I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: TIJUANA NO!-Transgresores de la Ley (1994).

In the mid 90s, when I was living in Boston, I discovered MTV Latino, and the Rock en Español resurgence.  Since I’m always interested in new music, I bought a few CDs by these Spanish-singing bands.  For most of my life I’ve thought about the rabid Japanese audiences who loved bands that sand in English.  Did they understand the lyrics?  And did it matter?  Well, here was a test for me.

Tijuana No! was the first band I bought and I really liked it (and still do).

The disc opens with a rollicking ska rocker “Goples Bajos” which features a wonderful horn filled breakdown and ends with a blistering guitar solo.  The title track, “Transgresores de la Ley” opens with a military beat and a military sounding flute before taking off with a heavy verse and, more impressively, a punk/shouty chorus.

My favorite song is “Tu y Yo,” it’s funky all over the place and has a super heavy midsection.  And “Borregos Kamikazes” has a wonderful juxtaposition of speedy, almost loco lyrics in the verses with some great group vocals in the chorus.

The first surprise (for me) comes with “La Esquina del Mundo” because suddenly there’s a female vocalist on lead.  She sounds great (her voice has a cool echo on it) and although she doesn’t quite convey the heaviness of the rest of the track, it’s an interesting juxtaposition.

The second surprise is that the track “Conscience Call” is mostly in English (I got so used to not understanding the lyrics that I was quite surprised to hear words I understood).

The final surprise comes with the penultimate track: an excellent cover of The Clash’s “Spanish Bombs.” Again sung by the female vocalist, her voice works wonderfully with the track.  The chorus, sung in Spanish, is really perfect.

So, in answer to the question, do you need to understand the lyrics to enjoy the music?, I’d say no.  Although it is nice once in a while.

[READ: November 20, 2010] The Savage Detectives

This was the Bolaño novel that I had initially wanted to read because the reviews were so glowing (amusingly enough it turns out to be virtually the last book of his that I read).  And now that I have read almost all of his books, it’s obvious how this book fits into his larger scheme of writing (I wonder what I would have thought if I hadn’t read the other books, too.  In fact, I wonder if I would have liked 2666 more at the time if I had read this one first.  As it is, I think I enjoyed this more having read 2666 first).

[DIGRESSION: When I was reading 2666 I found a fantastic review of 2666/The Savage Detectives by Daniel Zalewski, which reviews 2666 and The Savage Detectives in context of Bolaño’s life].

In a previous post I noted how Bolaño doesn’t really write conventional novels.  And this one is no exception.  Part I is the diary of Juan Garcia Madero, a 17-year-old aspiring poet.  It covers from November to December 31, 1975 .

Garcia Madero talks about his introduction to the visceral realists, a group of Mexican poets whose legacy is more or less unknown to us now (in the book–in reality there was no such group).  The two main visceral realists are Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, and we will follow or look for these two for the rest of the book.

As with other Bolaño books, there is a massive obsession with sex.  At first Garcia Madero is a virgin and thinks about sex a lot.  Then he finally has sex with first one woman and then many women.  And he writes about them in his diary and spares no details.  (Many entries reveal him having sex with one of his girlfriends 5 or 6 times a night).  And there are of course whores and other deviant sexual individuals (including a guy who carries a large knife by which he measures his penis–we never see this, it’s all hearsay, but it’s in there).

And during this time, he is writing poetry as well–a fully welcomed member of the visceral realists.  

As the diary entries reach the end, a plot develops.  He is friends with the Font family.  He has been sleeping with daughter María, while another guy, Pancho, has been sleeping with daughter Angélica.  Despite this, the Font patriarch, Quim, finds Garcia Madero charming and welcomes him into their home (he doesn’t know about the sex).  Quim is a loud, boisterous man with many quirks.  One is that he is interested in “rescuing” a local whore, Lupe, from her pimp.  (All the while he is sleeping with her as well).  When he finally does, the pimp is not happy.  They all hole up in Quim’s compound with the pimp and his guards waiting outside with guns drawn.

While they are waiting, fearful for their lives, Belano and Ulises Lima more or less saunter up to the compound and ask what’s up.  And for a few days, the Font family, the three poets and the whore are all at the Font house.  As the year draws to an end, the three poets agree to take off, to leave Mexico for safer lands, and to bring Lupe with them.  Quim offers them his white Impala and the four of them speed off for the border.  And thus ends 1975.

Part II (by far the largest part of the book at 540-some pages) is absolutely fascinating in its construction.  There are 26 chapters.  Each chapter shows an unnamed questioner interviewing various people with an unstated (but implied) quest. Nevertheless, since the quest is never specified it certainly seems like different interlocutors are after different things.  The fascinating thing about the chapters is that they do not directly correspond to one chapter per year, nor do the characters repeat consistently.

Starting in 1976, there are 53 characters introduced (some are characters we saw in the diary, but most are not).  I’ve mentioned before that Bolaño loves to create characters and really this is what you get here: 50-some character sketches.

The first person they interview, Amadeo Salvatierra. They interview him once in 1976 and portions of this lengthy (and Los Suicidas Mezcal-fueled) interview appear throughout the chapters as a sort of grounding for the rest of Part II.  Salvatierra was visited by two young poets (who must be Belano and Lima).  Their quest was to find whatever information they can about Casárea Tinajero, the poet.  Salvatierra is one of the few people who has heard of her and who even (he thinks) has a copy of one of her poems.  [He eventually finds it and the poem is outrageously non-literal].

In the rest of 1976, there are some people we know (Luscious Skin, one of the visceral realists that hung out with Garcia Madero and the others), Quim Font (in a mental institution) and María and Angélica Font).  After 1976, the interviews progress somewhat more chronologically (although again, not in chapter breakdown), with several characters appearing every couple of years.  The content of these interviews is fascinating.  We learn about Belano and Lima from third parties, creating a fascinatingly rounded picture, and we also learn bits about the interviewees too.

The interviewees talk about meeting “him” (who we assume is Belano, even if it’s not always specified) or dating him (Belano is almost exclusively described as impotent).  We see some people who dated friends of Belano’s and who have things to say about other friends that relate back to the quest, even tangentially.   There’s also a few gay characters who are portrayed in a positive light. (I mention this because many characters use the word “faggot”–although not describing people who are actually gay.  And the use of the word “faggot” is rampant in 2666, leading many to speculate about Bolaño’s homophobia).  There’s even mention of a J.M.G. Arcimboldi who is apparently not quite Giuseppe von Archiboldi from 2666.

I started taking notes on the different interviewees, thinking that they would crop up regularly, but I soon realized that there were far too many people saying different things, so I started writing down the main thrust of each section (and then I made a spreadsheet of all the characters (geek!) which I’ll send you if you want, since I don’t think I can post it easily here).

It quickly becomes apparent that the questioner(s) is traveling around looking for information about Belano and Lima.  All of the names of the interviewees are followed by the location where the interview took place.  They interview fellow poets, former lovers, even people who seem to have no connection to the story (until you read a later person’s interview which ties everything together).  They travel from Mexico City to Barcelona to Paris back to Mexico City to Tel Aviv to Vienna to San Diego, to Madrid, finally ending back in Mexico (all this during the years 1976-1996).

Although most of the interviews are very short, there are a few that are twenty or more pages.  One in particular is with a woman who was more or less in love with Belano for a summer. It follows her travels throughout Europe in her attempt to find work and lodging with a busload of other hippies. Her story itself is practically a novella and it quite wonderful.

Another great one concerns Auxilio Lacouture, a woman trapped in the bathroom of UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) during the 1968 government takeover.  Her story has been expanded into the novel Amulet.

We also see that Belano challenged a critic to a duel (the story is told in two parts and is revealed deliciously).

The later interviews are with people who seem to have no connection to those early 1976 folks.   In the final interview in 1996, Ernesto García Grajales reveals that he is writing the definitive account of the visceral realists, and even he doesn’t know for certain what happened to Belano and Lima.  He has also never heard of Juan Garcia Madero, who he says was never a visceral realist, and he should know because he is the foremost expert on them.

Part III of the book continues Garcia Madero’s diary.  It picks up on the next day, January 1, 1976.  It shows them driving around on a quest.  After several days they realize that Luce’s pimp is very close by, trailing them still. And in a climactic scene (and it’s amusing in itself that it takes place in 1976 even though the book ends in 1996) the characters (including one wholly unexpected) converge in a scene of violence.

The diary ends rather nebulously, and yet given all that has happened in the book, how else could  it end?  It’s been several weeks since I finished the book and I’m still thinking about it.  There’s so many possible threads and thoughts going on.  And, as with all of the Bolaño books that I’ve read, each little section is a tightly compressed story.  Since Bolaño was a poet first, his fiction seems as tightly structured as his poetry.  As far as novels, most of the ones he wrote were as densely packed and were all pretty short.  This large novel (648 pages) is really a series of short stories/novellas that all tie together because of an elusive character.

And as with most Bolaño, the story is a quest.  A quest for a person who is never really found by the people seeking him (although we the readers learn more about him than we could possibly imagine).  And what I find about Bolaño (and why I keep reading more and more by him, is that even if his stories don’t have an “end” so to speak, the world he creates is so real, that it feels like a real world, where tidy endings don’t often happen.  And that’s quite a talent.

I want to make a special mention of Natasha Wimmer’s excellent translation.  At no point does the book “feel” like a translation.  The writing is smooth and consistent and although I couldn’t begin to compare it to the original, I feel like she totally captured the feeling of the novel.

For ease of searching I include: Bolano, Maria, Angelica, Casarea Tinajero, Garcia Grajales, Espanol