Una ventana media abierta

I'm still trying to work out why I enjoyed Detectives salvajes so much. On the surface level, it's one of those novels where "nothing happens". What there is of a plot concerns two poets in search of another in what ends up as a wild goose chase in the Sonoran Desert. Obviously, that's not the draw--and, curiously, neither are the two lead characters, who remains someone inscrutable throughout. No, it's all the other voices, from the somewhat precious teenager who narrates the opening and closing sections to the Uruguayan exile who witnesses the Tlatelolco massacre and was the narrator of Amuleto, the only work I'd read from Bolaño previously. (Six years ago now? Jesús lloró.)

I know I missed a lot of the intertextuality that has got the critics so wet because I'm frankly ignorant of the Latin American literary tradition, but I'm glad I got over myself and read the book anyway. I'll never be as prepared as I want to be to read the great novels I want to read, and if I keep holding off on them until I am, I'll never read them, nor will I be any more prepared to read any other works I want to read. I know some people don't believe in rereading, but it's always an option if you feel you didn't get what you wanted the first time. (And since, at this point, I've read so many works in translation, some of them I'd be reading again for the first time, so to speak.)

At its heart, Detectives salvajes is a novel about loss and naturally that speaks loudly to me right now. It's also a novel about the importance of literature (aren't they all these days?), which is something else close to my heart--though, again, articulating why I think literature is important is a tall order. For many of the characters in the novel, it is literally a matter of life and death. For me I doubt it will ever be more than a favourite hobby, albeit one I find it difficult to imagine a life without.

So what now? Well, I did start into Jull Costa's new translation of Eça de Queiroz' Os Maias and it seems worth sticking with, though it may be something I only really get into once the weather gets cooler. For my non-English reading, I'm picking up Grjasnowa's Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt, which I bought new a few months ago as an antidote to all the older German literature I've been reading. (Last time I was at Nuphy's, I pocketed his copy of Der Tod des Vergils and I've given it a go or two since then. Yeah, not happening.) Of course--for reasons I don't want to talk too much about just yet--what I really need to be doing right now is reading more Irish. Where did I lay my copy of Dialann deoraí, ní fheadar.