with minor factual corrections, suggesting the blind Borges either didn't check the text or didn't care.

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Latin American Literature

Jenny Cockle interviews Isabel Allende.

My Chile is an idealised country, probably frozen in the 1970s; it's the old country where I grew up. Though I was born in Peru my parents were Chilean diplomats (the children of diplomats always take on the nationality of their parents) and we returned to Chile during my childhood to live in my grandfather's house in Calle Cueto, Santiago. That particular house really marked me. All my memories of Chile are rooted there. I suppose I've created a utopian country in my mind, the one you find in Pablo Neruda's poetry.

I returned to Chile recently to make a film for The South Bank Show. It's a different country now, especially Santiago. If you travel out of the city, you can still find some of the old-style Chilean hospitality and kindness that I remember. But Santiago has grown into a huge city of 6 million people; everybody is in such a hurry all the time, and there are terrible problems with traffic and smog. During filming, we took the funicular up the San Cristobel Hill. Fortunately, it was a beautiful sunny day and there was no smog, so we got a great view of the city. We could see the whole of Santiago.

Yet, in many ways, I think the country has changed for the better. For example, we now have excellent roads, great airlines and trains that run on time; it's a very efficient place. You might be robbed of a gold chain, but generally there's little violence. It's a safe, wonderful place for European tourists to visit.

In 10 years, Chile has lowered poverty from 39 per cent to 18 per cent, which is astonishing. It's a very prosperous country, yet there's still a gap between the very rich and the rest of the country, which I find appalling. There is a small group of billionaires who control the economy living up in the Santiago hills in gated communities. They live in another world. The country was much, much poorer when I lived there. Now, at least, you don't see all the shanty towns that used to surround the city.

Although I visit Chile three or four times a year, my home now is in Marin County, north of South Francisco. I've often said that I don't fit in anywhere but I almost feel at home in California. When I return to Chile I feel wonderful initially because I can speak with my native accent; I get the humour and all the little codes that you truly understand only in a place where you've grown up. I love all of that. Then after two weeks, I need to get out. There's no privacy because people recognise me in the street and although they are very kind, you can't work in that kind of atmosphere.

It's funny that Chileans look like such mellow people, but anything can spark off the terrible violence that's in our history. We descend from the Mapuche, one of the bravest tribes in Latin America. They were pacified in the 1800s but they never surrendered and I think that formed the spirit of the nation.

I've travelled all over the country - to Easter Island and Patagonia in the south and to the desert in the north. Chile is a great destination to explore but it's a long way away from Europe, so you'll need at least two weeks there.

There's not much of interest in Santiago, but about an hour and a half away is the coastal town of Isla Negra, where you can visit the former home of Neruda, now a museum. He was a collector of all kinds of junk. In his day I would have called it junk but now he's dead, it's "a collection". His poetry had a great influence on Chile. People go there to pay homage and some even stand and recite his poems by heart.

But if I were visiting Chile for the first time, I would go south, to the lakes, the forest, the volcanoes and the island of Chiloe, which is actually an archipelago. If I had more than two weeks, I would add the south of Patagonia, in particular the national park, Torres del Paine, which is surrounded by the most beautiful mountains. Fly to the city of Punta Arenas, and from there, drive for six or seven hours into Patagonia until you reach the wonderful eco-tourist park and hotel Torres del Paine. You need to stay for at least five days because there's such a lot to see: glaciers, mountains. It's the most beautiful landscape in the world. My son says the best part of Chile is the desert up in the north around San Pedro de Atacama; I agree that the desert is fantastic, but I don't think it's as stunning as the south.

Many people come to Chile during the summer in Europe or the US, because it's our winter and we can offer great winter sports. There is also some wonderful fishing to be had. In summer, there are lovely coastal towns to visit in the north such as Antofagasta and La Serena. These are picturesque little towns with beautiful beaches, but the water is really cold. In the south there are no real beaches but you can go to the lakes, which are beautiful. It's a wonderful sight to see the volcanoes reflected on the water.

I grew up in an area of Santiago called Providencia, where my parents still live. My happiest times were spent during the time I was living there, when I was working as a journalist on a magazine called Paula. I was young and still in love with my first husband, and we had two small children. We lived in a tiny house. We had no money, but at the time, the country was changing. The three years when my uncle Salvador Allende and his government were in power were so interesting. It was the beginning of the 1970s, with the sexual revolution, great music, hippies...

I stayed in Chile until about a year after the military coup of 1973, and although it was very sad to leave, I had no choice. I just couldn't have lived under Pinochet's regime. So I went to Venezuela for what I thought was going to be a short time - I never quite unpacked - but I ended up living there for 13 years.

Throughout that time, I was always looking south and hoping to return to Chile as soon as we had a democracy again. But by the time we did, I had met my second husband, William, and was living in the United States. I don't think about what my life would have been like if I'd stayed in Chile - you can't think like that. What if I'd stayed in Venezuela?

It feels natural to keep my Chilean history alive in my books. I don't ever say I'm going to write a book about this or that, but I sit down on 8 January each year and something comes to me. My first novel, The House of the Spirits, started off as a letter to my dying grandfather. And my book Paula started off as a letter to my daughter, who had fallen into a coma. I've just written a memoir based on the letters I've exchanged with my mother over many years. So letters are very important in my life.

I still love my work. I love telling stories and I love the silence that the story requires. I'm not a very social person. I'm not introverted or shy, but I enjoy my privacy and spending time alone. When I'm writing, I don't always feel in control because the story has a way of going in totally unexpected directions. As I work, the characters start shaping up in very different ways. People often want a happy ending but I can't do that. It's not about a happy ending or a bad ending; it's just an open ending. Tomorrow things may be different. Read More

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Latin American Literature

Amanda Heller reviews Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio

We have been here before, in the totalitarian brave new world of "Lost City Radio." This self-defeated place has no name, though that of the author's native Peru will do as well as any other.

The heroine of the novel, Norma, is her unhappy country's earth mother of the airwaves. On her radio show she reads aching messages from people looking for loved ones separated over years of war and disruption or, more likely, "disappeared" into the grasp of a vicious regime. What her listeners do not know is that Norma's husband, Rey, is among the missing. Rey has a second, secret life, which Norma suspects, as a member of the underground insurgency, and another about which she knows nothing until a boy from the exotic interior makes his way to the city seeking her help.

An expansive political fable, an urgent mystery, a story of doomed love: Daniel Alarcón has chosen no easy assignment for his first novel. Fortunately his talent is equal to the task. No one in the compromised world of "Lost City Radio" is as innocent as we suppose or as guilty as charged by a paranoid dictatorship. Alarcón relates this haunting tale in shades of gray, breaking the rules for concocting a fable but honoring those for conveying truth.

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Latin American Literature

Harriet Paterson reviews Inés of My Soul by Isabel Allende.

Ferocious Indians and hostile geography were grist to the average conquistador's mill in the early 16th century. The real problem with organising an invasion of Chile was that there was no promise of gold. A disastrous expedition under Diego de Almagro in 1535 led to appalling hardship, many deaths, but worst of all, no treasure.

This makes Pedro de Valdivia, conqueror of Chile, even more pathologically single-minded than his contemporaries. Without the lure of riches, and with the grisly warnings of Almagro's survivors before them, no sensible Spaniard would have attempted another Chilean campaign. With fanatical obstinacy, Valdivia went anyway, lusting for glory, with just 10 soldiers and a group of Yanacona Indians.
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History tells us that Valdivia also took along his mistress, Inés Suarez. This gives Isabel Allende her novel: the bloodthirsty tale of invading the Americas is familiar, but here it is told from a woman's viewpoint.

This should be a fascinating story. It took the invaders a whole year to cross the Andes and the Atacama desert, one of the most desolate places on earth. When founding Santiago, their new capital, in 1541, they faced terrifying numbers of Mapuche Indians, warriors so fearsome that even the powerful Inca had failed to subdue them. Six months after the settlement was built, the Mapuche razed it. To withstand all this, Suarez must have been quite a woman.

Unfortunately for us, she knows it. As protagonist and narrator, she is insufferably self-satisfied, listing her achievements without a shred of irony. She hectors the hapless reader with her skill as a lover, her wise decisions, her astounding courage, wit, political nous and so on. She chops her enemies' heads off, she makes great chiefs turn and run. Along with the Indians, she kills our sympathy stone dead.

The narrative meanwhile suffers from flashback fever, jumping to and fro as Suarez looks back over her life. Major outcomes are anticipated without ceremony, whisking tension out from under the main storyline.

Despite lashings of gore, the book remains a bloodless affair. None of the characters ever quite lifts off the page. Even Allende's magic realism is a ghost of its former self, with a dead husband showing up to no dramatic effect. Somewhere in the transition from Allende's obviously extensive research to the novel, a riproaring story of ambition, venality and ruthlessness has sadly lost its guts.

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Chilean Literature

Emily Carter Roiphe reviews Roberto Bolaño's "The Savage Detectives".

Even satisfied adults will sometimes hear a train go by and become alert with desire: What would it be like to be in an open boxcar, the wind rushing through, the light shining, hurtling with an unknown purpose toward an unknown destination? It might be something like settling in to read Roberto Bolaño's combustible novel "The Savage Detectives." He remains cagey as to destination and reason, but his characters and their voices make the ride worthwhile.

From the first page it's evident that Bolaño, who was born in Chile and lived in Mexico, El Salvador and Spain before he died at 50 in 2003, is the godfather of the so-called dirty realist movement currently energizing South American literature. In fact, his main characters, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, are themselves the masterminds of an amorphous literary genre called "visceral realism," and they are on a quest for their own poetry icon, a woman who has vanished or been "disappeared" by powerful forces. It's a quest that will take them on a worldwide journey from Mexico, through Europe and into the Congo. Their odyssey is described not so much by them as by the extensive carnival of people they meet, into whose voices Bolaño breathes opinionated, fallible, tragicomic life: visceral realism at work.

This book was published in 1998, late in Bolaño's career and late in his life, cut short by liver disease. His rattlesnake wit, however, keeps hissing.

At a poetry workshop attended by the serious 17-year-old narrator in the first section of the book, students read their poems and the teacher shreds or praises them according to his mood. Sometimes he lets the students critique one another. The narrator observes that "it was the ideal method for ensuring that no one was friends with anyone, or else that our friendships were unhealthy and based on resentment." Anyone who has ever taken a workshop and seen opinion ripple like a breeze through wheat in response to the teacher's comments will respond with a hoarse laugh of recognition -- and this is just the first of many sweet-and-sour surprises.

The narrative of this book stretches across the world and employs a great number of points of view, each with its own startling voice and strange, often tangential, story to tell. It's as vast as Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude," but without that novel's stateliness. Bolaño could not care less about myth or tradition; what he wants is speed. As the poets chase their phantom across the world, the very real violence and corruption that surround them claw at any kind of meaning. Looking for logic in the midst of current events, says Bolaño, will only drive you mad.

Plot itself disintegrates under the weight of lies and chaos. In Bolaño's world, the only thing that keeps the disparate characters going is an underlying connection to and belief in the power of the written word. It's a small but sharp little weapon against the post-modern worldview, a view Bolaño continually engages in an uneasy dance. Perhaps it all means nothing. But if that is true, why write a 577-page book?

This glittering, tumbling diamond of a book was Bolaño's answer to chaos. With its strident, utterly believable characters and their stories, Bolaño sends a shot over the bow: When you are done with this book, you will believe there is no engine more powerful than the human voice. So don't worry about where the story is going. Listen to Bolaño's voice and marvel at the scope of his craft -- go along for the ride.

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Chilean Literature