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Powell's Books: You'll Want to Bookmark This Page: 37 of Our Most Anticipated Books for Spring and Summer 2021 (1 comment)
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Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño
Savage Detectives

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  • Synopses & Reviews

ISBN13: 9780312427481
ISBN10: 0312427484
Condition: Standard


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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

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 Cesaea 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 Bolano 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

"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 Bolano'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

Review

"[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)

Synopsis

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.


About the Author

Roberto Bolaño was born in 1953 in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain: he wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50. Seven more of his books are forthcoming from New Directions.

4.8 16

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating 4.8 (16 comments)

`
Alex Deley , October 22, 2014 (view all comments by Alex Deley)
Possibly my favorite novel of all time.

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Charles Faulkner , January 01, 2013 (view all comments by Charles Faulkner)
This book is the ultimate document of a mysterious and almost lost generation. What happened when this young group of poets and revolutionaries were dispersed to four continents? A great, rambling and tragic comedy of earnestness and youthful brilliance. Read it and learn what can happen to one's origins when they are finally discovered.

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Linda Moore , January 01, 2012
2011 was my year of the excruciatingly long novel: Rick Moody's Four Fingers of Death (long distance space travel written in what seems like real time), Murakami's 1Q84, and Bolano's The Savage Detectives. All of them tried my patience; they differed in how they rewarded it. The lengthy, annoying, chaotic and self-indulgent tone of Bolano's novel ended up being so effective in creating the sense of time and social milieu of its story it gave me a new appreciation of the long novel. The book was a long journey that truly transported me to a new place.

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mick provencher , August 12, 2011 (view all comments by mick provencher)
Great novel, if it is a pure novel, some of it may well be true if we're to believe the intro. wonderful story from so many points of view. i did have a somewhat tough time remembering who's who but it was a great, great ride. i highly recommend going for it.

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second gary , January 26, 2011 (view all comments by second gary)
It is an exhilarating read; he makes you feel he can do anything. He does things with pacing and scale which are tremendous.

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John Bradley , January 23, 2010
Surely one of the most unlikely and intriguing novels to have come along in a decade or more. Bolano seems to have invented a new form--part fiction, part autobiography, part trickster tale.

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Antony Falco , January 06, 2010
This novel bears both re-reading in full and the occasional drop-in -- open a page and start reading.

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elmonoenano , January 04, 2010 (view all comments by elmonoenano)
This books was a fabulous read in and of itself, but it also turns you on to the world of Spanish, and particularly Mexican, poetry beyond Paz and Neruda. Poets like Efrain Huerta are routinely cited and lauded. It's a great book.

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Steve Abrahamson , January 04, 2010
Just brilliant. Even in translation his ability to render different characters through a variety of first person voices is nothing short of astounding. An adventure story, a coming of age tale, and intellectual inquiry into narrative. It has it all.

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Devon LePage , January 03, 2010
Reading this was the most fun I've had with a book in the last decade. This is Bolaño's masterpiece, not 2666.

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John Lawson , January 02, 2010 (view all comments by John Lawson)
An outstanding novel, sometimes difficult to keep all the characters straight but one that you cannot stop reading for its entire 600+ pages.

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wesleyaten , January 02, 2010
Great book!

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Patricia Kelly , January 01, 2010
Bolano does not just write, he sings. The beauty of his prose takes your breath away. I do not think he is easy, but if you feel the rythmn of his writing he is truly exceptional. I loved this book.

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guiyilan , January 01, 2010
Never has anyone created characters more passionate about literature.

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Neighborlies , January 01, 2010
A pleasure to read- full of tragic, hilarious characters not to mention a denouement to die for. One of the best of the decade for sure. Highly recommended.

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mathias buchner , March 31, 2009
I was so excited to experience this novel after seeing all the praises. Unfortunately, I found the book unrelenting in its insistence on being, well, unrelenting. The book moves from one cacophony of violent, confused imagery to the next without much point of reference or relief. It dispenses with a satisfying dramatic structure without gaining anything in return. The comparisons to the masterworks of Garci Marquez or Luis Borges are absurd in my opinion. Having said that, if you like William S. Burroughs you'll probably riff off Bolano's "visceral" visions. Novels are, after all, much about taste.

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Product Details

ISBN:
9780312427481
Binding:
Trade Paperback
Publication date:
03/04/2008
Publisher:
ST MARTINS PRESS
Pages:
648
Height:
1.10IN
Width:
5.40IN
Thickness:
1.25
Number of Units:
1
Copyright Year:
2008
Author:
Roberto Bolano
Translator:
Natasha Wimmer
Subject:
Poets
Subject:
General Fiction
Subject:
Literature-A to Z

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List Price:$21.00
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