The Savage Detectives
Ratings16
Average rating4.1
15
Ratings16
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
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.
