The Savage Detectives discussion

I'm only 50 pages in. I enjoy the fact young Juan tells us right at the beginning he is reading the fiction of Pierre Louys. Incidentally, one of Louys's short novels was made into a film by Luis Buñuel in 1977 -- That Obscure Object of Desire. Also, even the English translation of the collected fiction of Louys has provocative black-and-white illustrations (I wrote a Goodreads review of this book), probably the same ones young Juan is stimulated by.

Also, the way Juan speaks of the visceral realists was reminding me of another group. What was it? Then I remembered -- the League, a secret society in Hermann Hesse's The Journey to the East. I picked up Hesse's short novel to reread to see how much these two groups could have in common.

I enjoy how Juan will list the authors -- poets, novelists, short-story writers, essayists -- he comes across in his travels across Mexico City. For example: when he goes into Luscious Skin's room, he spots a stack of books, one by Auguste Monerrosso.

Turns out, this author wrote one of my favorite short-stories -- Mr. Taylor -- about an American anthropologist who goes to a Central American country to live with a tribe. He sends the tribe's shrunken heads back to the US and makes a fortune. The demand for shrunken heads skyrockets but the tribe runs out. Well, the government finds out and, along with the anthropologist, comes up with some great plans to cash in on shrunken heads. How? Let me just say that if you are a poor person living in that country, you had better watch out! ---- Anyway, associations like this make for rich reading, at least for me.

I'm up to page 90. Young Juan's life in Mexico City is filled to the brim with young women and sexual encounters, conversations about poets and poetry and magazines, lots of coffee and marijuana, but through it all Juan does remind me of the narrator of Hesse's Journey to the East, when Hesse's narrator says, "For our goal was not only the East, or rather the East was not only a country or something geographical, but it was the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times." Juan has a strong sense his true home is his poetic voice and, in a way, the visceral realists is his 'league'.

I must say reading about the two worlds of Juan's life: the nitty-gritty of everyday Mexico City and the light-filled realm of poetry is most refreshing.

Young Juan goes into a café. We read, "After dark I went back and found Jacinto Requena dying of boredom. None of the visceral realists except for him, he said, were showing their faces at the café. Everybody was afraid of running into Arturo Belano, though their fears were unwarranted since the Chelean hadn't been there in days. According to Requena . . . Belano had begun to kick more poets out of the group." --------- You have to love a 17 year old who is having sex left and right but still has his eye (and poetic soul) on his ray of light, his league of fellow questers, the visceral realists. ---- And you have to admire an author who can splay himself into a number of characters within a novel.

I don't know about you, but I am right there with Juan on his quest. Thank goodness there are some sensitive 17 year-old souls who experience life as an artistic odyssey. The printing of this novel could have been set in gold. And perhaps a few pages coated with hallucinogens so the reader could lick the pages from time to time. -- This is one of the techniques used by a short-story writer in Moacyr Sclair's The Short=Story Writers.

I’ve read 20 pages of Part 2, where there are multiple fully adult men and women, first-person narrators who relate their experience with the visceral realists and Latin American poetry. The more I read this novel, the more I’m drawn into a mythic dimension of time. Such an uplifting, energizing experience to enter a world where the spirit and power of poetry is the polestar. And not only a poetic reaching up, as if the night sky contained a thousand poems for every star, but deep, deep down into the earth. Here are a few of my favorite lines, where Venezuelan poet Amadeo Salvatierra relates a conversation with his father and a friend riding through the country outside Mexico City:

“He said that there was probably some pyramid lying buried under our land . . . deep underground there must be lots of pyramids. My father didn’t say anything. From the darkness of the backseat, I asked him why he thought that. He didn’t answer. Then we started to talk of other things but I kept wondering why he’d say that about the pyramids.”

Of course, there were pyramids at Teotihuacan, the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican city 30 miles outside present-day Mexico City. I wouldn’t want to press the point too hard, but pyramids bring to mind inner depths of the psyche. The Jungian analyst Robert Moore talks a great deal of the archetypal pyramid each of us carries in our collective unconscious – the four sides are king/queen, warrior, lover and, magician, the magician being that part most directly connected to imagination, creativity, the inner quest and spiritual transformation. In traditional societies, those profoundly in touch with magician energy would be chosen to be shamans; in our modern, ‘civilized’ world, the role of shaman is inhabited by, among others, artists and poets.

It is this magician power the narrators are in touch with as they move through their days and nights, their conversations and writing and reading of poems. Here is a reflection from one of the narrators, an Argentinian poet, as he is walking in Mexico City with a Mexican poet and a Chilean poet:

“The three of us were quiet, as if we’d been struck dumb, but our bodies moved to a beat, as if something was propelling us through that strange land and making us dance, a silent, syncopated kind of walking, if I can call it that, and then I had a vision, not the first that day, as it happened, or the last: the park we were walking through opened up into a kind of lake and the lake opened up into a kind of waterfall and the waterfall became a river that flowed through a kind of cemetery, and all of it, lake, waterfall, river, cemetery, was deep green and silent.”

The chapter about the clones that give birth to clones ever year continues to haunt me... it's like a sci-fi short story in the middle of this opus... man I wish he'd done more of that.

Cymru wrote: "The chapter about the clones that give birth to clones ever year continues to haunt me... it's like a sci-fi short story in the middle of this opus... man I wish he'd done more of that."

Yes! What a fantastic novel this is - he could have taken dozens of themes and expanded. The Savage Detectives in 10 thick volumes.