The Savage Detectives
Ratings31
Average rating4.1
15
Ratings31
Average rating4.1
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 Cesárea 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 Bolaño 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.
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An incredible novel. I've never read something with a plot so ultimately pointless yet so engaging and gripping to read. It truly is a fascinating portrait of a person's life, and yet also, I thought anyway, a description of the idealogical and aesthetic groups that people (mostly young people) create. Mythicized individuals who are constructed as totems and in the end are painfully ordinary people, elitist creators who lash out with their own set of defined morality which becomes arbitrary and in the end was meaningless and the individuals that are swept up in their charisma and the enjoyment of connection in a group. The book as a whole described how in the end often our lives are defined by the impression we leave on people and how we're remembered, the two main protagonists of this book are never characterized through first person narration, we only learn about them through the perception and memory of others. Their absurd quest is ultimately pointless yet the book spans decades. It in a way holds a microcosm of humanity and human association, lives that come together for one cause and gradually and inevitably drift along to their final conclusion, never stopping.
Este libro es literatura pura, un ejercicio literario de la san p*ta.
Lo conversaba con un amigo que piensa exactamente lo contrario, pero para mí esta obra es fundamentalmente una gran crítica al mundillo literario en general y al de los poetas en particular.
El hecho de que se hable tanto de poetas, de corrientes literarias, de juicios de valor sobre tal o cual escritor, pero que a la vez no haya ni siquiera un fragmentito de poema transcrito en toda la obra (salvo creo 2 casos) constituye en mi opinión una clara crítica a este mundillo. La obra, los poemas en sí, parecen ser secundarios, ni siquiera aparecen reseñados, mientras que lo que prevalece es el postureo, la afiliación de los poetas a tal o cual corriente, sus vidas personales –una competencia por ver quien está más demente-y sus relaciones interpersonales. Que poetas campesinos; que realvisceralistas; que estridentistas; que alfiles de Octavio Paz. Los conocemos a todos, con abundancia de nombres y apellidos e historias personales, pero de su obra ni noticias, y ello incluye -sobre todo- a los protagonistas Belano y Lima.
Me parecen fantásticas las historias que aparecen, una dentro de otra como una muñeca rusa, intercaladas, interrelacionadas, tangencialmente conectadas. Me gustaron particularmente las historias autosuficientes, aquellas que se narran de principio a fin tan sólo para contar una participación mínima de alguno de nuestros (anti)héroes. Todo va creando un mundo en el que el lector es espectador a la vez omnisciente, porque lee todos los puntos de vista, y dependiente de esas miradas tan parciales y particulares.
El motivo por el cual recibe 4 y no 5 estrellas es simplemente la extensión. Me pareció algo largo. Es cierto que un libro de estas características no puede caber en 200 páginas, no alcanzaría su objetivo, pero en algunos pasajes –sobre todo promediando la segunda parte- el libro se hace un poco largo.
I made it a third into it, but I think I'm going to stop now. Even though I enjoyed the beginning, it started to drag soon. Plus, the novel suddenly went from 1 narrator to many,many,many narrators which I truly don't like. Not up for listening to another 18 hours of this, sorry.
