The cult success of The Savage Detectives and 2666 by Chilean-born Roberto Bolaño has seen much of what the late writer published translated into English.
The latest are two novels, The Skating Rink, originally published in 1993, and Monsieur Pain, the winner of a provincial writing competition in the early 1980s, both translated by the prize-winning Australian, Chris Andrews.
The action of The Skating Rink revolves around the figure-skating beauty, Nuria, who is mysteriously dropped from Spain’s Olympic team. The event triggers an unforeseen concatenation of events, including a murder and a love triangle. The narrators are Enric Rosquelles, a Spanish bureaucrat, Gaspar Heredia, an itinerant Chilean poet, and Remo Moran, his compatriot and
ex-compadre.
At only 181 pages, it doesn’t show the cyclical vision and grand ambition of 2666 or the narrative flourish and ingenious manipulation of voice typical of The Savage Detectives. But one can see some of Bolaño’s long-running motifs — murders and detectives, poets and exile, fascism and a longing for a vanished golden past.
Monsieur Pain was written at the time Bolaño started writing prose. What is evident is the grizzled poet’s cynical voice, non-symmetrical use of metaphor and symbol, and a tentative grasp of narrative strictures (not structures). One weakness of The Skating Rink, as other reviewers have noted, is in Bolaño’s inability to distinguish the voices of his narrators, a technique he was to master to devastating effect in The Savage Detectives.
But those weaknesses are camouflaged by the author’s shaggy, unschooled use of language, something that can’t be taught at the myriad creative-writing courses that most universities offer. This is, perhaps, the reason why one of Bolaño’s characters declares that literature ‘is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen and tears”. This literature, or the idea behind it, is one that is created by ‘scruffy, damaged individuals; resentful, taciturn, sickly misfits, the sort you’d rather not encounter on a deserted street”.
He comes up with beautiful sentences and striking metaphors, which have never been used and which, if they slipped into the mainstream, would taste as fresh as the day they were first plucked from the tree. He is a marvellously deft writer, able to write about, say, faeces and raise that to the level of mystique, a ritual even (as in the paragraphs about scatology in The Skating Rink).
His works are populated by literary folk, be they fascists, romantics, revolutionaries or celebrities. But it is the fighters, gestured at in Distant Star as veterans of ‘Latin America’s doomed revolutions”, who have the most allure. They could be ‘the scruffy, damaged individuals” marching to a literary nirvana, listening to atonal, distorted music and haunted by nightmares and ghosts.
One could be Moran (in a previous life) who, when he’s not doing the accounts, he thinks he would ‘have loved to be a detective” as he is ‘pretty observant”, can ‘reason deductively” and is a ‘keen reader of crime fiction”.
I don’t know if detectives love crime fiction, but his one prediction turns out to be tragically accurate. Quoting Hans Henny Jahnn, Moran says: ‘If you find a murder victim, better brace yourself, because the bodies will soon be coming thick and fast —”
This prefigures the chilling killing of women in 2666.
The Skating Rink is a different novel, a second, or perhaps even third, cousin to 2666, The Savage Detectives, Amulet, By Night in Chile and Distant Star, novels that are unrelenting in their preoccupation with writers’ lives. Yes, one or two of the characters in The Skating Rink are literary, but their literary pursuits are tangential to what they do.
Moran, with a novel to his name, runs a hospitality operation. But you get the sense that he has not quite forgotten his true vocation and sinks into tragic resignation when one of his employees says, ‘poetry is a waste of time”. In a sense ‘she was right; on the planet of happy eunuchs and zombies, poetry is waste of time”.
One wonders what this person would have made of the fact that the novel Monsieur Pain, set in Paris 1938, is dominated by the historical figure of César Vallejo. This novel, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s Mesmeric Revelation, features the Peruvian poet who lies near death in hospital, seized by a strange case of continuous hiccups.
‘All the organs are in perfect working order. Let’s hope we find one that is diseased. I can see that this man is dying, but I don’t know from what,” a puzzled doctor says. (Vallejo was born in Peru in 1892 and emigrated to France in the early 1920s. He later became associated with the Spanish leftists who fought Franco and died of an undiagnosed condition on a rainy April 15 in 1938. Years before, the poet had predicted: ‘I will die in Paris on a rainy day.”)
Madame Reynaud, a young widow, asks a mesmerist acquaintance of hers, Monsieur Pain, to come and cure Vallejo, the husband of her friend. As he goes down the stairs to meet Madame Reynaud, he encounters two Spanish men who ‘trained their gazes” at him in the way a policeman would. Why did he think they were cops? Because ‘only policemen have preserved that way of looking, an atavism that goes back to hunting and dark woods —”
These mysterious men with links to the Francoist forces arrange a meeting at which they instruct Pain to stop treating the dying poet for ‘the common good”. To make sure he agrees, they give him a dark brown envelope, containing ‘more than two thousand francs”.
There’s a fascinating cast of characters (real and imaginary), including Madam Curie, her daughter Irene and Pleumeur-Bodou, who has decamped to join ‘the other side” — the Spanish Fascists for whom he works as an intelligence officer. In an episode that unfolds at a movie house he boasts: ‘I apply my knowledge of mesmerism to the interrogation of prisoners and spies.”
Monsieur Pain unfolds on the streets of the Paris, at times on rainy days, at other times on nights that smell of ‘something strange”, on avenues bustling with people and sometimes on roads on which not a soul is to be seen.
It’s a book suspended in a void where fascist
ghosts, dreams and nightmares crystallise into the real and vice versa, where the sciences and the occult intersect, a mesmeric world in which the substantial and the insubstantial share a wall.
Monsieur Pain is not the sort of novel you want to read if you haven’t read anything else by Bolaño. The novel is somewhat ethereal; it blows this way and that way. It is unsettling in the brazen way that it races from heaven to hell, dream to nightmare, life to death.
The action unfolds in motionless landscapes where not a sound is to be heard but, when sounds emerge, for instance, Vallejo’s hiccups, they are ‘simply beyond description and yet accessible to everyone, like a sonic ectoplasm or a Surrealist found object”.
When Bolaño was awarded the Romulo Gallegos Prize (the Spanish world’s Booker) for The Savage Detectives a decade ago, he delivered a speech (printed in the literary magazine Chimurenga 15: The Curriculum is Everything), in which he said that great literature is not only about exquisite sentences or ‘writing marvellously well”.
It’s ‘knowing to stick one’s head into the dark, knowing to jump into the void, knowing that literature is basically a dangerous occupation. To run along the edge of the precipice: on one side the bottomless abyss and on the other the faces one loves, the smiling faces one loves, and books, and friends, and food.”
The Skating Rink and Monsieur Pain are testament to that lifelong pursuit, first as a poet on the streets and in the cafés of Mexico and then as an impoverished novelist in Spain, which began with novels such as the experimental works Monsieur Pain and The Skating Rink, and culminated with the masterpieces The Savage Detectives and 2666.