Fiona’s Reviews > The Savage Detectives > Status Update

Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone into in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man’s memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy.

Problems. Life is full of problems, although life was wonderful in Barcelona in those days, and problems were called surprises.

Have you ever heard the theory of Easter Island? According to the theory, Chile is the real Easter Island. You know: to the east we’re bordered by the Andes, to the north by the Atacama Desert, to the south by Antarctica, and to the west by the Pacific Ocean. We were born on Easter Island and our moai are ourselves, the Chileans, looking in bewilderment toward the four points of the compass.

It was Claudia’s voice and then Ulises’s voice, but not their normal everyday voices, or at least not Claudia’s everyday voice. It didn’t take me long to realise that they were reading poems. They were listening to Cat Stevens and reading short poems, deadpan and sad, luminous and ambiguous, slow and quick as lightning, poems about a cat rubbing itself up against Baudelaire’s legs

He had some Peruvian friends who gave him work occasionally, a group of Peruvian poets, probably poets in name only, since as everyone knows living in Paris wears you down and erodes your vocation if it isn’t ironclad. It coarsens you, it pushes you into oblivion. At least that happens to a lot of Latin Americans I know. I’m not trying to say it was true of Ulises, but it was definitely true of the Peruvians.

There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake

The story he told me wasn’t much different from what my friend had told me. The fight had been about Neruda and Parra, about the validity of their respective poetic visions, and yet there was a new element to the story that the director told (and I knew that he was telling me the truth): when he fought with my friend and my friend couldn’t come up with anything else to say in his desperate defence of Neruda