The Savage Detectives

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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