Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives

I just finished Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. I first came across the author through an article that my Dad gave me about him a couple of years. It was this book, translated in 2008, that brought his name to the attention of the English speaking world. He died in 2003 and was only truly recognised internationally, after his death.

The book focuses on  two Mexican poets, Arturo Bolano (a ficticious alter-ego of the author) and Ulises Lima and documents their search, over twenty years, for Cisarea Tinajero, a mysterious dissappeared writer and founder of the real vicerismo movement. It is told in three parts. The first and last are diary entries by a young student who, through his involvement in Bolano and Lima's gang of real viceralistas, ends up leaving Mexico  DF with the two. The main, central part of the book consists of a series of various freinds' and acquaintances' accounts of meetings with and reflections on Bolano and Lima, and their lives between 1976 to 1996.

 The central part of the book is an audacious undertaking, in terms both of the scale of what it chronicles -twenty years of searching through Mexico, Spain, France, Israel and even Africa- and in the narative technique used to tell this. Some of the writers give numerous accounts, others appearing just once; some are a couple of paragraphs while others are over twenty pages long. What impressed me most was Bolano's ability to adopt the persona of these fictitious characters, and use them todescribe a certain period of one or the other of Lima or Bolano's lives. One character simply retells tales that Bolano told him. Fantastic tales and short stories in their own right. Another character is asked by Bolano to assist him in a duel with a critic who Belano feels has misrepresented him.  Later in the book, there's a passage from a woman whose spare room Belano rents. She's a body builder who falls in love with Bolano, but with whom Bolano has little, if anything, in common. Sometimes I found myself stunned by the brilliance of these first person naratives. The content is so rich, giving you an awful lot to dwell on.

The book is realist in its descriptions and has an incredible richness in terms of the language. I  have to admit that when I first picked up the book, I was overwhealmed. It had been a long while since I'd done much reaing in Spanish and it did seem a little daunting. It is certainly a book that you can return to, and understand more and more with time. It is the first book that I have read that is so closely tied to poetry and was an awakening, with regard to how beaurtiful writing can be. I'm now completely sold on LAm literiture. With Javier Marias and Jose Saramago, every book I pick up at the moment feels like it's the best book I've ever read.

Work Now, Climb later

Climbing has taken a back seat since arriving in Bandung. The first indication of this came perhaps just before Christmas, in the Harau Valley, in West Sumatra. My interest in the Harau Valley was first sparked by the casual mention of a group of self-sufficient climbers in the Lonely Planet and the subsequent Internet searches that gave a hazy view of definite climbing possibilities. The Valley is a stop-off on the backpacker trail, with the waterfalls of Lemba Harau incorporated into tours to the area around Bukkitinggi. It consists of a single road around which there are villages in a rural setting which back onto distant rocky outcrops. As you continue up the valley, the rock gets closer, the dwellings get fewer and sweeping 100 metre expanses of yellow orange and blue rock rising from emerald green rice fields continue kilometre after kilometre and lead finally to the village of Harau itself. We stayed at the Echo Homestay, a place very close to nature providing an ideal location from which to set out on day trips into the valley itself.

The Eiger Wall

While we managed to fit a visit to the place into a one week trip as well as cart a rope, shoes and harnesses along on the trip, we didn’t get any actual climbing in; in the three days we spent there we only took a look at the rock and the astounding scenery around from ground level. In retrospect it seems like a genuine missed opportunity, and in writing this I realize just how upset I am, while at the time it felt like we tried, although perhaps not with a full effort, to get onto the rock and get some climbing done. By the time we had psyched up to give it a go on the afternoon of the second day, the rain began and didn’t let up before we left to Danau Maninjau on the morning of the third.
While the circumstances and the rain were perhaps partly to blame I can’t help thinking that a fear of the prospect of having to down climb, of the bolts (which were for the most part in good condition), and of my unfamiliarity with the conglomerate rock all went together in creating a certain reluctance to climb and prolonged the climbing until it was, by accident, too late to do so. The trip to Maninjau made up for the lack of climbing for the most part.

In Bandung, we found a local climbing wall within the first week through a friend of Anja’s and went down a couple of times initially and then, when I started work I managed to get it together enough to trek down twice a week at 9 a.m. to have a rewarding pre-work climb. The wall is at a local outdoors shop Eiger on Jl. Cihampelas and by Indonesian standards is pretty good. It is a fully free standing 25 metre overhung, bendcrete-esque artificial wall with holds, bolts enough to get you to the top at about French 7a climbing. Inside, the shop has large glass windows looking into a small bouldering wall made of similar paneled climbing wall with a flat section, a stepped roof, overhung by about two metres and another by around one.

Coming from the UK and having worked at both The Edge in Sheffield and the Manchester Climbing Centre sets my expectations of how a climbing wall should be far too high. Having just one lead wall and small bouldering area at the Eiger Climbing Centre, both with questionable safety issues puts a slight damper on the whole experience. Still, the walls present enough of a challenge to keep me occupied. Throughout the month of March though, I haven’t been down. I put this down to the fact that I haven’t been out on rock since arriving in Indonesia. It really does kill the motivation. Let’s face it, indoor climbing just isn’t the same.

All in all, now that the dry season seems to be making a, appearance, I hope to be able to post some information about climbing around Bandung in the coming weeks and to be able to get motivation back up to the level it was prior to leaving the UK. Bandung has much in its favour in terms of climbing: the local competition climbers who, while perhaps being unable to go outdoors as much as one might hope, are always ready and willing to share a session. So Citata becomes less of a dream and more of a reality.

And done

The blog has definitely been forgotten. In all the excitement, finding time to write about what's going on here has been.. well, in a way there has been plenty of other things to get on with. However to bring this page up to date: I have moved into a house in Bandung in an area of North Bandung, Dago, and since January I have been working for English First as an EFL teacher.

The two months that I've been in Indonesia seem to have flown by. After the initial week or so staying with Anja's folks in Upper Dago; their village is Ciburial, a week which, thanks to Gary and Siegrun's fantastic hospitality and culturally balanced environment, provided a gentle shift from West to East; we both headed to West Sumatra, the Island north of Java for one week, before returning to Bandung and heading to the south coast of Java to celebrate the Christmas holiday with Anja's parents. New Years was vastly different to the last few and was spent at Fashion Pasta an Italian restaurant which overlooks the city of Bandung. The night was accompanied by a small string band and four singers who rotated throughout the evening, which played a variety of eastern and western music and felt special. It was one of those events that you know is a once only affair. The set-up was two guitars, mandolins, and an instrument that I'd describe as a three-string cello and was simply surreal. What was really funny to see, was the way in which the majority of people seemed to bring in New Year together at midnight and then by quarter past, seemed to evaporate.

That more or less covers life in the first month in Indonesia in terms of events and what happened. Personal reflections are harder to put down on paper. I'm not sure that the phrase culture shock would be proper for the way I felt when I arrived in the country. It was more a sense of pure wonder. In a way, with the abundance of photos and information about anywhere you care to look at on the Internet, you can create a fairly good mind's eye of how a place might look and feel; you expect the heat and humidity when you step out of the plane so when it happens it isn't so much of a shock, but it still feels incredible. An entry in my diary from the first few days here reads: I'm astounded by everything and surprised by nothing. Livingwithin view of but outside the city, in the hills meant that Bandung wasn't in my face initially. It also heightened the intrigue: looking at it everyday, down below, wondering how it worked and what it felt like.

For me, one of the greatest experiences when stepping outside the environment to which you've become accustomed, is the feeling that so much is so new. The knowledge that you're really looking at the world and noticing it objectively. You walk around, drive, ride, all with eyes wide open, attempting to take everything in. To this end, everything here is so different visually, from what I've become accustomed to in Europe.