This made me so happy to read. I discovered Bolaño at university with 2666 and was then re-radicalised by The Savage Detectives a couple years later. I love your point about fiction being a lens to shape understanding in a post-truth, as those books had that effect on me. I think the most lasting idea that his books imprinted on me was that it is absurd to imagine that a story, life, should have a clear plot - all of the pleasure and truth of it comes in the experience of it.
I have been afraid to revisit these books as they are so tied up to my early twenties: the stories are so intertwined with my own memories of the excitement and trauma of growing up. There was an eroticism in that. My girlfriend and I would send each other cryptic allusions to page numbers of the most sensual passages. Perhaps I worry that in re-reading I will erode those truths by discovering new, less keening ones.
Thanks!! I'm really happy & grateful you enjoyed. And I understand the sentiment. I've reread Savage Detectives a few times now, and although it's just as good with every read, the experience has been different each time. There is a part of me that wishes I could reclaim that same sense of unbridled urgency and emotion I felt the first go-round. Perhaps this is why I keep coming back to it.
This made me so happy to read. I discovered Bolaño at university with 2666 and was then re-radicalised by The Savage Detectives a couple years later. I love your point about fiction being a lens to shape understanding in a post-truth, as those books had that effect on me. I think the most lasting idea that his books imprinted on me was that it is absurd to imagine that a story, life, should have a clear plot - all of the pleasure and truth of it comes in the experience of it.
I have been afraid to revisit these books as they are so tied up to my early twenties: the stories are so intertwined with my own memories of the excitement and trauma of growing up. There was an eroticism in that. My girlfriend and I would send each other cryptic allusions to page numbers of the most sensual passages. Perhaps I worry that in re-reading I will erode those truths by discovering new, less keening ones.
Thanks!! I'm really happy & grateful you enjoyed. And I understand the sentiment. I've reread Savage Detectives a few times now, and although it's just as good with every read, the experience has been different each time. There is a part of me that wishes I could reclaim that same sense of unbridled urgency and emotion I felt the first go-round. Perhaps this is why I keep coming back to it.