The Savage Detectives: A Novel | Roberto Bolano

The Savage Detectives: A Novel | Roberto Bolano | If you love Bolano...

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Innocence The Savage Detecti...

	The Savage Detectives: A Novel Roberto Bolano Picador, 2008 - 672 pages average customer review:based on 91 reviews view larger image
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National Bestseller

In this dazzling novel, the book that established his international reputation, Roberto Bolaño tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes--the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself--on a tragicomic quest through a darkening, entropic universe: our own. The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age.

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealist poetry movement. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998. Roberto Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty.

One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the YearA Washington Post Top 10 Book of the YearA New York Magazine Top 10 Book of the YearA Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the YearA San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the YearA Kirkus Reviews Top 10 Book of the Year

In the novel that established his international reputation, Roberto Bolaño tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes?the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself?on a tragicomic quest through a darkening, entropic universe: our own. The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age. "When I began reading The Savage Detectives last month, I had already devoured the first three of Bolaño's books to arrive in English?two short novels, By Night in Chile and Distant Star, and the story collection Last Evenings on Earth?and become a devoted fan. But I was still unprepared for The Savage Detectives, the work that made his reputation when it first appeared in 1998, and for which he was awarded the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Available now in a seamless translation by Natasha Wimmer, this novel is an utterly unique achievement?a modern epic rich in character and event, suffused in every sentence with Bolaño's unsettling mix of precision and mystery. It's a lens through which the strange becomes ordinary and the ordinary is often very strange."?Vinnie Wilhelm, San Francisco Chronicle "Over the last few years, Roberto Bolaño?s reputation, in English at least, has been spreading in a quiet contagion; the loud arrival of a long novel, The Savage Detectives, will ensure that few are now untouched . . . The novel is wildly enjoyable (as well as, finally, full of lament), in part because Bolaño, despite all the game-playing, has a worldly literal, sensibility . . . The Savage Detectives is both melancholy and fortifying; and it is both narrowly about poetry and broadly about the difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth. Bolaño beautifully manages to keep his comedy and his pathos in the same family."?James Woods, The New York Times Book Review

"Bolaño's fiction is, in large part, an ironic mythologization of his personal history, and The Savage Detectives hews closest to what Latin-American writers call the Bolaño legend. The novel, which has been given a bracingly idiomatic translation by Natasha Wimmer, is a teeming, 'Manhattan Transfer'-like collage featuring more than fifty narrators . . . When The Savage Detectives was published, Ignacio Echevarría, Spain's most prominent literary critic, praised it as 'the kind of novel that Borges could have written.' He got it half right. Borges, whose longest work of fiction is fifteen pages, would likely have admired the way Bolaño's novel emerges from a branching tree of stories. But what would he have made of the delirious road trip, the frenzied sex, the sloppy displays of male ego? Bolaño fills his canvas with messy Lawrencian emotions but places them within a coolly cerebral frame. It's a style worthy of its own name: visceral modernism."?Daniel Zalewski, The New Yorker

"A magnum opus of serial narration and collective testimony . . . A work that established Bolaño's reputation in the Spanish-speaking world as a successor to Borges, García Márquez, and Julio Cortazar, this 600-page novel has finally been published in English in a translation by Natasha Wimmer . . . It is an extraordinary work; obsessive, uneven, and magnificent, The Savage Detectives is a picaresque of late capitalism that demands utter submission from the reader as it presents an account in multiple voices of the adventures of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of a short-lived poetry movement called 'visceral realism.' Ostensibly about a quest by Belano and Lima for a mythical woman poet from the 1920s, The Savage Detectives is a hustler of a book."?Siddhartha Deb, Harper's Magazine

"The fifth of Bolaño's books to appear in English, and the first in a translation by Natasha Wimmer (who is best known for her work on Mario Vargas Llosa), The Savage Detectives was published in Spanish in 1998, under the title Los detectives salvajes. An outsized, autobiographical travelogue?in the course of which Bolaño and his friend Mario Santiago appear as the 'visercal realist' poets, pot dealer, drifters, and literary detectives Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, respectively?it was Bolaño?s most ambitious work to date. That it works quite well as a mystery is the least of this novel?s many surprises . . . But the bulk of The Savage Detectives is montage: an oral history narrated by male hustlers, female bodybuilders, mad architects, shell-shocked war correspondents, and Octavio Paz's personal secretary. There are fifty-two voices in all?jokers in the pack, Belano and Lima are not given speaking roles, appearing only in the recollections of others?and the stories they tell shade into one another, encompass historical forces and personages, and allude to specifics of the author?s own biography . . . The savagery of the title is the savagery of youth?poetry, poverty, fiery idealism, quick fucks, blind drive, the threat of violence, and violence itself . . . The Savage Detectives can be read as a love letter to the Mexico they knew in the '70s, but much of the book sees Belano and Lima in Europe, and one, climatic chapter takes place in Liberia?s killing fields. Like the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu, The Savage Detectives is kaleidoscopic and antiprovincial?and the world it describes is recognizably our own . . . The Savage Detectives is good art. When it is dark, it is very dark. At other times, it is very funny, thrilling, tender, and erotic. At its best, it is dark, funny, thrilling, tender, and erotic at one and the same time, in a way few novels before it have been . . . Natasha Wimmer's translation, too, is lucid."?Alex Abramovich, Bookforum

"While norteamericanos were rereading dog-eared copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, a dyslexic, gl

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A Literary Adventure Novel

I first discovered The Savage Detectives almost by accident. I was probably killing time
before work in a bookstore in downtown Berkeley and its cover was striking, not to
mention the title! After glancing at it several times and flipping through its pages
over the course of a few months I finally decided to buy it. It is rare that I buy a book
I've never heard of, simply out of curiosity. Usually I choose books based on friends'
recommendations or because the author is someone I've heard a lot about and have
been meaning to read.
I had never heard of Roberto Bolano before I bought "The Savage Detectives" about
six or seven months ago. Which, now, I find odd, because there is no doubt in my
mind that he belongs in the upper echelons of writing with all of those writers that
have simultaneously educated and entertained me along the way.
One striking feature of "The Savage Detectives", and the most obvious I suppose,
is that, despite its length of 649 pages, it is cleverly broken down into short diary
entries, from a paragraph to six pages in length, making it easier and more enjoyable
to read. This also exposes one of Bolano's greatest talents, that of perspective.
The novel is told from the point-of-view of at least twenty or thirty characters,
including its two quixotic main characters, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, Bolano's
alter-ego. The "voices" of his characters, from the paranoid Heimito Kunst, whom
Ulises meets in prison and who worries there are Jews underground building
atomic bombs to the young, naive intellectual Juan Garcia Madero who wants to
join the Viscerrealists, a new poetry movement begun by Lima and Belano,
to the dancer/prostitute Lupe who is friends with the poet, Maria Font, and
loves to brag about the length of her boyfriend/pimp's member which he often
measures with a knife, are flawless. Bolano pulled out the sculptor's carving tools
when he created his characters.
The novel is full of adventure and travel, migrant workers sleeping in caves by
the sea, a sword fight, death, imprisonment, and more travel with poetry
weaving its way through each page to its grand finale in the north of Mexico.
An unforgettable, cinematic ending. I would recommend "The Savage Detectives"
to just about anybody who enjoys reading.

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If you love Bolano...

... then you will love this book. I read 2666, his poetry, and several of his short novellas before reading this, so I had a very good idea of what I was getting into. The ending left me breathless. You might want to try the Skating Rink to see if you like his style before reading some of his longer books.

Stellar Performance

Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives is the story of a group of young poets in Mexico in the early 1970's. The book is written in three parts. The first part is the story of the Visceral Poet group, young poets and writers living in Mexico City, all Hispanics from various countries. The founders of the group are Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, who named the group after an earlier set of visceral poets in the 1920's. That group centered around a female poet, Cesarea Tinajero, who disappeared mysteriously.

In the first part, we meet the various characters through the eyes of a 17 year old, who thinks he might be a poet. This young man, Juan Garcia Madero, spends his days reading and writing and discussing literature with the group members. He also discovers his sexuality, and much of the section deals with his sexual awakenings and various partners.

The second part is written forty years later, and is written as a series of short interviews with various people who have encountered either Lima or Belano over those years. Through these vignettes, we discover what has happened to these poets over the succeeding decades. The story winds through several countries and continents. Each person knows a bit of their stories, and the reader is able to slowly piece together their lives.

The third part is a flashback to the road trip that Belano, Lima, Madero and a prostitute take to try to find Cesarea and what caused her to disappear. The events of that trip fuel the rest of the book, although the reader only realises this in retrospect.

The Savage Detectives is a book that will be considered important for years, and will probably become a classic. Many readers might pick it up thinking it is a mystery, and they might be disappointed. But those readers that stick around for the ride will be entranced as they enter Bolano's world. This is definately a book that will bear rereads, and is recommended for readers who appreciate cutting edge literature and exposure to the literature of other countries.

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A Tough Slog, But Worth the Effort

This is an interesting, if somewhat daunting, precursor to Bolaño's magisterial epic, "2666." Having read "2666" first, I wasn't as enamored with "The Savage Detectives" as I might otherwise have been; the conventions of the detective genre had already been exposed as fraudulent, the brutal style had already been perfected, the thematic nightmare of inevitable destruction had already been explored... I had already been to Santa Teresa. That said, the two books should rightly be read together and the effect of reading each one is haunting in its own right. "The Savage Detectives" is sometimes painfully slow, it's true; however, it seems to be written in a way that is deliberately so. This is not a book that is meant to be read and then written off. It stays with you. This is the kind of book that grows over time and is best understood with repeated readings. (By the way, Natasha Wimmer is a brilliant translator. I probably wouldn't have read this book if anyone else had translated it into English.)

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Get in the Impala

This is a massive, ambling book. For the most part I'm at a loss as far as why or even what happened in it. There's a huge cast of characters and a span of time that weaves back and forth. Generations of characters fold into one another, children act as parents and vice versa. Time stretches and contracts; time lies or at best is irrelevant or should I say airrelevant in the same sense that the characters are amoral? This is an epic journey a la Don Quixote and his side kick Sancho Panza though these Detectives aren't enamored of Chivalric literature but, perhaps, their related genre of Visceral Realist Poetry. Were either of these, Chivalry or Visceral Realist Poetry, ever valid codes to live by? Of course Visceral Realism is an invention of Bolano's but Chivalry, at least to
Quixote, was his own personal invention that only vaguely tied in with the main King Arthur traditions. Did either Bolano or Cervantes traditions ever exist? Suspend believe, get on Rosinante or into the Impala, and head off into the sunset with either of these authors. It will be more comfortable that way trust me.

There's also an element of a spiritual coming of age. This multitude of characters seek enlightenment by wandering in the Sonoran, or sometimes the Kalahari, desert however on their quest there are rumors that they've seen and performed deeds in various guises in variously places. Are ALL these characters really one person trying on each mode of being, each code of belief? They're certainly not doing their wandering in a straight line but are at once son/father/brother, author/student/prisoner, criminal/savior, to those they encounter. Rosinante/the Impala are stolen, retrieved, used for good and ill. The women are alternately madonas and whores, friends and lovers, daughters and wives, high born and low, etc. just as in Don Quixote. It depends on the character du jours' perceptions.

The writing is lush and enmeshed, confusing when taken as a whole but almost simple when taken bit by bit. There are lists of people and places that recur throughout the book like a Greek (Latin American?) chorus that feel like they have great importance but they don't seem to fit into the storyline. Are they recitatives, musical happenings that join one big aria to another?

As you can see I have more questions than answers after reading `The Savage Detectives'. I have a sense that's what Bolano intended. Just get in the Impala ok? It's a sweet ride.

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