New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, poets and leaders of a movement they call visceral realism, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their mission: to track down the poet Cesarea Tinajero, who disappeared into the Sonora desert - and obscurity - decades before. But the detectives are themselves hunted men, and their search for the past will end in violence, flight, and permanent exile.In this dazzling novel, Roberto Bolano tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes on a twenty-year, multi-continent, tragicomic quest through a darkening universe.
First published in July 2007.
Reviews
The Guardian
Ben Richards
"The most important test that Bolano triumphantly sails through as a writer is that he makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world. His vision can be disturbing and dark but it is not cold: humour and compassion are never far away."
23/06/2007
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The Independent
Jason Wilson
"Bolaño has a perfect ear for the Mexicans, Argentines, French and Spaniards who tell us about their brief encounters with the two poets. It's as if he has tape-recorded them... Bolaño can be savagely comic as he mocks his generation, yet equally tender in his piecing together of broken lives."
24/08/2008
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The London Review of Books
Benjamin Kunkel
"No novel I have read is so movingly and appallingly lifelike in its unthematised accumulation of time and grief, and in its unco-ordinated march towards oblivion... It’s something close to a miracle that Bolaño can produce such intense narrative interest in a book made up of centrifugal monologues spinning away from two absentee main characters, and the diary entries of its most peripheral figure. And yet, in spite of the book’s apparent (and often real) formlessness, a large part of its distinction is its virtually unprecedented achievement in multiply-voiced narration."
06/09/2007
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The New Yorker
Daniel Zalewski
"When “The Savage Detectives” was published, Ignacio Echevarría, Spain’s most prominent literary critic, praised it as “the kind of novel that Borges could have written.” He got it half right. Borges, whose longest work of fiction is fifteen pages, would likely have admired the way Bolaño’s novel emerges from a branching tree of stories. But what would he have made of the delirious road trip, the frenzied sex, the sloppy displays of male ego? Bolaño fills his canvas with messy Lawrencian emotions but places them within a coolly cerebral frame. It’s a style worthy of its own name: visceral modernism."
26/03/2007
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The New York Review of Books
Francisco Goldman
"Bolaño shows how time punishes us for the rebellious dreams of youth, bringing disappointment, painfully modest accomplishments, broken loves, illness, even violent death and, simply, the end of youth. But for readers no longer young, the novel also conjures youth in all its hilariousness and overwrought drama, and reminds us of the purity of young people's faith—above all in poetry. It can also make a reader care deeply about the characters, almost like a parent, wanting happiness for them, fretting when it eludes them, and finally forced to accept that they will live out their destinies on their own."
19/07/2007
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The New York Times
James Wood
"The musical control is impeccable, and one is struck by Bolaño's ability to nudge on his long, light, ethereal sentence — impossibly, like someone punting a leaf — image by image: the falcon, the red hue, the sunset, the dawn, the dawn seen from a plane, the femoral artery, the blood vessel, the abstract painter. It could so easily be too much, and somehow isn't, the flight of fancy anchored by precision and a just-suppressed comedy."
15/04/2007
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The Observer
Helen Zaltzman
"This is a sprawling treasure, involving dozens of characters in Mexico City, Europe and Africa over two decades. Through the eyes of numerous fellow poets, the novel follows two poets, Ulisses Lima and Arturo Belano, as they search for a, um, lost poet. If this sounds like too many poets for your liking, there are also hookers, while magic realism-detractor Bolaño errs towards witty plain speaking rather than florid poeticism."
20/07/2008
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The Daily Telegraph
Jonathan Gibbs
"This is an extremely important book in the Latin American canon, but there is nothing difficult or high-minded about it. The Savage Detectives is a grubby epic, part road movie, part joyful, nostalgic confession... In these 400 pages [of the second section], the book reveals itself as a masterpiece. In making himself the silent heart of the novel, Bolaño has reinvented Kerouac, but without the ego."
02/08/2007
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The Daily Telegraph
Ed King
"On its publication, The Savage Detectives, with its tongue-in-cheek subversion of the Latin American canon, was hailed as the perfect antidote to the self-important posturings of the generation of Latin American writers who came to international fame in the 1960s - cementing Bolaño's reputation as one of the giants of the post-Márquez era. But it's the effortless blend of irreverent humour with a muted sense of tragedy that was Bolaño's lasting contribution. Beneath the biographical ironies and the playful sampling of European genres lies a deep sense of rootlessness that goes to the heart of Bolaño's fiction."
18/08/2007
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The Washington Post
Ilan Stavans
"The Savage Detectives alone should grant Bolaño 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 Cuarón's film "Y tu mamá también."... By far the most hallucinatory element in The Savage Detectives is its bizarre, exquisite prose. Having spent years studying linguistic varieties across the Americas, I've never come across a chameleon talent like Bolaño'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."
06/05/2007
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Time Out
Craig Morgan Teicher (New York)
"Bolaño masterfully and compassionately interweaves the stories of countless believable and unforgettable characters, displaying humanity in a variety of extremes, from lonely desperation to humorous self-seriousness. The Savage Detectives is not a quick read, but it’s engaging, important and spellbinding at every turn."
01/04/2007
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