"The Savage Detectives" by Roberto Bolano: An Intriguing Novel of Adventure and Discovery

miguel: Todo correcto

Spain on Nov 05, 2022

Mohammed H: There are mainly two things to talk about here. This book as a stand alone value in itself and this book in the whole picture of the works of Roberto Bolaño, I say the whole works as if I read all of his books. I didn’t- I’ve only read this and 2666! Although probably in the wrong order !
The savage detectives is one of those books that I can’t really tell what does the title have to do the content of book! There are no detectives in there and even if there were, they are certainly not savages.
This book is a plotless headless narrative that combines a huge assembly of POVs who vary in importance and number of appearances! The POVs take place all over the world basically, from Tel Aviv east to The Sonora desert west down to Chile and Argentina south.
Although the narrative here is headless and in a sense does not lead anywhere, it is still very compelling and rewarding nonetheless.
Roberto Bolaño first appeared in my life when I randomly picked up 2666 last year. One of the better memorable reads of last year. He’s very unique in that he’s prose is prone dragging. He spent a fifth of 2666 basically reporting horrific murders to the smallest terrifying...

Germany on Mar 14, 2022

Buddyboy: If you like novels that take you on a long rambling journey, you will love this book.
I cannot praise it highly enough for its originally and ability to engage the reader in the detail of life.

United Kingdom on Feb 15, 2022

Browner: Roberto Bolaño was an interesting and peripatetic guy. Born in Chile in 1953 to a working class family, he moved to Mexico as a teenager in the late 1960s, where he quickly dropped out of school to become a journalist involved with left-wing political causes. While developing his talent as a poet and writer of fiction, he returned to Chile around the time of the Pinochet coup and was imprisoned as a terrorist for a brief stretch before returning to Mexico City to start the Infrarrealismo movement as a reaction against the conventional literary traditions prevailing at the time (e.g., magical realism). Bolaño later left Mexico for Spain, where he lived a bohemian lifestyle as a writer and also as a security guard at a campground. He died prematurely at the age of 50 just as he was reaching the height of his fame as a novelist.

That background is useful to know before one launches into reading The Savage Detectives. Hailed as “the first great Latin American novel of the 21st century,” the book tells of two renegade poets—Arturo Belano, a Chilean ex-pat, and Ulises Lima, a Mexican national—who start a literary movement in Mexico City in 1975. They call themselves the...

United States on Jul 14, 2020

Amazon72: Vintage Bolano.

India on Apr 06, 2017

Pierre N. LeBlanc: It is interesting, if I had written this comment as soon as I finished reading this excellent novel, it would have been less excellent. Some works require that some time pass between the experience of them, their filtering into existence to finally be expressed in words. Language after all is why this book is so compelling, it must be truly amazing in Spanish. In short, the reading is an experience. I came upon Bolano's work by way of D.F. Wallace and was not at all disappointed, though richer in "drama" this work also sidesteps narrative in favour of looking and taking the time to see something new. The way the landscape is explored through lists of street names was particularly effective at creating a sense of time and space of the city.

Canada on Jun 11, 2015

J. Bosiljevac: Arturo Bolano and Ulises Lima, the protagonists at the center of this crazy novel, are the Jack Kerouac and Neil Cassidy of Latin America, poets based on Roberto Bolaño and his friend Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. Most of the other dozens of characters are also based on real-life acquaintances of Bolaño, and the story seems to be somewhat autobiographical, though it's hard to tell to what degree. It revolves around Bolano and Lima's quixotic attempts to create a Latin American poetry revolution with a style they dub "visceral realism."

The innovative three-part structure of The Savage Detectives is a precursor to Bolaño's five-part 2666. In the first and third sections, we have a single narrator, Juan García Madero, a university dropout who follows the trail of the visceral realists through Mexico City. At first, he is an outsider who has only heard tales of the visceral realists, but through the course of the first section he begins hanging out with them and learning more about what it means to be part of the self-proclaimed greatest movement in Latin American poetry--mostly a lot of sitting around in coffee shops discussing poetry, stealing books from libraries, dissing...

United States on Nov 30, 2010