The Eye and The Savage

The two readings for today, "Mauricio (The Eye) Silva" and The Savage Detectives by Robert Bolano, were very interesting to me and quite similar. They both tell stories of men that have descended from Latin America, moved to Europe at some point and seemed to come in and out of each other's lives and learned from one another in a profound way. The two sets of characters have bonds that have connected them through their lifetime and somehow always brings them back together to know about each other's lives through many years.

Some unifying themes between these two pieces seem to come from their view of violence. in "Mauricio," The Eye talks about how he hates violence and the story he shares with the narrator from his experiences in India is quite graphic. The interesting part of this story, in comparison to the other stories we have read, is that The Eye is homosexual, but it doesn't seem to be quite as big of a deal. For instance, nothing like the other story where they would have locked him up in a sanatorium for being gay. The narrator doesn't even seem to be too phased by it, except for the fact that it continues to pop back up several times throughout the story. But, the story of the prostituted boys who have been castrated was SO sad for me to read. I just couldn't understand how and why people could be this cruel and actually get away with it. Sometimes this fact truly boggles my mind. Like, Hitler for instance. How did something such as the massacre of 6 million Jews go on for so long without it being stopped? Or Rwanda? Or the thousands of other instances that have gone on unmentioned but invariably not unnoticed. Are we too timid as a society to speak up for wrong doings? Too afraid that it may hurt us to do so. This is quite plausible. I mean, it takes balls to do something we feel passionate for because it's not always going to be easy. I don't know I guess that's kind of a rant, but reading this I felt like somethings gotta give!

In the second story I read, The Savage Detectives, I guess I didn't understand it quite as much. It was a good story and I really enjoy the writing of this author. I know that there had to be much symbolic meaning because the writing was extremely rich, it almost read like a poem, well not quite but it flowed quite well. It also seems that this could be somewhat biographical because the two stories that we read for today had very similar aspects and the only thing I can attribute that to is the possibility that it could come from his own life.