1. "You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can’t hold on to her with a poem."

    Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives (p. 172)

    FYI, FOLKS, THIS DOESN’T WORK WITH BOYS EITHER

    (via diseasedintelligence)

    You can woo life with a poem, but you can’t hold on to it that way.

  2. "For a long time I stopped existing."
    Roberto Belano in The Savage Detectives (via aeternums)
  3. "The food is cheap here. But there isn’t any work."
    The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano (1998)
  4. "Literature isn’t innocent."
    Roberto Bolaño, from The Savage Detectives (via aubade)
  5. "Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach."
    Roberto Bolaño (via doubledaybooks)
  6. "Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach."
    Roberto Bolano (2666)
  7. "Still, American television is full of smiles and more and more perfect-looking teeth. Do these people want us to trust them? No. Do they want us to think they’re good people? No again. The truth is they don’t want anything from us. They just want to show us their teeth, their smiles, and admiration is all they want in return. Admiration. They want us to look at them, that’s all. Their perfect teeth, their perfect bodies, their perfect manners, as if they were constantly breaking away from the sun and they were little pieces of fire, little pieces of blazing hell, here on this planet simply to be worshipped."
    Roberto Bolano (2666)

  8. »  Lit Bits: Bolaño's rising "North American" Star

    litbits:

    I’m a little late to this literary fracas, but I read The Savage Detectives last year & am interested in its success in the U.S…

    I came across this essay in Guernica by Honduran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya today… It’s extremely critical about the way Bolaño was marketed and canonized in a most calculating way by the U.S. (“North American”) publishing industry, starting with the publication of The Savage Detectives. According to Moya, they reduce him into a typical image of a James Dean, Jim Morrison, Jack Kerouac-type character, South American style. The novel was anointed as the next go-to impression for Americans to have of Latin America, because Garcia Marquez was getting old…

    I feel like the real issue with Bolano being mythologized or popularized misses a part of the novel. Isn’t Bolano poking fun at the way he was? His character is so broadly written and even avoided for much of the novel, only described from the point of view of others. I feel like The Savage Detectives is a series of facades, fronts people put up for others or for themselves. People trying to live a certain way and ultimately finding it futile. It’s a fair point to raise that Bolano was no longer the kind of wanderer his avatar was when the book came out. It’s also important, though, to remember that Bolano was supposed to have been more serious about poetry. Novels seem like a kind of game to him.

    Two parts of the book come to mind. The first is when someone’s coming out with a collection of young poets. The visceral realists aren’t in it. For the most part, they don’t want to be. That’s the uncomfortable part of Bolano becoming popular. Is that really what he wanted? Then again, the part that’s not in the book (for the most part) is what happens when he settles down. Maybe he did want recognition. I think that’s part of what The Savage Detectives is getting at. It’s silly not to want it. Still, it’s hard to imagine a promotion taking into account that kind of…tangled skein. That’s the problem with promotion. But as litbits says, it’s a necessary “evil.”

    The second part is when Ernesto San Epifanio dies. It was one of the more poignant moments in the book for me, and highlights the futility of the visceral realists’…well, idealism.

    I think the other part of Bolano’s promotion to keep in mind is 2666. I don’t think you can read that and essentialize Bolano in the way you might be able to with a cursory reading of The Savage Detectives. I think reading 2666 first was good for me.

  9. "…the aftereffects of his operation were visible in the streets, in the people without work, the petty thieves who would come out at seven in the evening to sit in the sun, like zombies (or messengers with no message or an untranslatable message) automatically primed to kill another evening in Mexico City.

    …Of his old friends, I was the only one who went to his burial, in one of the patchwork cemeteries on the north side of the city. I didn’t see any poets, ex-lovers, or editors of literary magazines. Lots of relatives and family friends and possibly every single one of the neighbors. Before I left the cemetery, two teenagers came up to me and tried to lead me somewhere. I thought they were going to rape me. Only then did I feel rage and pain at Ernesto’s death. I pulled a switchblade out of my purse and said: I’ll kill you, you little creeps. They went running and I chased them for a while down two or three cemetery streets. When I finally stopped, another funeral procession appeared. I put the knife in my bag and watched as they lifted the coffin into its niche, very carefully. I think it was a child. But I couldn’t say for sure. Then I left the cemetery and went to have drinks with a friend at a bar downtown."

    Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives, originally from Day n+3 (belated)

  10. "I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don’t have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions."
    Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives (via fuckyeahrobertobolano)

About me

Pursue understanding. Deconstruct systems in order to taste building blocks. Happiness waits else/everywhere. And the heart(h). Do spheres not pull at each other?
Moby-Dick, Forward

Read the Printed Word!
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