This book posed an interesting problem for me, because while it is unquestionably a good book it’s also one that I’m not sure I can really honestly recommend to anyone. Let me tell you what this book is about: Two poets living in Mexico and other places from about the mid-70s through the mid-90s. There’s a very vague semblance of a story that sort of bookends the novel and has to do with the two poets looking for another poet, a woman who founded their branch of Mexican poetry (called visceral realism) and disappeared in the 20s. For most of the book, however, this storyline is either ignored completely or referred to only in the most opaque ways, and to be honest it’s not a particularly interesting plot in any case.

The middle 500 pages or so of the book come in the form of deposition-like statements from a variety of people who knew the two poets over the decades. When I say “a variety of people,” what I mean is literally dozens of characters. Many of them get more than one chance to speak in the book, and many of their stories are interesting. Keeping track of who they all are, however, is a challenge to say the least, as is the fact that the novel sprawls over four continents and three decades, moving from place to place and time to time without much obvious rhyme or reason to the process. Some of the characters who tell their stories in the book seem to have something relevant to say about the two poets; some don’t. I could point to a multitude of places in the novel where I just had to stop and ask myself “What in the world am I reading here?”

So why did I keep going? First of all, there’s the writing. The novel is translated from Spanish but it’s hard to imagine that much of the force or the beauty of the writing could have been lost in the change, because so much of what’s here is so forceful and so beautiful. Taken by itself, each character’s “deposition,” for lack of a better word, is fascinating. The book is frequently hilarious on one page, sad on the next, only to turn around and make you laugh again a few pages later. The author recognizes that the travails of these characters, their own over-estimation of the worth of what they do, is frequently ridiculous, but at the same time it’s kind of noble and kind of sad to see how they really suffer for their work.

And suffer they do, though they don’t always seem to realize it. There’s nothing magical about this book’s realism. Poetry is not a money business, and many of these characters are poor. They live in hovels, they lose teeth, they get scabies, they die or go crazy in ugly ways. Scenes that other authors might romanticize are never allowed to become pretty in Bolaño’s book, and if you come to the conclusion after reading this book that you want to be a poet then you are either called by God or touched by some sort of mental illness, because nothing in here reads like a brochure for a bohemian lifestyle.

It’s not just the physical or mental suffering that gets at you, but also how pointless everything ends up being for most of these characters There’s a significant scene near the end of the novel where one of the main characters finally meets Octavio Paz, a Mexican poet who represents the opposite of everything the book’s main characters believe in. Far from being a climactic confrontation, however, the scene is depressing in its meaninglessness. Paz doesn’t even recognize the name of the character, has no idea that he’s a poet at all, and after a brief and uninteresting conversation the character simply shakes his hand and leaves. After a full life suffering for his art, the main character of this novel has left virtually no mark on the world whatsoever.

Does that sound like the kind of book you want to read? Maybe not. There were definitely times when I considered putting it down. In the end, though, I’m glad I didn’t. There are passages in here that I’m not likely to forget anytime soon, images that will stay with me. There’s also something to be said for the way Bolaño is unafraid to write about life the way it really is, instead of trying to graft a coherent story onto it or at least dress it up and make it prettier. “Here is what happens,” he’s sort of saying, in my view. “Take from it whatever you want.” That doesn’t necessarily make for a book most people would want to read, but it is part of what makes The Savage Detectives a good book.