The Savage Detectives Reread

David Kurnick’s study of Roberto Bolaño’s key novel, Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), first published in 1998 and in English translation in 2007, is a milestone in the critical landscape devoted to the work of the Chilean-Mexican author. Kurnick rightly criticizes recent tendencies in United States and Latin American criticism of Bolaño that dismiss the author, and The Savage Detectives in particular, as a mere marketing phenomenon born of exoticism. This argument is deftly deconstructed by the author in his introduction. It is a relief to read that Kurnick takes a different approach. At the heart of his book is something that has all too rarely been done with Bolaño’s work: a close reading of his texts and an extrapolation of the complexity of their arguments and micro- and macro-structures.This approach proves highly effective, allowing Kurnick to accurately describe Bolaño’s work as an “aesthetic […] that hovers indecisively between formalism and vitalism” (28). While the latter has been exaggerated in descriptions of Bolaño’s poets and their adventures, the former has often gone unnoticed. In the three chapters of the book that correspond to the three main chapters of the novel, Kurnick first highlights this interplay between formalism and vitalism at the heart of Bolaño’s work. In a constant movement between descriptive and analytical passages, Kurnick shows how the vitalist discourse of Juan García Madero, the protagonist of the first part, follows an underlying structural form of the social worlds depicted, marked by constant semantic doublings and oppositions. Through the use of puns, proper names, and other recurring patterns, Bolaño, as Kurnick aptly puts it, “provides what should be a formless picaresque with an underlying tension” (44).This restless search for structure in the novel is at once a problem of the characters’ lives (“vitalism”) and the principle of Bolaño’s fiction-making machine, as Kurnick goes on to explain: Bolaño’s poets are detectives because “they are searching for the structure that would give meaning to their lives, and part of what’s confusing about this search is the suspicion that this structure may not await them in the future, but may have disappeared in the past” (58). This basic experience of all the numerous characters in The Savage Detectives—the absence of social, political, and aesthetic structures that would allow them to make sense of their lives and their art—leads directly to the political dimension of the novel. On the one hand, it is clear that the revolutionary hopes of the 1960s and 1970s can no longer be sustained for Bolaño’s generation. However, according to Kurnick, there is “no consoling or redemptive vision of escape from history” in Bolaño (69), since there is a deep political dimension in the very notions of community and friendship negotiated in the novel.This becomes clear in the second part of the book, for example, when Kurnick’s analysis of the novel’s character Heimito Künst shows that for Bolaño there is a “political indeterminacy of the will to collectivity, a recognition that ‘togetherness’ can be as terrifying as it is comforting” (115). In the second part of the novel, with its countless testimonies, these dimensions are shaped by specific topographies, temporal structures, and situations of dramatic speech. Kurnick’s reading of the Amadeo Salvatierra episodes as a long farewell to revolutionary dreams is particularly convincing. His is one of those voices that “sound like visitants from the afterlife” and whose “environments resemble scenes of a haunting” (132), a fact that Kurnick masterfully relates to the intertextual discussion of Juan Rulfo and Dante as iconic templates for modeling this ghostly experience of history in Bolaño.The final chapter of the book on the final part of the novel in the deserts of Sonora is of particular interest for its interpretation of the novel’s mysterious ending, which Kurnick frames in geopolitical terms. Arguing that a good answer to the novel’s final question of “what’s outside this window” is precisely the United States of America, Kurnick reads The Savage Detectives as “a kind of optical apparatus: not something to be pored over, but something to be looked through, a viewfinder to be held up to the reader’s vision in order to remake perception” (172)—especially for U.S. readers.Kurnick’s book is among the best in English on Bolaño and The Savage Detectives, along with Chris Andrews’ Roberto Bolaño: An Expanding Universe (2014) and Hector Hoyos’ Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel (2015). It is very insightful in its detailed readings and could well serve as the basis for a critically annotated edition of the book in its numerous efforts to make sense of the many obscure passages in Bolaño’s classic that accompany each chapter. Kurnick’s style is very readable, eschewing overspecialized academic language in favor of a style that is expressive, even poetic at times, without becoming hermetic or overwrought. By that, Kurnick matches perfectly the objective of the Columbia University Press book series Rereadings to offer “short and accessible books revisiting a favorite post-1970 novel from the vantage point of the now” and to “experiment with form, voice, and method in an attempt to find different paths among scholarship, theory, and creative writing.”Given this necessary focus on The Savage Detectives, Kurnick’s book sometimes loses sight of the fact that many of the novel’s motifs and techniques are part of Bolaño’s oeuvre as a whole and can also be found in texts prior to The Savage Detectives, as in the case of Bolaño’s short novel Estrella distante (Distant Star, 1996). The analysis of intertextuality could sometimes have been a little deeper, and the dialogue with existing scholarship—especially from outside U.S. academia—could have been stronger. Nevertheless, the merit of Kurnick’s book is that it offers valuable insights for a variety of reading interests and reading groups—for Bolaño novices as well as for academic experts, for readers with only a basic knowledge of Latin American literature and history, as well as for those familiar with them. The Savage Detectives Reread grants a reading experience of great literary erudition, focusing on the textual and intertextual core areas of Bolaño’s work that have been neglected so often by scholarship dedicated to his work.