Towards (Against?) a Lesbiography

Recently, while browsing the literary essays and criticism section of a bookstore, I was thrown for a loop by the subtitle of a new book, This is Not the End of the Book, which consists of a conversation between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere on digital and book culture. I'm not sure that it actually is the subtitle, rather than just a graphic embellishment on the cover that the publisher thought would enhance its prestige-marketing, but in any case, it reads: “Two Great Men Discuss Our Digital Future.”

I mean, seriously? In 2011, we're casually throwing around the term “great men,” like everybody knows what that means (and wants a piece of it)? Who better to discuss a matter of such serious cultural weight than Great Men? Who else is going to tell us anything worth listening to on the subject, in “this twittering world,” as another indubitable Great Man, T. S. Eliot, presciently put it in the 1940s?

I blame Harold Bloom. Back in 1999, the popularity of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human proved that, despite the combined efforts of academic feminists and deconstructionists, there was a huge cultural hunger, at the populist level, for the concept of the Great Man, as some kind of figure of millennial reassurance. That book was a lot of fun, I'm not going to lie, but Bloom's Wildean hyperbole also felt finally oppressive (as Wildean tongue-in-cheek exaggeration-for-provocation never is, but no one ever accused Bloom of having a light touch), and nearly made me nauseated with the Bard (I had to remind myself I was only nauseated with Bloom). He might as well have called the book Saint Shakespeare... except that the titular suggestion that Shakespeare is, well, GOD (or better than God, who only invented human vessels, while Shakespeare invented our subjectivity: he's not God, he's SHAKESPEARE) left mere canonization in the dust. It didn't even seem to help that I knew where Bloom was coming from, and what he was trying to achieve: that he was using Shakespeare as a synecdoche for the power of literature itself, in reaction against attacks on that power, and on the concept of subjectivity, from “literary theory.” Well, except that Bloom himself often seemed to lose sight of this aim and take his own Bardolatry literally. And certainly, the average reader who bought the book to be educated about Shakespeare was taking it literally.

Quiet Riot Girl, with whom I've been forming a relationship on Twitter and here on my blog that inspires me to nominate us, in our quiet moments (except that there haven't been any quiet moments), as the Doherty and Barat of Internet Discourse (can't get away from those Great Men of History...), recently directed me to David Halperin's Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, in explanation of her concept of “Fagiography” and its critique in her recently free-download-published debut novel, Foucault's Daughter. (Or I assume FD is critiquing it; but you`ll have to wait for the review, when I've finished reading.) I haven't read Saint Foucault, but I gather that it marks the moment when, after Judy Garland's death kicked off the gay rights movement by inspiring Stonewall, gay male culture lost its historical allegiance to Mom (celebrated in the form of opera divas, Golden Age Hollywood actresses, and other female performers of gargantuan personality and presence) and started chasing after the ghost of Dad instead. In doing so, however, rather than pioneering it may have simply joined in the chorus celebrating/mourning those Great Men of History, which has, after all, been a homoerotic theme since Milton's “Lycidas.” In an effort to prove that gay men were exactly like straight men, flamboyance and fabulousness had to be shoved in the closet (or, worse, relegated to reality TV shows); machismo was the order of the day. Even if this machismo was limply, hilariously, intellectual. (Or is that the worst kind?)

In the Room the Women Come and Go...

And where does this leave women? In 2011, when most of the feminist battles have been won, where are our Great Women, and what are they talking about, in ways that, apparently, cannot reassure us? And where is our Lesbiography? I never wrote or published my Saint Foucault (or Saint Morrissey), but I did spend the summer I was seventeen continually writing a 50-or-so-page fan letter to Camille Paglia that, luckily for her and me, I could never complete to my satisfaction, because, well, it was my autobiography: Sexual Personae caused me to rethink the entire history of my personal development (through the prism – or prison – of gender identity and sexuality). (I've often thought that if I had completed and sent that letter I might have ended up as Paglia's partner – instead of the mostly-straight, usually single woman I am now – and she would have eventually ditched me and our baby to join the entourage of a Brazilian pop star, as dotty as Dietrich shedding her heels to trek through the desert after Gary Cooper's legionnaire at the end of Morocco).

Speaking of women and deserts, I return to my theme of the strange lack of comment in the generally ecstatic reviews of Bolano's The Savage Detectives on its feminism, which you'd think would be a theme to inspire the liberal intelligentsia. TSD is a boy's-club novel to end all boy's-club novels, focused on the homosocial, Doherty-and-Barat relationship between the two founders of an obscure, outsider, failed poetry movement, based on Bolano and his best friend. And yet these overgrown boys go chasing after an even more obscure, self-erasing female poet who's disappeared into the desert, in what to all intents and purposes is a sort of pilgrimage. Why? What's up with this? Is it a comment on the historical erasure of women, women's art, women's contributions to culture, women's voices? Why does the erased woman stand for poetry, or the possibility (or the impossibility) of poetry? She's not the Muse: she's the Master. Not a saint, though: a prophet, of the fantastic misogyny exhaustively recorded (and participated in?) in 2666. Of all the crimes Bolano could choose to represent the decadence of the West in the early 21^st century, and the negative legacy of the 20^th century, he chooses misogyny.

I Just Stand Around and Shoot Into the Blue

Female intellectuals talking to, or about, female intellectuals, remains a rare thing. If women (even Great Women) get together and talk, we expect they're going to talk about women. Or men. Certainly not make pronouncements on topics of general cultural interest and importance. And certainly not deify each other. (Paglia never wrote that book on Madonna, either. Although I think we can all be grateful for that. I just hope she never writes the one on Saint Palin.) So that in the annuls of female intellectuals (not feminists) writing about women (pre-Paglia, whose chapter on Emily Dickinson remains extraordinary), Elizabeth Hardwick's essay on Hedda Gabler (the character) stands out for me, even though, as a female intellectual, Hardwick takes offence at Hedda's (at Hedda's; she treats her like a real person, a historical Great Woman, not Ibsen's creation) narrow pettiness (rather than, as I did in my Hedda essay, taking glee in it as the most outrageously, unapologetically, unsentimentally amoral female character in the annuls of literature). (“I'm burning your child, Ejlert Lovborg. Yours and Thea Elvsted's child.” How I've longed to say those lines in performance; right up there with “I have more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in / Imagination to give them shape / Or time to act them in.”)

(I had a real epiphany about that play when I learned, in some book on Ibsen, that in early drafts Hedda, rather than being a creature of motiveless malignity, was given the sympathetic motivation of genuinely trying to help her husband by destroying Lovborg. By the time of the final draft – and this is the originality of Hedda Gabler, Hedda Gabler, and Ibsen – the very concept of that is a joke that sends Hedda into fits of mordant hilarity. Ibsen was the most murderous feminist of them all.)

(Incidentally, I find this excellent, brief review of Antony and Cleopatra by a female blogger very Hardwickian. The Hardwicks of today, they're blogging, aren't they?)

Oh, there's been plenty of feminist hagiography, don't get me wrong. With a few chosen saints, of which Sylvia Plath (forever fixed in the cultural consciousness crushed under the boot of her deified/demonized Nazi Daddy) is so prominent that I found myself grateful for the sacrilege of James Maker's line “A sonnet from a sociopath / I annihilated Sylvia Plath” from “Born That Way.” (Or maybe I just got the mordant giggle-fits at the idea of rhyming “sociopath” with “Sylvia Plath.”)

The thing is, if I did write that book on Paglia, it would hardly be appropriately titled Saint Paglia. If there is to be a Lesbiography, I would want it to take a perspective that's not idolatrous, but iconoclastic. We don't need to celebrate any more Great Men, or sentimentalize our feminist martyrs. We need not new heroes (or heroines), but a new perspective.

If I call myself “gynocentric” (at which Quiet Riot Girl recently – rightly – took umbrage) it's in relation to a cultural context where it's still expected that the intellectual-oriented woman will also be male-oriented. And don't get me wrong, I like the intelligent conversation of men and always have. I don't exclude anyone from intellectual discourse based on gender. But I'm no more likely to want to talk ideas with a man than with a woman (or vice versa). Despite this, I have not escaped the sense of being "honoured" by having male intellectuals bestow their interest upon me, as though my credibility in my own eyes somehow depended upon it, or was enhanced by it. 

Remembering that high school English teacher (rumoured to be gay, although I hardly knew what that was despite Reading All About it in Orton's published diaries) with whom I had antagonistic chemistry because he would not take me seriously (to be fair, I was demanding acknowledgement that I was a genius; then I proved that I might be, but he still wanted me to prove that I could impress him in the context of a high school English assignment, which I did once), who gave me Shaw's Pygmalion to read, which I fancifully half- interpreted as a comment on our relationship, and I thought, "No, you will not be my Henry Higgins. Even though, or because, that is exactly what I want." I was not falling into that paradigm. I would go it alone, lonely, without the male mentor. I would go it alone, lonely, without the artist boyfriend, seeking a Muse. 

I certainly went it alone. 

That incident made its way, in a way, into Live With It. (The Pygmalion fantasy, accepted, and turned into nightmare.)

This in preface to a post on a few of my favourite, mysterious female artists.  

I Can't Get No

I wanted to make a post on recent articles in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books on the effects of the digital era on culture, but I ended up writing thirteen pages, which I may turn into several entries after I edit them. In the meantime, I've wanted to make a post on The Savage Detectives that connects with a digital-era-related comment in another recent NYRB article.

In a review of Keith Richards's Life in the March 10 issue of the New York Review of Books, “High on the Stones,” Dan Chiasson beautifully imagines the genesis of the Rolling Stones as a yearning for a half-imagined blues to which they were denied the kind of easy access that characterizes culture in the internet age:

Anyone reading this review can go to YouTube now and experience Muddy Waters, or Chuck Berry, or Buddy Holly, or the first Stones recordings, or anything else they want to see, instantly: ads for Freshen-up gum from the Eighties; a spot George Plimpton did for Intellivision, an early video game. Anything. I am not making an original point, but it cannot be reiterated enough: the experience of making and taking in culture is now, for the first time in human history, a condition of almost paralyzing overabundance. For millennia it was a condition of scarcity; and all the ways we regard things we want but cannot have, in those faraway days, stood between people and the art or music they needed to have: yearning, craving, imagining the absent object so fully that when the real thing appears in your hands, it almost doesn’t match up. Nobody will ever again experience what Keith Richards and Mick Jagger experienced in Dartford, scrounging for blues records. The Rolling Stones do not happen in any other context: they were a band based on craving, impersonation, tribute: white guys from England who worshiped black blues and later, to a lesser extent, country, reggae, disco, and rap.

Chiasson's logic is lovely, but not very sound: he seems to be confusing access to cultural artifacts with access to contemporary culture. The parallel would be not someone going on YouTube and finding performances by Chuck Berry now, but rather a contemporary young person hearing about an amazing current or recent musical movement and not being able to look up the artists on YouTube, or find their albums online (legally or illegally, as an Mp3 or on Amazon) or at the national mall chain store, or see them on MTV. Obviously, before the Stones – before there was rock and roll – there could be no MTV, and corporate culture, making sure that no one in any city of any size should go without any music with any reputation, took care of the rest; and whatever our hearts still desired in terms of cultural access that we didn't know about, the internet took care of. In my own teenage years in the late 80s and early 90s, you may have had to hear about The Smiths or The Cure or The Pixies from a friend (since you wouldn't hear them on the radio), but once you had, it only took a trip to HMV to find their cassettes and even a VHS collection of their videos. 

I also think Chiasson somewhat underestimates (perhaps for the sake of his point) the mystery that attaches to the cultural artifacts shared by users on YouTube and other places on the internet. A few years ago I developed an interest in the 50s comedy duo Nichols and May after reading a book on comedy of the era. Corporate culture seems to have passed Nichols and May right by, and without the internet I would not have been able to find a copy of one of their albums (only one) or seen footage of a few of their sketches on YouTube. At least, it would have taken a lot of scrounging in second-hand record/CD shops, few of which now exist in my neck of the woods. Live footage would have been permanently unavailable to me. (I say "never" and "permanently," but nothing is permanent in the internet era: I go on Amazon now and find Nichols and May CDs on Mp3 for cheap, as well as links to new CDs from various sellers, which may have or may not have been available the last time I looked, and in any case are too expensive for me. Traditional corporations may not have given these items a re-release, but Amazon is ahead of the game, and, as ever, undercutting the price of traditional retailers.)

YouTube is also great for throwing up things you hadn't even bothered yearning for because you believed you would never see them. One of my earliest such discoveries was footage of Marlene Dietrich's screen test for The Blue Angel, which more than fulfilled any expectations I could have had about it, while at the same time clarifying notions about Dietrich being Sternberg's “creation.” (“You can see what Sternberg saw in her,” I commented to a friend when I sent the clip.) Recently I found some clips (promotional clips of some kind, it seems, like early music videos) of Lotte Lenya performing “Surabaya Johnny” and “Alabama Song,” which were as magical as I could ever have dreamt. Previously I had only ever seen Lenya perform, in a much younger incarnation, in Pabst's film version of The Threepenny Opera. Such clips are precious and tantalizing, suggestive of all we still never got to see and never will; and if time unearths more, most fans will only be disbelieving and grateful. Of course, I refer to the use of YouTube now, to unearth precious cultural artifacts that would never otherwise have seen the light of day (or, if they're culled from official releases, never have had such a wide viewing). Presumably things will be different when future generations no longer know what it is to think that you will never see a legendary artist perform because everything is instantly available and archived in the first place. 

The Savage Detectives is centered around the kind of acute, aching cultural yearning that Chiasson describes, although for an artist of the past, not the present. There is little doubt that Cesarea Tinajaro becomes of such great symbolic importance to “the boys” precisely because she is so little known and so little can be known about her: desire is a function of the impossibility of its fulfillment. Her only published poem is a holy relic that requires a pilgrimage. It can't live up to their expectations, which are far too high, but neither can it disappoint, because they won't let it. They treat it with respect, as a mystery, puzzle, or enigma, like the woman herself. But is she an enigma because almost every trace of her has disappeared or because she has allowed or caused almost every trace of herself to disappear? Bolano is no debunker; it is not his purpose to reveal that Cesarea is, after all, mundane. The little we learn about her leaves no doubt that she is inscrutable, and much more is left mysterious. The grotesque slapstick conclusion to their search is, to be sure, inadequate, but this seems like an aesthetic flaw rather than an aesthetic choice, and I'm not sure how else he could have concluded the quest, since any option would be anticlimactic. But is the sort of cultural pilgrimage that Bolano describes, generated by obscurity, only possible in the pre-internet era? Is it possible that there are any cultural figures who have ever meant anything to anyone that the internet knows nothing about?

After I finished the novel (several weeks ago), I naturally did some searching of my own on the internet. The Wikipedia page on The Savage Detectives includes a chart listing the people on whom the characters were based, without citing the source of the information, and the real-life Cesarea Tinajaro is given as Concha Urquiza. When I searched Urquiza's name, I found only one English-language page, a brief blog entry which gives some tantalizing details about Urquiza's life (she died by drowning at the age of 35, joined the communist party and worked for the publicity department at MGM), misprints her name in the first line as “Chocha” (which the mischievously misprint-obsessed Bolano would probably appreciate), links to a page of her poems in Spanish and quotes a long passage in Spanish about her ideas. Just now (don't know if it wasn't there before or if I missed it) I found a Google Books result, an entry on Urquiza from the Dictionary of Mexican Literature by Eladio Cortes, which fills in more details: after her Marxist period she entered a convent but took no vows; she wrote Biblical and erotic poetry; she wrote poetry that was published when she was twelve; she was a probable suicide; her poems were published posthumously in 1946 as Works, Poems and Prose of Concha Urquiza, edited by Gabriel Mendez Plancarte. 

Next I searched her on Google Images, and found two pictures, or rather two pictures from what appears to be a single photo shoot and a second picture, which, due to the women's dissimilarity and the fact that the text was in Spanish, I at first didn't accept as the same woman. However, another image, of the “two women” on a single board together with photos of a modern woman, presumably the artist who made the bust of Urquiza in the foreground, confirmed that the two women were, in fact, the same. The photos from the same shoot show a pretty, sensual young woman with bobbed hair, lipsticked mouth, and an expression that's both sullen and sultry. The other photo is of a prim woman of mannish appearance with severe upswept hair, glasses, and no makeup. It's like Mary Bailey in Bedford Falls versus Mary Bailey the spinster librarian of Pottersville. The discrepancy is so great as to add to the poet's mystery. What could have changed her so drastically, or did the sensual and puritan selves always co-exist and struggle?

Since I don't know Spanish and have no plans to learn it, I will probably never know, unless a publisher inspired by Bolano's posthumous Anglo success decides to bring out an English edition of Urquiza's poems with a substantial biographical essay, or unless Google gets some way better translating software. But I did enjoy the similarity between the fragments Belano and Lima manage to learn about Tinajero, just enough, and just little enough, to tantalize while leaving her mystery intact, and my own attempts to learn something about the "original" Tinajero. It's a comfort to know that although everything may be on the internet, everything is not in English on the internet.

I think it's fair to say that the goal of human life that we've been striving for from the beginning of the species is the closing of the gap between desire and fulfillment. That gap can be temporal, spatial, or economic. Corporations have worked towards the elimination of the temporal/spatial gap by making more products available to more people in more places, and the technological innovators of the internet have made it possible for individuals all over the world to share information, images, music, and videos with each other. Do we need to "worry" that future generations won't know what it is to know about a musician or a movie (or a writer) primarily by rumour, supplemented by a few scraps? That they won't have to long and yearn and search or know what it is for scarcity to make the artist, to make art, seem all the more precious? Aren't Belano and Lima guilty of scorning the art their culture makes available to them precisely because it's in such abundant, oppressive supply; of indulging in the human tendency to reject the near and romanticize the distant?

That tendency will always be with us, alongside the conflicting impulse towards instantaneous fulfillment of desire. Maybe it will become harder to find things that are unknown not only to corporate culture (or literary culture, where they differ) but also to the savvy multitudes on the internet.We ought to keep in mind that even though together they are responsible for our current cultural overabundance, the "availability" provided by corporations and the internet are very different, even opposed. The internet not only subverts corporations by offering pirated copies of their products for free, but also by filling in the gaps left by corporations by file-sharing items overlooked by the corporate money-making machine because there is not enough demand or enough perceived demand: video or audio that is out of print or that has never been released in currently prevalent formats. There remains a sense, then, in which many of the cultural artifacts one finds on the internet are "unknown"; and a sense in which searching the net is a kind of scrounge and quest, albeit a much faster one for our faster age.

Roberto Bolano, Desperation, the Novel, and Morrissey

Bolano, Desperation, the Novel, and Morrissey

In one way Roberto Bolano reminds me, in The Savage Detectives, of what I've read about, or seem to remember I've read about, a Germanic tradition of authors from Goethe to Mann. (I attempted Werner as a teenager and Wilhelm Meister in my early 20s, and was so stunningly bored by both that I gave up after a few pages. I'll be attempting Wilhelm Meister again soon, having a current interest in both the picaresque and the Bildungsroman. As for Mann, I read Death in Venice and “Tonio Kroger” as a teenager; I didn't understand a word of the former, although I liked the movie; the latter, however, hit home with my teenage self. Do you think Sontag, Trilling, or Wood has literary skeletons in their closet like this – important novels they tried to tackle at a young age and couldn't? Or are they all too serious and self-punitively assiduous? Then there were the ones that bored me so much I couldn't get past the first few paragraphs, including The Waves and 100 Years of Solitude.)

Bolano reminds me of this tradition whenever his characters go on rants (recounted in dialogue or expressed in monologue) about the nature of literature, the sort of unapologetic didactic intrusion of the author's aesthetic and intellectual ideas into a fictional narrative that I associate, rightly or wrongly, with Wilhelm Meister and The Magic Mountain. While we're speaking of boring novels, I could also mention here Marius the Epicurean – I actually got through the entire first volume of that as research for my second plan for an MA thesis, prompting the following discussion with my supervisor:

Me: Next time we meet I should probably have something to show you to prove that I've done some work...

Supervisor: Yes. “Describe the plot of Marius the Epicurean.”

Me: Plot?

Supervisor: LOLOLOL.

These are the jokes in academia, let's face it. (AND I STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO MARIUS. No spoilers, please.)

And, following on from Marius, there is also Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, although Stephen Dedalus' abstract and abstruse aesthetic theory is so different in tone, let alone content, from the impassioned serio-comical rants of Bolano's poets and publishers that Joyce makes a distant point of comparison at best.

There is, first, the gay visceral realist Ernesto San Epifanio's long speech (interspersed with the shouted interjections of his listeners) essentially classifying all poets as “faggots” (of whom he approves) or “queers” (the bourgeois), with many sub-categories whose precise definition is obscure. Reproducing the tour de force section in full, Bobby Byrd rather brilliantly compares San Epifanio's rant to Mercutio's Queen Mab speech. 'Nuff said.

Then there's the rant about “desperate books,” in which Bolano describes the type of novel he is writing and anticipates objections to it through a proxy-recounting of the aspirations of Bolano stand-in Arturo Belano and his friend and co-founder of visceral realism, Ulises Lima. I was reminded, first off, of an interview with Morrissey in which he said that the quality he most prized in a singer was “desperation.” Morrissey's career actually makes a good illustration of exactly what Bolano is talking about in this section. Quim's rant essentially reduces to the observation that there are books for adolescents and “immature” adults and books for mature adults (i.e. the bourgeois), which makes yet another way to oppositionally categorize types of novels. Only the examples given of “novels for the mature” are not literary fiction but rather masterpieces such as In Search of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain, Les Miserables and War and Peace. In this monologue Bolano makes it clear that he is not only writing a novel about adolescents and bohemians but a novel for them (if there's a difference; if there can be a novel on this subject written for mature adults), or I suppose for anyone who, regardless of their age and outward circumstances, still finds that this notion of “desperation,” so acute in adolescence, speaks to them. Nothing about The Savage Detectives makes me particularly think it's a book for Morrissey, but the young Morrissey did identify with Werther, mentioned by Quim when he describes desperate readers as “the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther.” The kind of fucking idiot, in other words, who takes literature seriously enough to die for it in a type of Romantic reaction that we much more commonly associate nowadays with the relationship between adolescents and their music – for example (pre-eminently, perhaps still), The Smiths. Because only an idiot would care that much. Which – via suicide and adolescence – somehow brings us back to Romeo and Juliet (in the previous paragraph – keep up!). Because the sorts of passions described in The Savage Detectives (for both literature and lovers) have those same qualities of intensity and naivety that are found in Shakespeare's play, which many critics consider rather bad by the Bard's standards, but you can't argue with its durability, or in fact its pop culture status ever since West Side Story adapted it to the new youth culture of the 1960s. And this risking badness seems to me here, as in 2666, to be the aesthetic stance that Bolano so thrillingly occupies by embracing a naivety of both viewpoint and effect (for example, in the eschewing of “literary” prose that has received wide comment in our “literary fiction” era). It's the kind of fiction that makes you go (unless you're so desperate to appear sophisticated that you can't question, even to yourself, whether the trendy, “difficult” foreign-language author is The Real Thing after all), “By the standards of everything I've been taught good fiction is, this can't be.” Unless you're me, of course. Because that pretty much defines my ideal book.

But the problem for the desperate reader is, of course, that he has only two options: he either becomes so desperate that (also a problem for the writer who writes for him) he stops reading (meaning, presumably, he is homeless, insane, or both); or he is cured, becomes bourgeois, and reads calm, mature novels – although, with his breadth of learning and taste, he reads desperate novels too, but they bore him, as rightly they should. Desperation, in other words, cannot be a permanent life choice (even if, as long as one lives within it, one feels certain that it is the only perspective from which truth can be accessed, the only uncompromised position): it either leads to obliteration or ends. It is an unoccupiable position that nevertheless this book, and its author, and perhaps its readers (who aren't bored), attempt to occupy.

By the way, has anyone (or everyone) considered yet that Arturo Belano may be named after K's assistant Artur, given the distinct resemblance of the eternally-popping-up Belano and Lima to the assistants towards the end of the first section? Just a thought.

Savage Tenderness

It's a rare thing for a novel, no matter how great, and no matter how enjoyable, to provide the reader with pure pleasure. As a teenager I experienced this a few times: with Les Liaisons dangereuses, Pride and Prejudice, and The Trial. Not until my late 20s and early 30s did I experience something close to it again: with The Woman in White, Huckleberry Finn, and Swann's Way. All six books are, obviously, extremely different, and many other novels at the top of my “favourites” list (The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, Two Serious Ladies, Pere Goriot, Sister Carrie) do not fall under this category; not to mention the many great novels that I'm glad I read but that intermittently bored me (Middlemarch, Bleak House, Clarissa) or irritated or upset me (Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary) in the reading.

I was beginning to think that I would never fully have this reading experience of untrammelled pleasure again, that it was something reserved for a young person newly discovering literature that could only be faintly glimpsed by the jaded older reader, when I finally started reading The Savage Detectives. In a couple of days I'm already on page 78, which is speed-reading for this casualty of the internet/ADD era, and there has not been a single sentence that doesn't fill me with delight, wonder, and a cozy, grateful sense of the author's spiritual generosity. This is the first time I've ever read a book that makes me fantasize about buying copies to give, not to everyone I know, but to several select friends and acquaintances who, I think, would also love its ingenuous vision of youthful intellectual bohemia (or vision of ingenuous youthful intellectual bohemia?), and I'd do it if I weren't broke. When I recently read Bolano's posthumously published 2666, I felt fairly certain I was reading a masterpiece, and entirely certain I was reading something brilliant, strange, wild and wonderful that made the 900ish pages pass without any moments of boredom, though not always without effort. In the case of The Savage Detectives, I couldn't care less if it's a masterpiece or not. The pleasure of the reading experience has obliterated those nagging, anxious questions of evaluation that can cloud the reading of contemporary literature.

What's remarkable is just how different The Savage Detectives and 2666 are, although they have the same translator, Natasha Wimmer. 2666 is a dark work, to say the least, which at times seems to have been written by a Lynchian surrealist psychotic. Although Bolano's interest in whores, pimps, sex and sadomasochism are already evident not even 100 pages into The Savage Detectives, its mood is, nonetheless, bright, light, exuberant, and infused with a warm glow of innocence. Bolano has suggested that The Savage Detectives is his homage to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but the voice of Bolano's teenage initial narrator, Juan Garcia Madero, isn't nearly as dark and melancholic as Huck Finn's is from the start of Twain's novel. In fact it's hard to say just what allows the reader to be interested in such a naive protagonist. Maybe it's just his Bildungsroman blankness, onto which the reader can project his or her own teenage experiences, but Bolano renders that blankness with tenderness rather than harsh irony. Harold Bloom once made a fantastic distinction by saying that Jane Austen's relationship to her characters is one of ironic love rather than loving irony; I think he was right, but Bolano's attitude to Madero is the more familiar loving irony, which works fine for his novel.

Something I have not seen mentioned in reviews and blog posts about The Savage Detectives is its feminism. I'm one of those cranky female readers who gets tired of the way that later 20^th century Anglo-American novels (not to mention films, especially independent films, but that's for another blog) by men almost always feature male protagonists and give the male perspective, in contrast to the habits of male novelists of the 19^th century, who frequently centered their works on heroines. I was braced from what I'd read and heard for The Savage Detectives to be a “boy's” novel about a “boy's” world, and so it is, but Bolano's literary utopianism effortlessly includes women (who are strong, in control, and sexually, intellectually and politically active) and homosexuals without ever incurring political correctness (the endless descriptions of blow jobs take care of that). The women in The Savage Detectives may be fantasies (so, for that matter, are the men), but they're fantasies that a female reader can enjoy as well, like so many late 20^th century Mexican Baby Millamonts.

I have heard, however, that the formal experimentation to come causes the book to lag and even ruins it for some, so perhaps my initial reading experience will not be my final one. I am not a reviewer, and hence I feel free to check back with more gushing as I go along or with any observations that might merit a post. I've decided, incidentally, to lock posts against comments until I've written a few of them and have a sense of what this blog is supposed to be and until any readers, besides the half-dozen friends who might check in, can respond to a body of ideas rather than isolated flippancies.