Image Credit... Tamara Shopsin

We are 120 pages in, and suddenly the book alters its form. The next 400 pages feature first-person interviews with scores of witnesses, friends, lovers, acquaintances and enemies of Lima and Belano. These are all people whose lives intersected, however briefly, with the two visceral realists, from 1976 to 1996. It is as if the novelist has taken a tape recorder and journeyed around the world, from Mexico City to San Diego to Barcelona to Tel Aviv, desperate to find out what became of the young, optimistic, but perhaps now doomed poets. Where did they go after the Sonoran Desert? What jobs did they have? What did they write? What became of all that ambition? Page by page, the novel begins to darken. An editor who met Lima and Belano before they set off for the desert says "it was as if they were there but at the same time they weren't there," and the novel precisely mimics this poignant presence and absence.

Again, it should be stressed that this is not just a postmodern game about the fictionality of novelistic characters (though it is that, too). Movingly, no one seems quite able to get the two young poets in focus; Lima and Belano flicker in and out of other people's lives, and the news is not good. They are dealing in drugs, they are often high, they drift from job to job. Lima is living in Paris for a while, desperately poor. He once found a 5,000-franc note on the sidewalk and now always walks with his head down. Belano is spotted near Perpignan, looking for a "friend" who has disappeared and who is about to commit suicide. A painter, interviewed in Mexico City in 1981, says that Belano and Lima weren't revolutionaries: "They weren't writers. Sometimes they wrote poetry, but I don't think they were poets either." Belano moves to Barcelona, and works as a dishwasher in a restaurant. Lima goes to Nicaragua, and disappears there; two years later he has returned to Mexico City, and is glimpsed by the secretary of Octavio Paz. In a wonderfully sad scene, Lima approaches Paz, and the two sit on a bench, talking. The impeccably establishment Paz had been the great bête noire of the visceral realists, but Lima now seems emptied of revolt. He meekly shakes the hand of the Nobel laureate — who has never heard of him, of course — and disappears.

"We poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness," are Wordsworth's famous lines, precious to a generation of American poets like Lowell and Schwartz and Berryman, whose lives ended in suicide or bouts of insanity. Curiously, "The Savage Detectives" is both melancholy and fortifying; and it is both narrowly about poetry and broadly about the difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth. Bolaño beautifully manages to keep his comedy and his pathos in the same family. For instance, it is at once very funny and oddly appalling that not once does Bolaño quote a single poem of Lima or Belano. We know their careers were not hoaxes (some of the witnesses speak of reading poems by the young men); but were they dreams? What kind of actual poetic talent inflated the ballooning ambition of these young writers?

The terror of the MacGuffin always hangs over Bolaño's work. In "By Night in Chile," he tells the story of a rich shoemaker in the Austro-Hungarian empire who becomes obsessed with building a Heroes' Hill, a vast mausoleum dedicated to the heroes of the empire. When, decades later, Soviet troops storm the hill, all they find is a crypt containing the skeleton of the shoemaker, who gave up his life to the grand insanity of his dream. Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, whose work we never see, drove off in 1975 in search of a poet whose own work was never published! Well, that's not quite accurate. The two men do eventually find a single poem by Cesárea Tinajero, published in a one-off magazine, and it's not even a poem but a hieroglyph. It is called "Siíon" (i.e., Zion), and consists of three line-drawings. In the first, a square that looks a bit like a boat on a horizon, sits on a calm, straight line. In the second drawing, the line is wavy, undulating like a choppy sea, but the little boatlike square is gamely floating in the wave. In the third sketch, the line is stormily jagged, like a terrible EKG, and the little boat is barely clinging to the vertiginous wave.

This "poem" might mean lots of things, but in the context of the novel, it surely evokes the difficult passage from the bathwater of youth and gladness to more treacherous adult waters. An Israeli friend of Ulises Lima's says that the importance of the poets' lives had nothing to do with visceral realism: "It has to do with life, with what we lose without knowing it and what we can regain." He continues, and says that what we have lost we can regain, "we can get it back intact." Can we? Minutes after delivering this wisdom this same man dies in a car accident. A Mexican academic, interviewed late in the novel, says that hardly anyone remembers the visceral realists anymore. Many are dead. Lima, he says, is living in Mexico City. "About Arturo Belano," he says, "I know nothing." This is finally how the novel makes good on its playful, postmodern impulses. Roberto Bolaño's alter ego, Arturo Belano, whose life so closely shadows Bolaño's own (night watchman and dishwasher, life in Paris and Barcelona, and so on), disappears from the story — to re-emerge, of course, as the man willing to "commit the vulgarity of writing stories," the man who triumphantly wrote this marvelous, sad, finally sustaining novel. Truly, it is as if he is there but at the same time isn't there.