The Savage Detectives

From Barnes & Noble

With any luck at all, Natasha Wimmer's luminous translation of The Savage Detectives will focus some long-overdue Anglo attention on the late Roberto Bolaño, one of Latin America's most influential writers. Ostensibly the story of two poets in search of a third, this freewheeling roman à clef mines the revolutionary landscape of the 1970s, the violent history of Latin American politics, and a rich trove of contemporary literature for a bold, bracing, and utterly original take on the conventional road novel. Often credited with breaking the long spell of magic realism over Latino literature, Bolaño uncovers in this remarkable book the painful, often violent collision of life and literature and the essential nature of the writer as fugitive/exile. Highly recommended for discerning readers.

From the Publisher

"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

Ilan Stavans

Not since Gabriel García Márquez, whose masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, turns 40 this year, has a Latin American redrawn the map of world literature so emphatically as Roberto Bolaño does with The Savage Detectives … The Savage Detectives alone should grant him immortality. It's an outstanding meditation on art, truth and the search for roots and the self, a kind of road novel set in 1970s Mexico that springs from the same roots as Alfonso Cuarón's film "Y tu mamá también."
— The Washington Post

Richard Eder

The key to Mr. Bolaño’s work is an insistence that the writer must keep no scrim of art or craft between him and the brute reality of the world he lives in and addresses. If there is a theme that runs through the complex, numbingly chaotic and sinuously memorable Savage Detectives, his first long (very long) novel, it is that the pen is as blood-stained as the sword, and as compromised.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

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Library Journal

The late Chilean writer Bolaño's 1998 (U.S. 2007) novel begins with a 17-year-old's diary entries describing life in 1970 Mexico City. The narrative's second part is a meditation on the visceral realism movement founded by poets Ulises Lima and Arturo Belaño, capped by their search 20 years previously for the poet Cesárea Tinajero. This Latin American On the Road presents a dreamlike patchwork of Lima and Belaño's adventures from which to reconstruct their literary pilgrimage. Narrators Eddie Lopez and Armando Duran reinforce the novel's sense of place with their rounded pronunciations. Essential. [Bolaño's final novel, the National Book Critics Circle Award winner 2666, is also available from Blackstone Audio.—Ed.]—Judith Robinson, Univ. at Buffalo

Kirkus Reviews

The search for a missing poet is the nominal subject of the late (1953-2003) expatriate Chilean author's blazingly original 1998 masterpiece. This almost aggressively literary novel, which won major Latin American literary prizes and follows into English translation several briefer works (Last Evenings on Earth, 2006, etc.), evolves around the professional friendship of poet intellectuals Arturo Belano (an obvious authorial surrogate) and Ulises Lima. In the course of founding a literary movement they label "visceral realism," the pair undertake a quixotic journey hoping to find their predecessor, Mexican poet Cesarea Tinajero, known to have disappeared into the Sonoran Desert decades earlier. But before we learn of their progress, Bola-o introduces the ardent figure of 17-year-old hopeful poet Juan Garc'a Madero, offering a wonderful account of the fledgling artist's plunge into Mexico City's artistic world, energetic discovery of the multitudinous pleasures of sex and hard-won solidarity with the visceral realists, once he has learned (through tireless networking) that unqualified poets are being rigorously purged from the movement. Juan Garc'a's breathless narrative then yields to a 400-page sequence in which various involved observers relate and comment on the shared and separate odysseys endured by Ulises (an adventurer prone to miscalculations and missed travel connections), Arturo (who becomes a war correspondent, as the novel travels to Europe and North Africa) and faithful Juan Garc'a. In a brief final sequence set in the desert, Juan Garc'a resumes the narration, treating the by-now brain-teased reader to a contest in which the poets display their knowledge of arcane literarytrivia. The sad, surprising result of their quest for the elusive Cesarea is also revealed. One of the most entertaining books about writers and their discontents since Boswell's Life of Johnson. A brilliant novel, fully deserving of its high international reputation.