I don't know how I feel about the Savage Detectives. It's definitely about feeling lost. I felt lost reading it. I don't know what is attributable to intent, whether I ought to have felt lost, or whether something was lost, in a given passage, via literal translation, or whether, in a given passage, something was lost in cultural translation.
Compelling segments include but are not limited to: the Liberian civil war, the duel, the camping trip, the besieged school, the chain of vignette resolutions, the chase/resolution. There are grossly detailed digressions that felt Proustian, dull but somehow compelling. There are amusing sideways glances and outright reflections on queer life.
With Bolaño I think it comes down to the void, like Nietzsche’s idea of it, most of the time. Everything in Bolaño’s work orbits the void, at least in my opinion. The void is fate, it’s time, it’s subconscious, connected to the violent and sexual and loving core aspects of humanity, and of course it’s death. One should hope that the void is evil, a conscious evil, but if it’s only a chaotic destruction how can it even be fought? (Belaño has a lot of characters asking this question frequently because the Nazis and police sieging the university are part of this question for him). It’s something which cannot be described outright, a void is nothing, so Bolaño traces its edges. Belaño also basically talks about whatever he wants to in his books, which can make them seem confusing. Why does a donut maker complain about modern industry alienating him alongside a bookshop clerk who never has the courage to read the ambitious masterworks? It’s the void that connects them. He also focuses a ton on literature, whether it’s a dumb pretend fight, whether it survives time, what comes next in literature, etc… The duel scene and the school scene are definitely about literature imo. Hopefully some of that makes sense. I read 2666 when I was basically alone for a year and went half insane, then read his short stories to try to contextualize everything and find the symbols/ideas which he repeats in every one of his works, and this is sort of what I got out of it.
“The heart of the matter is whether knowing evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it's purposeful, we can fight it, it's hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less. If it's random, on the other hand, we're fucked, and we'll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us. And that's what it all comes down to.”