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Sign up todayThe Savage Detectives
Translator
Natasha Wimmer
Length
26 hours 58 minutes
Language
English
Narrators
Eddie Lopez & Armando Durán
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Learn moreBookseller recommendation
“A road novel about both the end and beginning of literature. Dazzling. One of the true giants of Latin literature. ”
— Ben • Bookstore1Sarasota
The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Márquez of his generation. In this dazzling novel, the book that established his international reputation, Bolaño tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes—the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself—on a tragicomic quest through a darkening, entropic universe.
Brilliantly rendered into English by Natasha Wimmer, the acclaimed translator of Bolaño’s other great masterwork, 2666, The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, wildly inventive and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age.
Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, France, and Spain. He has been acclaimed by the Los Angeles Times as “by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” and as “the real thing and the rarest” by Susan Sontag. Among his many prizes are the prestigious Premio Herralde de Novela and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. Bolaño is widely considered the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry before his death at the age of fifty.
Eddie Lopez, a northern California native, earned his BFA in theater from the California Institute of the Arts. He has worked professionally in Los Angeles as an actor and is currently with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He began recording audiobooks for family road trips at the age of eight on his home cassette deck.
Armando Durán has appeared in films, television, and regional theaters throughout the West Coast. For the last decade he has been a member of the resident acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In 2009 he was named by AudioFile as Best Voice in Biography and History for his narration of Che Guevara. A native Californian, he divides his time between Los Angeles and Ashland, Oregon.
Natasha Wimmer’s translation of Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and New York Times. Her translation of his 2666 won the National Book Award’s Best Novel of the Year as well as the PEN Prize.
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Reviews
“By turns humorous and sad, this literary mystery also affirms the value of literature and serves as a modern history of the Latin American literary scene. Critics praised Bolaño’s vivid, experimental novel, applauding Natasha Wimmer’s skillful translation from the chatty, slang-filled Spanish…inventive and entertaining.”
“A bizarre and mesmerizing novel…It’s a lustful story—lust for sex, lust for self, lust for the written word.”
“Roberto Bolaño’s masterwork…confirms this Chilean’s status as Latin America’s literary enfant terrible.”
“An exuberantly sprawling, politically charged picaresque novel.”
“Wildly enjoyable…Bolaño beautifully manages to keep his comedy and his pathos in the same family.”
“The Savage Detectives, which, like 2666, has been translated with wonderful agility by Natasha Wimmer, catapulted [Bolaño] from obscurity to worshipful adulation.”
“Deeply satisfying…Bolaño’s book throws down a great, clunking, formal gauntlet to his readers’ conventional expectations.”
“An utterly unique achievement—a modern epic rich in character and event…[Bolaño is] the most important writer to emerge from Latin America since García Márquez.”
“Combustible…A glittering, tumbling diamond of a book…When you are done with this book, you will believe there is no engine more powerful than the human voice.”
“One of the most respected and influential writers of [his] generation…At once funny and vaguely, pervasively, frightening.”
“An instant cult hit among readers and practically a fetish object to critics.”
“This novel—the major work from Chilean-born novelist Bolaño, here beautifully translated by Wimmer—will allow English speaking readers to discover a truly great writer…There are copious, and acidly hilarious, references to the Latin American literary scene, and one needn’t be an insider to get the jokes: they’re all in Bolaño’s masterful shifts in tone, captured with precision by Wimmer…Bolaño fashions an engrossing lost world of youth and utopian ambition, as particular and vivid as it is sad and uncontainable.”
“The late Chilean writer Bolaño's 1998 (US 2007) novel begins with a seventeen-year-old's diary entries describing life in 1970 Mexico City. The narrative's second part is a meditation on the visceral realism movement founded by poets Ulises Lima and Arturo Bolaño, capped by their search twenty years previously for the poet Cesárea Tinajero. This Latin American On the Road presents a dreamlike patchwork of Lima and Belaño's adventures from which to reconstruct their literary pilgrimage. Narrators Eddie Lopez and Armando Duran reinforce the novel's sense of place with their rounded pronunciations. Essential.”
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