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The Savage Detectives: A Novel
by Roberto Bolano
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Awards Powells.com Staff Pick
Easily the year's most acclaimed literary sensation, Roberto Bolaño is enjoying a remarkably unprecedented ascendancy in fame. The Chilean novelist and poet, whose exaltation has long been celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, is posthumously sweeping the English-speaking countries (he died in 2003). Semana, a Colombian weekly magazine, recently published a list of the 100 best Spanish-language novels of the past 25 years, which, not surprisingly, included three works by Bolaño (number 3: The Savage Detectives; 4: 2666; and 14: Distant Star).
It was also recently announced that Natasha Wimmer (who translated The Savage Detectives) was awarded a $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant to support the translation of his masterwork 2666. According to the NEA, "Six weeks before he died, his fellow Latin American novelists hailed him as the most important figure of his generation at an international conference he attended in Seville." His work is widely considered to be hailing a significant change of direction for Latin American literature as a whole.
The Savage Detectives, which Bolaño called a "love letter" to his generation, is an accomplished and thorough effort. No amount of praise or critical elucidation could possibly do this epic story (at nearly 600 pages) justice, as it's both astonishingly original and magnificently composed. The highly autobiographical novel tells the tale of a group of "visceral realist" poets (a fictionalization of the "infrarealism" movement Bolaño helped spawn in the 1970s), their days drifting throughout Mexico and western Europe, and their search for the elusive poet Cesárera Tinajero. The main characters, if the book can be said to actually have any, are the founders of the so-called "visceral realist" movement, Arturo Belano (a loose stand-in for Bolaño's own life) and Ulises Lima (Bolaño's poet-friend Mario Santiago). Told mostly in the style of an oral biography spawning 21 years, The Savage Detectives is a must-read for ardent fans of literature and poetry, as the novel chronicles the wanderlust of men and women for whom poetry is something well beyond the cafes and yellowing pages of forgotten verse.
Though he often garners comparisons to Borges, Pynchon, and Cortázar (a claim that, while not entirely erroneous, does little to exemplify his singular style), Bolaño's genius is, in part, his ability to synthesize the elements of literature which his forebears had set as standard, usurp them as his own, and then transcend them in an erudite manner heretofore unseen. Roberto Bolaño's newfound fame is, indeed, well deserved, and The Savage Detectives is one of the finest novels to come along in quite some time.
Recommended by Jeremy, Powell's City of Books
Put simply, Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives is a retelling of Homer's
Odyssey. The comparison to Joyce's literary monument Ulysses comes
naturally, and Bolaño's work is arguably the better of the two, though it
can also be considered homage to Joyce. The Savage Detectives at once
mirrors and furthers the epic, is expansive where Ulysses is mysterious,
and plies new understandings of people, religions, and nations from its
reader in ways that Ulysses does not. Bolaño's tale is that of Arturo
Belano and Ulises Lima, two friends who have gone in search of a missing
poet, Cesárea Tinajera. Told in pieces by many characters over the
course of decades, The Savage Detectives is a sometimes violent,
passionate story of lost men in search of the puzzle that is before you.
Recommended by Gin, Powells.com A decidedly Mexican novel that spans the entire globe, The Savage Detectives is Homer's Odyssey, Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and Borges's Ficciones all rolled into one — and somehow becomes more than the sum of its parts in the process. Beautifully vibrant language leaps off every page, magical realism battles with stark reality, and the constantly rotating cast of hundreds never feels shallow or poorly developed. Intriguing and innovative from the very first page, The Savage Detectives is a must-read for pretty much anybody, and my favorite book of 2007.
Recommended by Nathan W., Powells.com
"[A] bizarre and mesmerizing novel....Just now published in English, the book is a fist-to-gut introduction to a deceptively powerful writer who died at age 50 in 2003. It's a lustful story — lust for sex, lust for self, lust for the written word....Their antics will repulse you. Your moral compass will be pissed upon. But in a world where a guy who cuts up his penis with a blade is considered a 'real man,' Bolaño's visceral realists shine." Buddy Kite, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)
Synopses & Reviews 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. Review: "Not since Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 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 Bolano does with 'The Savage Detectives.' The Chilean-born Bolano moved with his parents to Mexico in 1968, returned to Chile in 1973 only to be caught up in the Pinochet coup d'etat, and settled eventually in ..." Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Catalonia, Spain. Much of the time before his untimely death in 2003, at the age of 50, he was obsessed with being an outcast. His turn has come to be an icon. Bolano not only wrote exactly what and how he pleased; he also viciously attacked figures such as Isabel Allende and Octavio Paz, accusing them of being conformists, more interested in fame than in art. In poems, stories (some of them included in his 'Last Evenings on Earth'), novellas (such as 'Distant Star' and 'By Night in Chile'), two mammoth narratives (one under review here and '2666,' scheduled for publication next year in English translation), and an essay collection (called, in Spanish, 'Entre parentesis'), he cultivated such a flamboyant, stylistically distinctive, counter-establishment voice that it's no exaggeration to call him a genius. '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 Cuaron's film 'Y tu mama tambien.' Its protagonists are Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, fringe poets professing an aesthetics they describe as 'visceral realism.' Their hunt for a precursor by the name of Cesarea Tinajero takes them to the Sonora Desert, portrayed by Bolano as a land of amnesia. As the title suggests, the material has the shape of a detective story, yet one that stretches the genre to its limits. The narration is polyphonic: The first part is told by Juan Garcia Madero, a transient member of the visceral realists. The second is a maze of testimonials by a plethora of people, real and fictional, about the Mexican literary world from 1976 to "96. And the third part returns to 1976 and Garcia Madero, who delivers a denouement as eccentric as it is graphic. The reader reaches the end recognizing that everything is a joke and that words are insufficient to chronicle metaphysical searches such as the one undertaken by this pair of good-for-nothings, who call to mind Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Indeed, Cervantes' masterpiece serves Bolano as pretext and subtext. The entire book is episodic, alternating between discussions of literature, misadventures and stories within stories. Middle-class angst is ubiquitous. Sex is performed — and depicted — prodigally. The scenes of Garcma Madero's initiations into a world of frenzied hedonism are the best of their kind I've read. There's a hilarious episode in which the visceral realists attempt to kidnap Paz, who is accurately portrayed as stiff and formal. The cumulative effect of these satirical episodes is astonishing. Everyone in them is looking to understand what motivates Belano and Lima, but fails to do so. It's a Rashomon-like quest, in which truth is evasive, ultimately unattainable. That, indeed, is the tone of the entire novel. As Belano and Lima try to find Tinajero, we readers try to understand them as characters. Yet Bolano doesn't want us to. He fills them with contradictions, including disappointment when they finally find Tinajero. What matters isn't the solution to the puzzle but the effort of assembling its pieces. One piece comes early in the novel's second part, when a mythical female, Auxilio Lacouture (Bolano's names are at once trite and magical), makes an appearance. She's a Uruguayan who moved to Mexico in the "60s, became involved in the student uprising of 1968, and who presents herself, irreverently, as the 'Mother of Mexican Poetry.' This section takes up fewer than a dozen pages, but after 'The Savage Detectives' first came out in Spanish, Bolano expanded the material into a rather plotless and meandering novella, 'Amulet,' which was first published in 1999 and has now been gorgeously rendered into English by Chris Andrews. By far the most hallucinatory element in 'The Savage Detectives' (and in '2666') is its bizarre, exquisite prose. Having spent years studying linguistic varieties across the Americas, I've never come across a chameleon talent like Bolano's. He writes in a Mexican Spanish with an Iberian twist but an impostor's accent. How ironic that the best Mexican novel of the last 50 years should have been written by a Chilean. Bolano started writing at the age of 18. He was an unredeemed smoker, ate poorly and slept irregular hours. Literature for him was a mania, if not also a form of martyrdom. His last decade of life was remarkably prolific. Starting in 1993, he published almost a book a year, sometimes more. His early fiction dealt with topics such as the death of the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo in Paris and the excesses of fascism in Chile. He rewrote a story by Borges and imagined an encyclopedia of Nazi authors in Latin America. He refused stipends from the literary establishment, submitting his manuscripts to contests in order to get the little money he needed to go on. In his late teens, he made an irrevocable decision: never to enter a classroom again. After that, everything he learned came via reading. Indeed, I'm convinced that Bolano worked his deepest revolution as a reader: He chose his own predecessors, rejected best-sellers, enjoyed carving out a career against the wishes of the literary status quo. Isn't it ironic then that the escritor maldito, the accursed writer, the ultimate pariah, is now being firmly positioned in the spotlight? Of course, it was inevitable. Too many mediocre books are being published, and a courageous voice, angry and heretical, remains rare. What distinguishes a genius isn't intelligence — there's plenty of that around; nor is it the degrees one receives from distinguished schools. It isn't even the polish of one's style. The classics are often imperfect, and 'The Savage Detectives,' though inexhaustible, is messy and perhaps overly ambitious. Only one thing matters: Bolano had the courage to look at the world anew. Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His new book, 'On Love,' will be published in the fall." Reviewed by Michael DirdaRon CharlesIlan Stavans, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "[B]lazingly original...[a] masterpiece....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." Kirkus Reviews Review: "The journey for all, including the reader, may prove arduous, but as a picaresque road novel, coupled with successful character creation, intriguing experimentation, and a unique premise, it provides a rewarding reading experience." Library Journal Review: "For readers interested in a straight narrative, this book will disappoint, but those who enjoy voice and character will find much to satisfy them." Booklist Review: "[A] deeply satisfying, yet overwhelming reading experience....Is it worth our time? Is it a good novel or a great novel? Time alone will supply the adjective 'great,' but what I can say now is: The Savage Detectives is a very good novel." Los Angeles Times Review: "[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." San Francisco Chronicle Review: "The Savage Detectives is a masterpiece, but unlike other postwar masterworks, it doesn't proclaim its importance right away....More a series of encounters than a novel, the entire work resonates like a prose poem, returning us to the haunting image of young people marching toward history's abyss, only their song remaining." Cleveland Plain Dealer Review: "[C]omplex, numbingly chaotic and sinuously memorable....Some of the book's best passages are here; but the formlessness, the cascading miscellany...can make the book, or at least the reader, founder. Many gleaming lights are displayed, but foundering nonetheless." Richard Eder, The New York Times About the Author Born in Chile in 1953, Roberto Bolaño fled to Mexico after the military government took power in the late 1960s. There he helped found the infrarealist movement. He later settled with his wife and children in northern Spain, where he died in 2003. He received all of that country's highest literary awards, including the Romulo Gallegos Prize for The Savage Detectives. In 2004 he was honored by the First Conference of Latin American Authors as "the most important literary discovery of our time."
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780374191481
- Author:
- Bolano, Roberto
- Publisher:
- Farrar Straus Giroux
- Author:
- Bolano, Roberto
- Author:
- Bolaano, Roberto
- Translator:
- Wimmer, Natasha
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- General Fiction
- Subject:
- Literary
- Copyright:
- 2007
- Edition Description:
- American
- Publication Date:
- April 3, 2007
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 577
- Dimensions:
- 920x632x134 189
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