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The Savage Detectives (Paperback)
Short Description for The Savage DetectivesAn exhilarating, must-read novel from one of Latin America's pre-eminent writers, and author of the acclaimed masterpiece 2666.
Full description- Publisher: PICADOR
- Published: 04 September 2009
- Format: Paperback 608 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Contemporary Fiction | Fiction In Translation
- ISBN 13: 9780330509527 ISBN 10: 0330509527
- Sales rank: 15,486
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Reviews for The Savage Detectives
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A Literary Quest
This novel is most remarkable for its narrative form. Its central characters, a pair of rebel poets, are only ever seen through their interactions with others. At the heart of the book are rambling monologues by scores of people across twenty years and half the world - there are journalists, critics, painters, academics, publishers, philosophers, photographers, an architect, a lawyer, a bodybuilder, but above all, poets. The narrators are firmly in the world, both geographical and literary. Even the lunatics and artists are people of action, defined by what they do. They are frank and homogeneous in tone - in translation, at least, there is little differentiation by means of idiom or dialect.
Bolano manipulates these voices to plot, often obliquely, the wanderings of his heroes Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, and it is the enigma of these two men - not â??who are they?', but â??why do they act so?' - which engages the reader. This jigsaw story is sensibly framed at either end by a young man's diary, which recounts his sexual and poetic awakening, and in the last fifty pages, a road trip in the company of Belano, Lima and a whore on the run from her pimp.
Many reviewers remark on the balance between pathos and humour in this book, but it's not laugh-out-loud funny - I found it very dry and very dark. Others are struck by the sex-n-drugs soaked Bohemian milieu, but while the story is certainly uninhibited, I thought it was also modest and grounded. Personally, I was most impressed by the eerie set-pieces: the duel on a moonlit beach between two literary rivals, the rescue of a child fallen into a haunted chasm, the journey through a war-zone in Africa; and the countless banal episodes Bolano somehow infuses with an ominous mystery and obscure grace.
Above all, this is a story about literature. Writers and poets are named (and sometimes listed) on almost every page. Many are obviously invented, but others may well be real. My knowledge of spanish lit. is not broad, and I recognised only Borges, Paz, Cortazar, and Sor. Juana from my own reading. The characters are mostly either immersed in, or in conflict with, the pretensions and institutions of high culture; yet the vernacular, conversational storytelling keeps these concerns on an intimate and human scale by Sholto Spradbury
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