The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño

If you haven't yet, you should read Bolaño. Now.

The plot of The Savage Detectives centers around two main characters, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima; Belano is modeled after Roberto Bolaño, Lima is modeled after Miguel Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, Bolaño's good friend. The two of them vaguely head up a literary movement. They drift from place to place, falling in love here, making love there, and generally bumming around everywhere. This vague plot aside... The Savage Detectives, more than anything else, is Bolaño lovingly writing an autobiographical portrait and scripting an ode to Mexico in the 70's. And the way in which he does so, in the words of the Harlequin in Heart of Darkness, massively enlarged my mind.

***************************

The Savage Detectives is split up into three sections:
I: Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975), pp. 3-139
II: The Savage Detectives (1976 - 1996), pp. 143-588
III: The Sonora Desert (1976), pp. 591-648

As you can see, the bulk of the novel comes in Section II where Bolaño writes from the perspective of, by my count, 56 different narrators who give 94 separate accounts in total. Heading each narrative account, which range from less than a page to twenty or so pages at the longest, there is a name, date and geographical location giving a small dose of titular background context as to where the speaker is coming from.

And at one point midway through the second section of The Savages Detectives, I realized I was in serious danger of completely losing track of who was talking, so I began to represent the section in an aggregated, visual way.

Here is a representation of the narrators of the first two subsections of Section II:

Each row represents a separate narrative account and each column, or indent, represents the introduction of a new narrator. When narrators repeat, their account gets a new line, but the entry appears in the same column in which they first appeared. As you can see, the first narrative is by Amadeo Salvatierra, in January 1976; the next is Laura Jauregui; both of these narrators give accounts in the second subsections, as well. The narratives are dated roughly in chronological fashion, from 1976 through 1996, though they often recount events that had happened years ago.

Make sense? Please say yes.

Here are the first 8 or so subsections of Section II (i.e. a partially expanded version of the first image above):




... and the visual aggregation for the entirety of Section II (zoomed out the whole way):













I loved this structural technique. Belano and Lima never give their own accounts of themselves - instead, their multi-faceted portraits are painted by countless others. This technique also got me thinking about the general trajectory of a given person's relationships with people. If you could map out your life and your interactions with friends and acquaintances, would it look roughly look like this? A slowly, constantly expanding map, with some relationships maintained properly and some lost? With a number of short, intense periods spent with individuals, then never seeing them again? With years elapsing between meetings?

And in the end, you have to wonder whether any one person would be able to paint a complete portrait of you, or perhaps whether such completeness is only possible through aggregating the accounts of... everybody who knew you.

*Update: Click here for a full pdf. A few of the cells have been cut in half for some reason - sorry about that. Of course, if you spot any errors in the spreadsheet (I hope nobody is OCD enough to spot them), please let me know!*