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The Savage Detectives: A Novel (Paperback)

by Roberto Bola�o (Author)

5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product Details

Paperback: 672 pages
Publisher: Picador; 1st edition edition (Mar 4 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312427484
ISBN-13: 978-0312427481
Product Dimensions: 20.6 x 14 x 3.8 cm
Shipping Weight: 499 g

Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #1,205 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in this category:
#74 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This novel—the major work from Chilean-born novelist Bolaño (1953–2003) here beautifully translated by Wimmer—will allow English speaking readers to discover a truly great writer. In early 1970s Mexico City, young poets Arturo Belano (Bolaño's alter ego and a regular in his fiction) and Ulises Lima start a small, erratically militant literary movement, the Visceral Realists, named for another, semimythical group started in the 1920s by the nearly forgotten poet Cesárea Tinajero. The book opens with 17 year-old Juan García Madero's precocious, deadpan notebook entries, dated 1975, chronicling his initiation into the movement. The long middle section—written, like George Plimpton's Edie, as a set of anxiously vivid testimonies from friends, lovers, bystanders and a great many enemies—tracks Belano and Lima as they travel the globe from 1975 to the mid-1990s. There are copious, and acidly hilarious, references to the Latin American literary scene, and one needn't be an insider to get the jokes: they're all in Bolaño's masterful shifts in tone, captured with precision by Wimmer. The book's moving final section flashes back to 1976, as Belano, Lima and García Madero search for Cesárea Tinajero, with a young hooker named Lupe in tow. Bolaño fashions an engrossing lost world of youth and utopian ambition, as particular and vivid as it is sad and uncontainable. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

This is the posthumously published English translation of the prizewinning novel that made celebrated Chilean Roberto Bolano famous. This highly stylized novel is ostensibly about two poets, leaders of the Mexican visceral realist literary movement, and their search for an obscure icon of the movement and its repercussions. The book spans a decade and follows the poets from Mexico City to the Sonoran Desert, Guatemala, Barcelona, Paris, Israel, Congo, Liberia, and the U.S. The narrative becomes secondary to the voices of the people who meet these poets as this long novel told through the personal stories--some humorous, some inscrutable, some tragic--of the eclectic assortment of characters they encounter on the way becomes less about the search and more about literature and language. For readers interested in a straight narrative, this book will disappoint, but those who enjoy voice and character will find much to satisfy them. As one of the characters notes, "Well. In Latin America these things happen and there's no point giving yourself a headache trying to come up with a logical answer when there is none." Rebecca Singer
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bola�o's body of work, Mar 13 2009

By	ES (Ottawa, ON) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Savage Detectives (Hardcover)

The Savage Detectives begins in Mexico in the mid-Seventies, where two young poet-provocateurs (Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, 'The Andr� Breton of Mexican Surrealism' and his double) are in search of a surrealist poet of the Twenties named Ces�rea Tinajero. Why are they searching for her? Because there's almost no evidence that she exists.

Over the next 500 pages, the reader is sent on a search - covering twenty years and four continents - for the two young poets, who take on the legendary and elusive qualities of Ces�rea. Along the way Bola�o recreates, among the Mexican 'Visceral Realists' (that's what Ulises and Arturo call their poetic 'movement') the excitement and daftness that once belonged to the Breton-led Paris Surrealist scene, complete with staged confrontations, excommunications, parties, and especially affairs. The Visceral Realists are like (penniless) rock stars, complete with sex lives that walk on the wild side, where the possibilities fascinate and frighten in equal measure.

Roberto Bola�o's writing produces the same thrill of discovery as Beck's music did when it arrived a decade ago, or Prince's 25 years back. It's the feeling that this artist isn't so much making art within a popular form as taking that form and, by an imposition of his own powerful creative personality, remaking it. The Savage Detectives controls dozens of voices and sub-plots with ease. Not only that, Bola�o re-arranges with almost off-handed skill the conventional narrative flow to alter the novel's pacing and delay the climax until the end. It's a vital strategy in a story where the climax, in terms of chronology, comes near the beginning, because the story is actually about the long fallout from that climax.

And it's probably significant that a key post-Surrealist is mentioned along with the introduction of Ces�rea's only poem: Piero Manzoni, a man who truly put himself into his art. There's little quoted poetry in this book populated almost entirely by poets. That's because poetry here is the creative potential that exists in youth itself. It's what another poet calls 'the strength and pain of being young': which will not come again.

Towards the end of the book there's a chapter of monologues from (fictional) Mexican writers that provides Savage Detectives' context. Latin American creative types who were born in the Fifties (like Bola�o and his fictional heroes) grew up believing in Freedom and Revolution. And what happens to Ulises, Arturo and their friends is what happened to being young and idealistic in the Seventies. Losing your youth is a kind of exile from your own happiness, as Arthur Rimbaud discovered; perhaps that's why Ulises and - especially - Arturo have such sad Rimbaudian fates. As does Ces�rea, who disappears into Sonora: the violent Heart of Darkness of Bola�o's imagination.

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