The Savage Detectives: A Novel

This was my first Roberto Bolaño book ... and now I'm hooked (just picked up !). He has an amazing storytelling ability--his use of conversation is mastery. He can jump in and out of one hundred characters with distinct voices and mannerisms and sayings, all interweaved with their own separate stories and emotion and tales. Many of these would be classic short stories in their own right.The novel has three distinct sections. The first and third are narrated by a young visceral realist poet, the 17-year old Juan García Madero. These portions are linear and connected, and tell a specific story. The middle section is nonlinear and consists of a large number of characters (some imagined, some not) being "interviewed" and telling their stories as they relate to Arturo Belano (Bolaño's alter-ego in the book) and Ulises Lima. These stories are what I mentioned above, subsisting on their own but coming together to tell a grander tale of life and notoriety and expectation and aging. Note: I DID find the transition from the first to the second section abrupt and jarring--I had a harder time picking up the book as often once I reached that second section. BUT, after getting used to the new format, that section flowed as well as the others, especially toward its second half, when the pieces begin to fall together nicely and the many (many!) characters are recognizable both in their own subsequent interview entries and as the related characters tell their "other" sides of the story.My writing has been inspired after reading The Savage Detectives. I have the desire to be a more active part of literary "movement," or collective--whatever. The good old visceral realists.Fantastic book. I will need to read it again, if not only to gain the inspiration again, but to be able to understand the vast multitude of characters, and how such people can relate to the goings-on and relationships within my own life.--- ---A quote or two can sum up some themes in the book:"writing poetry was the most beautiful thing anyone could do on this godforsaken earth" (134)"Literature isn't innocent." (154)"what a shame that time passes, don't you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us" (185)"Do you know what the worst thing about literature is? ... That you end up being friends with writers. And friendship, treasure though it may be, destroys your critical sense." (359)"a poem doesn't necessarily have to mean anything, except that it's a poem" (397)"in a burst of utter Mexicanness, I knew that we were ruled by fate and that we would all drown in the storm, and I knew that only the cleverest, myself certainly not included, would stay afloat much longer" (406)"I try not to rush the passage from comedy to tragedy. Life does a find job on its own." (500)

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 the poetry establishment, partaking in a bohemian approach to sex and relationships, and a good amount of drugs and drinking. Madero never quite buys into the hype, but nonetheless finds himself with Lima, Bolano and a prostitute named Lupe as they speed north out of Mexico City at the end of the first section, Lupe's murderous pimp and a crooked Mexican policeman hot on their trail.The second section is a convoluted mishmash of snapshots of Bolano and Lima, from various narrators who knew them to varying degrees over a thirty-year span. Some of the people knew the young poets well, some vaguely, but what we get in totality are portraits of two wandering, possibly delusional souls. Their stories wander across Europe, Israel, Africa. They sleep on sofas, on boats, in caves. They are loved, admired, detested, celebrated and despised, depending on who is talking about them. This section is sometimes difficult to plow through, because although it's divided up into short chapters, each one offers only a small piece of a massive puzzle. It's an incongruous timeline, and there seems to be little rhyme or reason for the order of the narratives. In a way, though, it's more realistic than a traditional narrative. What is a person if not a set of disjunctive moments and memories?The third section picks up where the first left off, flashing back to Lima and Bolano's desperate escape from Mexico City. Eventually the thread of the prostitute and pimp is resolved, but most of the third section focuses on the visceral realists' search for whom they consider to be the original visceral realist, an obscure poet named Cesárea Tinajero who lives in the Sonoran Desert.The Savage Detectives is my second Bolaño. Maybe because of that, I didn't find it as stunning as 2666, although it shares many of the same elements and themes. Or maybe it's because the characters are so full of themselves, sometimes admirably but more often annoyingly so. But in the end I found their youthful spirits infectious. There is a scene where Arturo challenges a critic to a duel, and they stand on a beach with swords, awkwardly swinging at one another. It is a silly moment, surreal and poetic and farcical, but we know that at any turn it could become tragic and deadly. For me, that scene is distilled Bolaño. This is a book that has grown on me since I finished it, and I expect it will continue to do so.

Todo correcto

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 details and made that readable. Challenging to get through but surely rewarding! That is the word actually - Rewarding- at times it might be difficult to get through his books but I now learned to trust his piloting skills to get me through the storm to a satisfactory conclusion.Recommending this book is tricky, because this is a 5⭐️ for me. But you’re not me ! So I would say if anything at all triggers you or if you’re easily bored during reading or if you don’t like incoherent narrative this one isn’t for you.

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.

This book is a must read, though I must caution the potential reader that if you go looking for a plot you'd come out dissatisfied, but if you are looking for an experience you might find this to be one of the best a piece of literature can offer.

I understand that hype can mislead some people to read something that is not for them so let's be clear this is an avant garde novel with an unusual structure and a meandering (to say the least) sense of narrative. A large part of it is made up of anecdotes by a range of people about encounters they had over several decades with the main characters, two avant garde and thoroughly disreputable poets (the savage detectives), one of whom is perhaps less of a poet and barely sane. These anecdotes, some extended, are thoroughly readable and each of the voices is distinctive and alive. Bolano's range here is impressive and he is adept at invoking a very wide variety of characters and situations, cultural and social, in masterful detail. He is a miniaturist of considerable skill. Most of these pieces are set in Mexico and Spain but we also have Israel and a number of African situations.This long section of voices, anecdotes, is sandwiched between a straight narrative telling the story of a group of wild young radical poets in Mexico City and of the escape of the two main characters with two characters from the first part to search for a lost poet (who may not have written any poetry) from an earlier generation.It seems only in a very sketchy way that all this - the narrative sections at the start and the end, and the long section of anecdotes in between - come together to tell a wider story but you do get a strong sense of time. And between the apparently disjointed parts you can slowly piece together the lives of the lead characters - as they age and as they go about their sometimes chaotic lives. By the end a wonderful portrait of them has been revealed.The action includes vivid sex (the first part of the book is a coming of age story), playful discussion and not a little violence. The book is incredibly alive. It's characters are incredibly alive. I can't even begin to describe why it had such a powerful affect on me. Perhaps I feel a little sentimental about my own roughly contemporaneous wild youth? The period is caught marvellously. But it cannot be that alone. I find Bolano's writing enormously satisfying. It is complex and extremely rigorous. Yet it delivers and is extremely readable. I will read this book again soon and have no doubt I will find more in it.