Wild detectives, 20 years later

His first lines are etched in the memory of recent literature: "I was cordially invited to be part of visceral realism.Of course, I accepted." There was no of initiation ceremony, it is better as well ". Whoever speaks is Juan García Madero, one of the narrators of Los detectives salvajes, the novel by Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) that brings together the story, the dreams and the defeats of a generation, his, in Mexico in the 70's. Supported by the Herralde Award, he was released in November 1998; a year later, he received the Rómulo Gallegos. The detectives did not just consecrate Bolaño: he changed the map of influences of the Latin American narrative. Considered as one of the best novels of the last 25 years, nine authors have responded to it: 1 What impression had its first reading. 2 Qualified as rupturist at the time, what is its value today? 3 How he appreciates his influence 20 years later

Alberto Fuguet (1964, CH): "I thought: God, Carlos Fuentes died"

1 I started to know Bolaño thanks to the literature Nazi in America. I thought that he was a very small Chilean author. Very modern, with this epilogue for monsters. And where he had always conquered me, it was with history. Last sunsets on earth, the anthology Honorás your father and, many years later, was part of Assbadin, 2001, via Anagrama. I mean, I have Detectives with this story in trailer. As a fan. And I bought it in November 1998 at the FNAC Madrid with Paz Soldán. Much earlier, I think, everything would explode even if there was already a lot of discussion or Edmundo was telling me a lot. I was with a Fullbright Scholarship in Georgetown, Washington DC and I started reading him in a plane at the Barajas landing strip and I ended up in an Adams Morgan cafe for Thanksgiving and it started to snow. It was before Romulo Gallegos. Years later, during a trip that I had only done in Mexico City, I bought it in my pocket, in the red edition, and I devoted myself to go through the city with book 2 and 3. The first thing I thought: God, Carlos Fuentes died. The best Mexican novel was written by a Chilean. Then: that it was the best novel for teenagers, the best novel in the bud, the best of bromances, that no one understood male psychology like Bolaño. I did not imagine a literary hit, but a cult novel between writers and strange children. The detectives are sensual, delighted, colossal and there are so many characters. Punk poetry, club fighting, dangerous literature, the street, a vital occupation …

Edmundo Paz Soldan (1967, Bol): "It was not love at first sight"

1 The first impression This was not entirely positive. Luis Cárcamo-Huechante, one of my Ph.D. students, recommended it to me. I remember reading the first 150 pages without being completely hooked. It was not, for example, a love at first sight. Then I left her on a plane and did not continue reading. A few years later, I tried again and this time, I read it fascinated by a pull.2 The novel was part of a renewed interest in the forefront. guard, for its practices and projects, under a rereading of a time when the market has all co – opted and it is not possible to be outside the system. Bolaño speaks of the dream of the union of life and art and the end of the project. As an example of avant-garde, we reflect on the difficult issues facing the artist in our neoliberal era, his relationship with his art and the way in which this art should deal with. politics and the market. 3 If you read the authors of the new generations, you will find Wild Detectives everywhere. It is, to give two examples, in the work of Peruvian Diego Trelles and Ecuadorian Mónica Ojeda. The most interesting thing is that the novels that they write are not alike; that is to say, there is a lot of clues to follow, that there is a forest in which to go astray, it is not only the plays that play dialogue with detective salvajes.

Matías Rivas (1971, ch): "It was an energy shock and daring"

1 It was the year 1998 and the publication of Los detectives salvajes fell like a meteorite that shook the national literary environment. I bought the book in the old Altamira bookstore, Huérfanos street. I had read stories and chronicles of Bolaño. This caught my attention – in addition to his literature – his character, his uncomfortable and insolent attitude. When I read The Savage Detectives, I understood the fundamental issues of Bolaño: the first was that he wrote with unusual skill, with a unique ease and breath. The other was to confirm that Bolaño belonged to Mexican culture. And the determining factor for me was to see the connection that Bolaño has with poetry and poets, which was already present in his novel Distant Star.2 More than a breakthrough novel in the formal aspect, I think his contribution has been to contribute literature a history of adventures, and writers of interest, subjects able to move by their desires and their lack of responsibility. I believe that Detectives will be read by generations and generations of readers who aspire to know the literature inside, how it lives impregnated, in its frequency.3 The Bolaño was a shock of energy and of self-confidence for a few years during which novels have abounded gentlemen knights, with exceptions such as Marín, Wacquez and Fuguet. There is no doubt that his work has affected the appearance of authors such as Alejandro Zambra and Alvaro Bisama, to name but two people who digested and wrote Bolaño with intelligence.

1 I do not remember how that happened, but I remember starting it on a bus leaving Antofagasta. And I remember how the desert entered the novel or the novel entered the desert until the landscape disappeared. The overflowing energy of The Wild Detectives has swallowed everything. And one of the things that appealed to me most at the time was the multiplicity of intersections: between prose and poetry, between horror and extreme pbadion, between documentary and fiction, between history with capital letters and microhistory. I still consider it an absolutely gratuitous novel, leaking all easy conversion. I see it today as a sort of milestone in the disappointed sensitivity of the period. As Grínor Rojo said, in the Bolaño literature, we can see the traces of a double loss. Or rather the loss of a double ideal: artistic avant-garde and political avant-garde. This is very clear in The Wild Detectives and, in a way, breaks with the traditional representations of disenchantment and skepticism3. The plasticity of Bolaño's writing, his privileged ear, his intensity, his risk, his ability to integrate the contemporary into the tradition, his universe and his aesthetic, in a word, are so unique that they can not be imitated. But this can be expanded. The disorder validated by Bolaño, the possibility of doing everything, could well be his most lasting influence.

Santiago Roncagliolo (1975, Pe): "It was like trying a new drug"

1 Everyone was talking about the novel when I arrived in Madrid, in 2000. I remember as a powerful badtail: metallitature, novel for teenagers, road movie, violence. Nobody wrote like that. It was like trying a new drug.2 I think Bolaño was able to bring together the traits of several generations and different cultures: the political force of the boom. The disenchantment of 68-year-olds like Houellebecq. The pop references of McOndo. And flashes of self-fiction. I do not know how he did it, but here it was all.3 I think his influence is invisible. Because it's too personal. We all have a corner of Bolaño, a phrase, a music. But great works leave no trace of crime.

Alvaro Enrigue (1969, Mex): "We all explode suddenly, do not we?"

1 When the detectives appeared, I was starting a doctorate in the United States. I read the novel with four or five years late. I thought it was awesome, but there was no way to suspect that it was going to become a delimitation text, which would mark a before and after.2 It seems to me a rather conservative novel on the plane formal: guided by the argument. But it's a powerful and intensely literary argument. It is cosmopolitan and melancholy: it was natural that it became an emblem of the beginning of the century. And there is this esoteric thing that is the style. Bolaño had an extremely imaginative and provocative conceptual voice: -A Gracian would have liked it. 3 I suppose you'll have imitators, but you do not know your work any better than if you were your neighbors.

Rafael Gumucio (1970, Ch): "He liberated an entire generation"

1 I read it in 2000 because Ignacio Echevarría had told me about it in the courtyard MACBA in Barcelona (drink beer with lemon soda). I am very envious, I told him "already, but it is not Chekhov". And indeed it was not Chekhov, but something more enviable and known and unknown at the same time: the last novel of the Mexican wave (José Agustín, Gustavo Sainz), which brought this ghost generation to possibilities that the events after 68 did not let it happen. It was an unbearable novel because the characters did not stop sleeping among them and read poetry; I was only the second and despised those who made the first one.2 This was a revolutionary novel of the type of novel, quite conventional, which was made at the time: realistic, corrected and modest. It was a real return to a previous novel, which was not the boom but the romance of the Mexican wave with which, oddly enough, no one identifies Bolaño. A generation that has Skármeta, Délano (Poli) and Dorfman in Chile. Bolaño looks at this generation of the distance that separates him from his failure (exile, ideological ambiguity) and gives a completely ironic version that is also a tribute to a young person who was not there3. I believe that he has released a whole generation who has read it. It gave you the feeling that you could not write like that, any more than what you live, that it could just be the advent of literature in your life. It's liberating, and that's fine, although in the long run, we want to not take so many freedoms, or at least not all of them.

Diego Zuñiga (1987, Ch): "An earthquake that I lived very rarely" [19659003] 1 I remember having finished reading it and I phoned a clbadmate reading it at the same time, or maybe I had finished it at that time. And we talked all afternoon about the book Belano and Lima, Cesárea Tinajero, the hundreds of characters that appear in the middle of the novel were an upheaval that I lived very rarely. I finished the novel and I really wanted to write. It was summer 2004, January. I was 17 years old and Bolaño died only a few months ago, but his name and this novel have appeared everywhere. The vertigo and enthusiasm he conveyed have never been forgotten.2 I think it's a book that completely messed up the Chilean story, which had written very correct, very predictable books, and whose appearance has changed the panorama, opened ways of reading In addition, he reminded the Chilean narrators how important it was to return to poetry3. Ten or fifteen years ago, when you asked the younger ones what they read, Bolaño – and the wild detectives – was very present. But today, the name Bolaño does not appear in his main readings. I do not know what happened Yes, I know that Detectives created a primordial game with forms, narrative structures, and that the bet, which is how to tell a story, did not permeate the new generations of Chilean storytellers. Something is lost along the way and I think it is urgent to get it back.

Patricio Jara (1974, CH): "It appeared at the right time"

1 I started reading Bolaño while I lived in Antofagasta. I left with the stories of phone calls. In these stories, there was something that exploded with The Wild Detectives: the simplicity to tell a complex story. This is clear from the first page, because there are moments to frame and moments to make poetry. I have emphasized it and I never forget it, even if I do not write poetry.2 At least for Chile, the novel appeared at the right time, when the production of local narrators and very popular started skidding. I do not know what would have happened if it had been published five years earlier. Perhaps it would have been lost in the thicket and in the bustle of the New Narrative editorial machine, which has published so much, that it has not been presented to everyone. In the year of its publication, Latin America experienced a decline in the generalized novel, which is why it also revived chronic and narrative journalism3. The voices that tell the story have very well connected to several generations. Especially for the idea of ​​the trip, for what happens, say, in a gang that knows he will lose but still goes to the front. Like few others, this novel has the shape of a hedgehog: it is a center full of points. He also showed that you could write about the meaning of writing. That was the key for many who had just started. In my case, his life experience was much more appealing than trying to write like him.