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Savage Detectives
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Product Description
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.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #25184 in Books
- Published on: 2007-04-04
- Original language: English
- Binding: Hardcover
- 592 pages
Editorial Reviews
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.)
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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
Review
“One of the most respected and influential writers of [his] generation . . . At once funny and vaguely, pervasively, frightening.” —John Banville, The Nation
“The brightest hope for the future of South American literature.” —Andreas Breitenstein, Neuen Zürcher Zeitung
“An event…The Savage Detectives [is] a brutal and lyrical vision of the last thirty years of the millennium.” —Fabienne Dumontet, Le Monde des Livres
“A rare and fertile talent.” —Amaia Gabantxo, The Times Literary Supplement
“Certain books go by too quickly. We wish they’d last longer and count the pages, not out of boredom, but out of anxiety at having to tell the characters goodbye. The Savage Detectives is one of these books…In the twists and turns of its mock-scholarly construction, The Savage Detectives succeeds in capturing both the fever of the past and the terrible, impossible yearning to have it back.” —Fabrice Gabriel, Les Inrockuptibles
“Bolaño, it seemed to me, hovers over many young Latin American writers, even those in their 40s, the way Garciá Márquez must have over his generation and the following one.” —Francisco Goldman, The New York Times
“Powerful and disorienting . . . [Bolaño’s] books are bursting with humour that is both raw and sophisticated.” —Angel Gurria-Quintana, The Financial Times
“Bolaño is a prodigious storyteller on the level of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.” —Elena Hevia, El Periodico
“The great Mexican novel of its generation . . . By turns sublime and sinister, The Savage Detectives is a magnificent portrait of an era—and of every era in which people experience literature as passionately as life itself.” —J. A. Masoliver Ródenas, La Vanguardia
“Quite possibly the boldest author in Spanish literature today.” —Matthias Matussek, Der Spiegel
“One of the most important novels in modern Latin-American literature.” —Rulo Melchert, Sächsischen Zeitung
“[Bolaño's work is] something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new…Reading Roberto Bolaño is like hearing the secret story, being shown the fabric of the particular, watching the tracks of art and life merge at the horizon and linger there like a dream from which we awake inspired to look more attentively at the world.” —Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review
“His generation’s premier Latin American writer…Bolaño’s reputation and legend are in meteoric ascent.” —Larry Rohter, The New York Times
“The Savage Detectives gave us the first real signs that the parade of Amazonian roosters was coming to an end: it marked the beginning of the end for the high priests of the Boom and all their local color . . . It also introduced us to an astonishing writer who reminded us how much deep joy there was in the passion of reading and, at the same time, spent his days on the edge of an abyss that no one else had ever noticed. What was he doing there? He was writing, on a ledge overlooking the void. In retrospect, The Savage Detectives must be considered--along with his giant, posthumous 2666—one of the two major axes of Bolano’s extaordinary, already legendary work.” —Enrique Vila-Matas, Le Magazine Littéraire
“Bolaño [is] the brightest literary star in the current Latin American panorama.” —El País
Customer Reviews
Bolaño's body of work
The Savage Detectives begins in Mexico in the mid-Seventies, where two young poet-provocateurs (Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, 'The André Breton of Mexican Surrealism' and his double) are in search of a surrealist poet of the Twenties named Cesárea 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 Cesárea. Along the way Bolaño 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 Bolaño'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, Bolaño 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 Cesárea'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 Bolaño 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 Cesárea, who disappears into Sonora: the violent Heart of Darkness of Bolaño's imagination.
