The Savage Detectives v. Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
presented by
ROUND ONE
The Savage Detectives
v. Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
Judged by Elizabeth Kiem
TMN Contributing Writer Elizabeth Kiem is a freelance book critic and very discriminating reader, despite the fact that if you Google her, the first hit you’ll get is “Bookslut.” She’s a member of the National Book Critics Circle, a reputable body that still hasn’t gotten on the poultry-as-prize bandwagon. She just finished reviewing a dozen unpublished manuscripts for Amazon and likes the ToB entries mostly because they are all bound. When she’s not reading, she produces videos for UNICEF. Connections to this year’s competitors: None known.
I spent a long afternoon into evening with Vendela Vida’s curious and implausible tale, seeing where it was going even as I wondered why it would go there, and trying hard not to imagine Jennifer Aniston as the lead in the Hollywood version. Then I spent a couple of weekends slogging through the cacophony of witnesses recalling the elusive subjects of Roberto Bolaño’s much-touted masterpiece, in which every third character is an obvious role for Gael García Bernal.
Apples and oranges have more in common than these two authors—Spanish-inflected surnames notwithstanding. Perhaps because all the world over, a beatnik is a beatnik—and a Believer something else entirely.
The Savage Detectives is complex, intellectual, and cool. I’m sure if I were to reread it I would pick up many subtleties and ambitions. Possibly, also, its importance—of which I’m passively convinced, but which has eluded me.
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name is unique and scrupulous. There is no mystery to this message-driven novel. It has a lingering atmosphere (being all Arctic, native, and spooky) but no lasting questions.
So it comes to this: The world (and my bookcase) is full of carefully crafted puzzles and dense, demanding novels that must, and will, be read again and again. As such, they (being Bely and Faulkner, Sebald and Pavic, Gaddis and Gadda) are the darlings of my personal library. But I will not be re-reading Bolaño, because his playfulness is coarse and his crypticism is narrow.
The winner is Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name—a peculiar story that I will never re-read, because it was completely satisfactory the first time through. And these days, I’m all about immediate gratification and simple pleasures. Besides, I have to save my reader’s ambition for the new translation of War and Peace someone gave me for Christmas.
Advancing:
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
JOHN: My bias in favor of Vendela Vida has been previously revealed, so let me just say, “Yay!”
One of my favorite aspects of the Tournament of Books is this sort of pairing, where a big, complicated, dare I say “difficult,” book gets matched up against something lean and quick-moving. I haven’t read The Savage Detectives, but I polished off Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name in a day. The story is literally linear, following the narrator’s (Clarissa) journey as she explores the central mystery of her life. Her story is experienced by the reader as we follow in her shoes. The emotions accrue, until the climax and conclusion, which hits (or hit me anyway) with a wallop. It does what good books should do.
Or, maybe good books should challenge us, push us to the limits of our abilities as readers and thinking creatures as fans of The Savage Detectives say it does.
Or, maybe books should focus on publishing pictures of people with their guns.
All of this is to say: Thank God there’s enough books around out there for everyone.
KEVIN: I know a lot of people who really love The Savage Detectives and I know even more people who absolutely despise it. In thinking about this match-up, I realized that most of the people I know who love it are men, and most of the people who hate it are women. In fact the most shocking thing about this minor upset (as of this writing there is actually more money for charity bet on Vida than Bolaño) is Elizabeth Kiem’s relative indifference to it.
The gender gap could be a problem for Bolaño in this market because recent surveys by the major publishers have shown that the only adult American men who read fiction for pleasure anymore are you, me, and the nine male judges in this tourney. The only categories of books men reliably read anymore are memoirs by disgraced CEOs and compilations of video game cheat codes. Which is why I am proud to be writing the introduction to the upcoming book, Jeffrey Skilling’s Sick Gears of War Hacks: 115 Shortcuts to Helping Your Company Take Down Your Company.
On the other hand, if you look at the Amazon blog for the photographer of Armed America, you will see that he recently attracted a German publisher for that book. I have no idea what it means that there is demand among Germans for looking at pictures of Americans sitting at home in their Sunday-going-to-meeting clothes holding their sniper rifles. I think I actually take a little comfort in that.