World Literature
![Roberto Bolano - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_roberto_bolano.jpg)
The Savage Detectives: A Novel
The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age.
National Bestseller
New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.
The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.
A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.
National Bestseller
New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.
The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.
A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.
Editorial Reviews
"An utterly unique achievement--a modern epic rich in character and event. . . . [He is] the most important writer to emerge from Latin America since García Márquez." ―San Francisco Chronicle
"My favorite writer . . . The Savage Detectives is an ark bearing all the strange salvage of poetry and youth from catastrophes past and those yet to come." ―Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love
"The Savage Detectives is deeply satisfying. . . . Bolaño's book throws down a great, clunking, formal gauntlet to his readers' conventional expectations. . . . A very good novel." ―Thomas McGonigle, Los Angeles Times
"One of the most respected and influential writers of [his] generation . . . At once funny and vaguely, pervasively, frightening." ―John Banville, The Nation
"A bizarre and mesmerizing novel . . . It's a lustful story--lust for sex, lust for self, lust for the written word." ―Esquire
"Roberto Bolaño's masterwork, at last translated into English, confirms this Chilean's status as Latin America's literary enfant terrible." ―Vogue
"Combustible . . . A glittering, tumbling diamond of a book . . . When you are done with this book, you will believe there is no engine more powerful than the human voice." ―Emily Carter Roiphe, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
"An exuberantly sprawling, politically charged picaresque novel." ―Elle
"Wildly enjoyable . . . Bolaño beautifully manages to keep his comedy and his pathos in the same family." ―The New York Times Book Review
"My favorite writer . . . The Savage Detectives is an ark bearing all the strange salvage of poetry and youth from catastrophes past and those yet to come." ―Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love
"The Savage Detectives is deeply satisfying. . . . Bolaño's book throws down a great, clunking, formal gauntlet to his readers' conventional expectations. . . . A very good novel." ―Thomas McGonigle, Los Angeles Times
"One of the most respected and influential writers of [his] generation . . . At once funny and vaguely, pervasively, frightening." ―John Banville, The Nation
"A bizarre and mesmerizing novel . . . It's a lustful story--lust for sex, lust for self, lust for the written word." ―Esquire
"Roberto Bolaño's masterwork, at last translated into English, confirms this Chilean's status as Latin America's literary enfant terrible." ―Vogue
"Combustible . . . A glittering, tumbling diamond of a book . . . When you are done with this book, you will believe there is no engine more powerful than the human voice." ―Emily Carter Roiphe, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
"An exuberantly sprawling, politically charged picaresque novel." ―Elle
"Wildly enjoyable . . . Bolaño beautifully manages to keep his comedy and his pathos in the same family." ―The New York Times Book Review
Readers Top Reviews
mcg1Mr S. J. Watt
Cool start and really good writing style but drifts off in part two and lost me.
WordsmithMr. R. Hale
Six hundred pages of nonsense! At least I think it was six hundred pages. It was only just over a hundred for me, which was more than enough! Some sort of diatribe about a group of trendy teenage critics and trainee poets, all of whom consider themselves to be on the verge of brilliance. Oh, and the lead character, despite having no obvious endearing qualities, is a magnet to any woman he comes across. Maybe that's how it is in Mexico. Maybe that's why James Taylor found it necessary to write a song about the place!
T Don
Loved the opening section. As for second section, am stuck on about page 400 and can't decide whether to finish or not. The second section has some very ugly, unexplained parts (like when the author's alter-ego is trying to strangle someone on a beach) and some parts that just seem to have been written and included compulsively and drag out the text unnecessarily. It also has a hilarious scene in a publisher's office very reminiscent of Bulgakov, can't decide whether this was intentional nor not. Any writer who wants instruction in how to orient the reader to time and place should take this book as the only lesson they will need. Also, in a novel about poets, not one line of poetry from the main characters...fantastic device. No, this is not a character-driven book: it is about the life and death of a way of life and way of seeing the world, of a time and place that the author misses very much. If you view Visceral Realism in Mexico City in the late 1970's as a character in its own right, you will be just as saddened to see it unraveling, along with its leaders, as you would with any other literary character. This edition is worth reading for the author's comments in interviews on Latin American literature alone....never liked Vargas Llosa or Isabel Allende, or Laura Esquivel, and I now feel freed.
Sherrie Miranda
I really did enjoy this novel immensely, but there were a few aspects that often left me confused or just plain bothered. Several times, they list writers of their time. Since a few obscure real-life writers' names show up, I assume all these are real. If I were more familiar with these writers, I would probably get the satire, but I am not so I didn't get it. On the other hand, the story is fascinating! And though I was disappointed when the narrator disappeared, I did find it fun to follow these characters all over the world. And you won't understand the title at all until then end. And even then, not completely. Bolaño is a genious. Or he was. It's tragic that he died so young, just when he was picking up speed. So many stories we will miss out on.
Browner
Roberto Bolaño was an interesting and peripatetic guy. Born in Chile in 1953 to a working class family, he moved to Mexico as a teenager in the late 1960s, where he quickly dropped out of school to become a journalist involved with left-wing political causes. While developing his talent as a poet and writer of fiction, he returned to Chile around the time of the Pinochet coup and was imprisoned as a terrorist for a brief stretch before returning to Mexico City to start the Infrarrealismo movement as a reaction against the conventional literary traditions prevailing at the time (e.g., magical realism). Bolaño later left Mexico for Spain, where he lived a bohemian lifestyle as a writer and also as a security guard at a campground. He died prematurely at the age of 50 just as he was reaching the height of his fame as a novelist. That background is useful to know before one launches into reading The Savage Detectives. Hailed as “the first great Latin American novel of the 21st century,” the book tells of two renegade poets—Arturo Belano, a Chilean ex-pat, and Ulises Lima, a Mexican national—who start a literary movement in Mexico City in 1975. They call themselves the “Visceral Realists,” resurrecting a short-lived group from the 1920s, and stand for whatever isn’t the current literary fashion. The ostensible plot of the story is the search that Belano (who is Bolaño’s alter ego) and Lima conduct for Cesárea Tinajero, the elusive founder of the original Visceral Realists, who long ago disappeared into the Sonoran desert. Their search takes them from the heart of Mexico City to the northern border of the country (accompanied by a prostitute and a young acolyte of the movement, all while being followed by two men intent on killing them), before they eventually scatter to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. If that sounds like reasonably direct story-telling, rest assured that The Savage Detectives is anything but straightforward. The novel is divided into three parts, spread over a span of about two decades. The first and third sections involve the first-person narration of Juan García Madero, the young want-to-be Visceral Realist, who tells of how he got involved with Belano and Lima, how they came to leave Mexico City in a stolen car with a prostitute in tow, and their adventures in Sonora. These events are relayed as diary entries over a three-month period from late 1975 to early 1976. The middle section, comprising the bulk of the novel, adopts a completely different stylistic tone. Spread between 1976 and 1996, this part of the book chronicles a series of “interviews” with about forty people who had some sort of contact with Belano and Lima over the years following their trip to the desert. Of course, each of these narrators has a different opinion of the poets and their abortive movement and, collectively, their vignettes provide ...
