I am not a great football fan but I must admit that this World Cup business looks very different when you are in Latin America.
I visited an ethnic Kuna community in the San Blas islands just as the football got under way and children were out in force, many of them barefoot but wearing Brazilian shirts as they played makeshift games on the island´s airstrip (there is only one flight a day so the rest of the time, it becomes a play area!)
In Panama city, cars are decked out with Colombian or Venezuelan flags. Flat screen tvs have appeared in shopping malls and coffee shops, attracting audiences cheering for Uruguay or Mexico or Argentina or Chile. There is widespread desire for the Cup to stay in Latin America.
As I am trying to track down and read children´s literature from Central and South America at the moment, I was delighted to come across this month a very powerful book by Chilean writer, Antonio Skármeta, The Composition (illustrated by Alfonso Ruano) which not only has a football crazy protagonist but also addresses what life is like for children living during a dictatorship. And, heaven knows, so many Central and South American countries have suffered under dictatorships.
Skármeta spent many years during the Pinochet dictatorship in Germany - you may know him as the screenwriter of the film Il Postino which tells the story of the friendship between Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and his postman. You may be as surprised to learn as I was that the book is set entirely on an island in Chile, not in Italy. The film was great - the books sounds even better.
The Composition opens with Pedro´s disappointment that his parents have given him a plastic soccer ball for his birthday instead of a white leather ball with black patches, like the ones real soccer players use.
The streets are full of soldiers with machine guns. Pedro´s parents are fearful and distressed. They huddle around the radio, listening to foreign radio stations, turned on at a very low volume. One day when he is playing soccer on the street, he sees soldiers arrest the father of one of his friends. When he asks his parents if he is for or against the government, his mother tells him that children are not for or against anything.
At school, an army officer announces a cash prize for the best composition on the children "What My Family Do At Night". What will Pedro do?
The writing is subtle and humorous and effectively shows how children are capable of understanding situations and making moral decisions.
It is only at the last page when Pedro´s father says "We´d better get a chess set then", that we learn that Pedro wrote in his composition that he plays soccer and does his homework and his parents sit on the sofa and play chess all evening.
From July, I will be a little less "scattered" - after almost two years in Panama, I am moving back home to Spain (with I hope frequent visits to England and Ireland). Now if I could only get a decent first draft of my book finished before I leave...
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I Am This
by Susana Montanares M.
I am a body without a soul,
a hungry corpse of desire,
a caress converted into torture.
I am an autumn leaf,
the trampled cry of nakedness born alive.
I am pain and forgetfulness staring together,
rage and hate joined into a fist.
I am the one you carry into the world
and cannot restore.
I am the sons of men
eagerly deceiving the wind.
You swear to protect me.
You swear to love me
but you kill the birth of my soul.
I am a frustrated dream,
annihilated desire.
I am a butterfly
undertaking its flight
and devoured by a flower.
I am this.
I am nothing,
a thing that opened its eyes to the world
but was assasintaed before it could see.
Yo Soy
Soy un cuerpo sin alma
un despojo hambriento de deseo.
una caricia convertida en tortura
soy una hoja en otoño
que pisoteada llora la desnudez de aquel que la vio nacer.
Soy la pena y el olvido
unidos en una mirada.
Soy la rabia y el odio contenidos en un puño.
Soy aquel que trajiste al mundo
y no pudiste devolver.
Soy los hijos de los hombres
engañados en el vientre.
Juraste protegerme,
juraste amarme,
pero mataste mi alma al nacer.
Soy un sueño frustrado,
un deseo anhelado.
Soy una mariposa que emprende el vuelo
y es devorada por una flor.
Eso soy...
No soy nada.
Algo que abrio los ojos y quiso ver el mundo,
pero fué asesinado antes de verlo.
Michael Sedano
In keeping with Daniel Olivas' column on Monday, here is the opening paragraph from Roberto Bolaño's novel The Savage 
Detectives, as translated by Natasha Wimmer:
"November 2. I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way."
On December 23, the narrator, a 17-year old boy named Juan García Madero, contributes what to me would have been a more cogent opening line:
"Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I'd rather not talk about it, because I didn't understand it."
In a nutshell, there's the sum and tenor of 577 generally tedious pages of adventurous writing. I suspect a plurality of readers will find the opening segment involving, then will get bogged down, or lost, in the abrupt stylistic shift of the middle of the novel, and probably stop reading somewhere in the mid-hundreds. Can't say as I blame them, although I stuck it out to the bitter end, having invested too many hours seeing if I could make sense of what was going on.
The opening segment takes place in 1975 with García Madero abandoning his university studies to join the oddball poets and barmaids of Mexico City. Bolaño creates a sentimental map of the city, the character wandering the various quarters of the city searching the cafés and bars for the twenty-something poets who have opened their clique to the youth. In the process he beds one of two sisters and gets tangled up in the girl's altruistic plan to liberate a whore from her pimp. The girl's father, however, complicates matters when the boy discovers the father has taken the whore as a Sancha, ensconced her in a cheap hotel, but has to flee to the family home when the pimp discovers the love nest. 1975 ends with the boy, the whore, Lima and Belano--two disreputable poet-tipos--fleeing Mexico City after an armed confrontation with the pimp and a corrupt cop.
Exciting and colorful material there. Then the narrative shifts from the diarist story teller to that of a documentary film interviewing a mixed cast of characters. Here the story wends its way back and forth in time, between 1976 to 1996, tracking the movement of the two poet-tipos as they travel about France, Spain, and Israel. Another thread--the detection element--tracks the search for Cesárea Tinajero, the mother, or perhaps chief muse, of this visceral realism literary movement. In subthreads we learn more about the personal lives of the the visceral realists introduced in the opening section, and various gente who come in contact with the mythic Lima and Belano, and Octavio Paz' secretary. Much of this actually has interest and delight as Bolaño uses it for sketches of a certain mode of literary life in Mexico City. But it's long and could easily benefit from a liberal paring, especially as a character remembers the name of a poet, then another, then another, another, another, another...
The novel wraps up reverting to 1976, with the fleeing quartet arriving in northern Mexico, pursued by the vengeful pimp and his cop enforcer. The detectives finally find the mother of visceral realism in a remote Sonoran village. In a fatal confrontation with the pimp, Cesárea Tinajero saves their lives but is shot dead in the process. One of the poet-tipos knifes the pimp, and the cop is gut-shot and will die a slow, painful death. As I note, I suspect many readers will abandon the novel and won't ever get to this climactic desert confrontation, so this is not a spoiler revelation.
I actually felt a bit sorry for the translator, saddled with what must have been a rich variety of colorfully abusive language that ends up in English as fuck this and fuck that. After numerous such linguistic devolutions, I was reminded of the scene in the film El Norte, when the Guatemalteco elder counsels the about-to-be emigrants that, in order to sound like a Mexican, they have to pepper their speech with liberal uses of "chingado" this and "chingada" that. Aside from a bit of French verse, little is untranslatable, except for a moment of fun at the end of the novel. The insufferable García Madero quizzes the falso poets about classical poetic schemes and tropes, none of which the street girl and the two tipos understand. To turn the tables, they quiz García Madero on a unique idiom they speak. Early, early in the novel, a character complains that Lima and Belano speak this language--it has a name though I cannot cite it--and finally on the 532 page, we're treated to a sample that runs two pages:
"All right, Mr. Know-It-All, can you tell me what a prix is?"
"A toke of weed," said Belano without turning around.
"And what is muy carranza?"
"Something very old," said Belano.
"And lurias?"
"Let me answer," I said, because all the questions were really for me.
"All right," said Belano.
"I don't know," I said after thinking for a while.
I was surprised to find Bolaño's novel so tedious. I glanced at the blurbs on the back cover and noted the breathless praise heaped upon it. "Powerful and sophisticated." "premier Latin American writer." "The great Mexican novel of its generation." Maybe it's just me, as despite my problems, I wasn't entirely bored with it. I suspect the difference is similar to the differences that stretch between, yet link, the music of Beethoven to Dvorak and Stravinsky, then on to Suk and Schoenberg and beyond into the 21st century. The new stuff is somewhat interesting, musically tolerable, and more so because it often is quite short. Bolaños sets that model on its head with 577 pages, some filled out with nearly interminable lists that, like December 23, either have nothing happening, or I didn't understand them.
mvs
La Bloga welcomes your comments here, particularly if you have a more solid footing to go on for The Savage Detectives. I'd dearly love to learn your appreciation of Bolaño's effort. La Bloga welcomes guest columnists. If you'd enjoy becoming our guest, click here, or when you've got a mind to share, drop us a comment on the day's post.
You may have heard about an old line of books for girls aged called The Magic Attic. Originally, the books were coordinated with play dolls. The company was eventually sold to Marie Osmond, but later folded. The books went out of print – but dozens of them still exist on library shelves.
What’s the problem? The books have an 800 number in the back that now serves as a sex line. The number was resold by the phone company. And now libraries are hunting the books down and yanking from the shelves.
Oops!
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Bolaño is one of my favorite authors so I was disappointed when I read your review of Savage Detectives. Not with your review, of course, but with the idea that someone actually did not like Bolaño's writing. I haven't read this book but was looking forward to it. I hope that I will have a different opinion about the book, but we shall see, no? I thoroughly enjoyed his short story collection, Last Evenings on Earth, and the novel Distant Star. Bolaño's importance continues to grow even though he has been dead for five years. And if you think 577 pages is long, check out his last novel, 2666, which comes in at 1100 pages.
I have yet to read that one, too.
Roberto Bolaño is one of my favorites authors and "The Savage Detectives" is the first book I read by him. As with most of his writing, this book can be interpreted as hyperbolic biography of his teenage years in México and his life as a mature man in other parts of the world. Bolaño dedicated his life to literature and it was only until he was forty years or so that he was recognized for his work. What I enjoyed most about this book is his position against the “official culture and literature”, (for example Octavio Paz is afraid of being murder by the visceral realists) and the fact that he thinks every author is most importantly a reader, hence his never-ending list of poets and writers. I do agree with what you mentioned about the translation. The translator, I imagined, most likely had the hardest time translating it. I read it in Spanish and there are some Mexican idioms, like many of us know, that in English they just don’t say the same. I hope that you will give Bolaño another chance; I recommend “Amulet” and “Distant Star”. I also, as Manuel Ramos, need to read 2666, 557 of Bolaño’s writing is never enough, but 1100 would do the trick.
Thania