The Savage Detectives

This is an incredible novel that took me a long time to read. Having read other reviewers on the book I see I'm not the only one who has had this experience and I think it speaks for the structural effects of the novel more than the laziness of the reader. The story is told in three parts. Part one (the first 139 pages in my edition) go by at a clip. They are told in diary form and plot mainly around the introduction of a group of poets who call themselves the visceral realists. The narrative form breaks in the second part and becomes about this same group only it is told in interviews with various people who have been in contact with them. The section is not laid out chronologically, it is 450 pages long, and it is the section that seems to be most culpable for readers setting their books down. The third part (only about 60 pages) goes back to the original structural format and goes quickly.

It has been a long time since I have felt as excited about the possibility of poetry and how literature can change the world. Indeed, the feelings evoked in the first section of the book reminded me of my youth in it's purest form. All things were possible and it was possible to do all things. The visceral realists matter and the fate of the world hangs in their balance. Among the many themes of this work is the passage of this group of poets from youth to experience (and whatever that means for each of them). The opening section of the novel starts with such exuberance that we are launched into the middle section with the same bright-eyed energy and optimism as youth into adulthood.

I think the reason the second part takes so long to read is that structurally the reader is given a lot of stopping points. Within each chapter (it isn't easy to say how each chapter is organized or why they are even chapters) different sections begin like a documentary, complete with location and date stats at the opening (eg, "Simone Darrieux, Rue des Petites Ecuries, Paris, July 1977."). Often the stories told within each section were so rich and full of meaning it took me a few days to digest them. Within each chapter you might have 4 or 5 different sections (sometimes less). The effect is a meandering relationship with the text as a reader. I put it down and came back often after reading several other novels in the interim.

This relationship mirrors the meandering visceral realists during the second section of the novel as we hear about them indirectly while they pass through innocence to experience and optimism to sometimes pessimism, sometimes distraction, sometimes violence (who would argue Luscious Skin's demise wasn't the natural endpoint for his trajectory... and yet, how similar to Belano's end).

Much is made by readers of the final puzzle: "What's outside the window?" Here's my answer: just as the reader's relationship with the text is implicated in the journey of the visceral realists (a name that accumulates authority throughout the novel), so the answer to the question is that it depends on what's inside the window. The lines of window are blurred. The contents of the novel's physically qualities as a book are (and have always been) blurred. What's outside the window? A good point: what is "outside the window?"