Roberto Bolaño

National Bestseller In this dazzling novel, the book that established his international reputation, Roberto 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: our own. The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age.

A Novel

The Savage Detectives

Roberto Bolańo

The savage detectives

2666 and the savage detectives (tsd) reminds me of deleuze’s reading of proust, and dare I say, the cinematic project of tarkovsky’s body of work. bolano’s meandering novels, and tsd in particular, challenges the conception of literature as a medium, instead acting as a conduit for experience itself.

the novel is split into three parts: first, that of garcia madero, at the cusp of adulthood, presented in a parody of the romanticised life of a poet-“warrior”, told through diary entries as he and other poets attempt to start a poetry movement of “visceral realists”. second, a hulking middle portion in the a documentary style, of the other two central characters, ulises lima and arturo belano, told from the kaleidoscopic point of view strictly of people who have encountered them. nothing here is told from their perspective. here, they travel from mexico city to sonora to paris to spain to vienna to tel aviv to managua to luanda to liberia and finally to santa teresa (the key city in 2666, although there is no other connection). they huck through an israeli prison, a liberian civil war, an impossible cavern, get drunk which eventually brings them on (important) a search for an elusive poet (cesarea tinarejo), and more. like five blind men feeling out an elephant, the world as they know it is seen through that of the other person, in various levels of memory and clarity. third, madero, belano, and lima travel through mexico to find cesarea, the mythical poet they are told stories about.

deleuze and proust — the key protagonist in deleuze’s drama of proust’s in search of lost time is that of the apprentice. the stumbling and fumbling individual who wastes time, loses track of themselves, and searches for truth. the individual who experiences, above all, signs. first, worldly: the general signs which we are faced to decipher, constituting our reality. second, love: “to fall in love is to individualise someone by the signs he bears or emits”. third, sensuous: simply, the textured, the material. madeleines, cobblestones, trees, steeples, napkins, the noise of a spoon, or a pipe. as proust recounts, “the taste of a the little madeleine had reminded me of combray. but why had the images of combray and of venice, at the one moment and at the other, given such a certainty of joy, adequate, with no further proofs, to make death itself a matter of indifference to me?” tarkovsky makes a cameo here, as time plays a central role in his work. in nostahlgia, he films his hero carrying a candle, knee deep in a pool, across it. the whole damn nine minutes.

understanding this, time itself also emerges as a central character of bolano’s drama. the simple passage of time experienced by the human through the world, the slogging through the desert, tripping over your own feet, finding your way. as the tale one of the interviewers tells goes: five hundred thousand people are lost in a forest, walking and crying. asked why, one of them says, “we’re all alone, and we are lost”.

right here, we touch on another one of bolano’s driving themes: the death of the author. “we fucked up, we’d found cesarea just to bring her to her death”. how melvillean! on the human level, what we desire is completely obliterated when we come into contact with it. bursts into flames. dissipates. jenny holzer eat your heart out. protect me from what i want? protect what i want from me. an oedipean reading: instead of a protagonist who, running from what they fear, end up attaining that very thing, what the protagonist faces when they run towards what they want, is an abyssal, painful lack. on the level of interpretation, the mythology they built up throughout the novel and in their minds of the author falls apart the moment they meet the poet. far from the ideal they had in their head, the now-elderly poet shows herself as “nothing poetic”, hunched over a washing trough like a “rock or an elephant”. the poet they constructed in their heads is no more. and just paragraphs later, the corporeal manifestation of this poet is no more, as well, the fault squarely of the boys. she is caught is the crossfire of someone else chasing after them, and dies immediately from a gun.

the author dies a slow and long death throughout the novel. the author being the poets, lima and belano, themselves. their escapades and frankly, ridiculous, side quests are told in excruciating (and i mean excruciating) detail by, and this is crucial, other people. they dont narrate their own stories! this is a running theme throughout the book. opposed to derrida, who spoke of “nothing outside the text”, everything exists outside the text. people are taken the wrong way, poems are misunderstood, hell, not understood, poems are drawn out in shapes and lines, undecipherable to everyone but the author. this is ultimately a nihilistic philosophy, not of pessimism, but rather emblematic of how devoid of centre our reality is. above all, the futility not just of literature, but of language. but it closes out on a positive note. throughout the book there will be various diagrams drawn by the characters. in the final diary entry, madera draws a box out of dotted lines, captioned: “what’s outside the window”? for me, everything.

Ghee

2666 and the savage detectives (tsd) reminds me of deleuze’s reading of proust, and dare I say, the cinematic project of tarkovsky’s body of work. bolano’s meandering novels, and tsd in particular, challenges the conception of literature as a medium, instead acting as a conduit for experience itself.

the novel is split into three parts: first, that of garcia madero, at the cusp of adulthood, presented in a parody of the romanticised life of a poet-“warrior”, told through diary entries as he and other poets attempt to start a poetry movement of “visceral realists”. second, a hulking middle portion in the a documentary style, of the other two central characters, ulises lima and arturo belano, told from the kaleidoscopic point of view strictly of people who have encountered them. nothing here is told from their perspective. here, they travel from mexico city to sonora to paris to spain to vienna to tel aviv to managua to luanda to liberia and finally to santa teresa (the key city in 2666, although there is no other connection). they huck through an israeli prison, a liberian civil war, an impossible cavern, get drunk which eventually brings them on (important) a search for an elusive poet (cesarea tinarejo), and more. like five blind men feeling out an elephant, the world as they know it is seen through that of the other person, in various levels of memory and clarity. third, madero, belano, and lima travel through mexico to find cesarea, the mythical poet they are told stories about.

deleuze and proust — the key protagonist in deleuze’s drama of proust’s in search of lost time is that of the apprentice. the stumbling and fumbling individual who wastes time, loses track of themselves, and searches for truth. the individual who experiences, above all, signs. first, worldly: the general signs which we are faced to decipher, constituting our reality. second, love: “to fall in love is to individualise someone by the signs he bears or emits”. third, sensuous: simply, the textured, the material. madeleines, cobblestones, trees, steeples, napkins, the noise of a spoon, or a pipe. as proust recounts, “the taste of a the little madeleine had reminded me of combray. but why had the images of combray and of venice, at the one moment and at the other, given such a certainty of joy, adequate, with no further proofs, to make death itself a matter of indifference to me?” tarkovsky makes a cameo here, as time plays a central role in his work. in nostahlgia, he films his hero carrying a candle, knee deep in a pool, across it. the whole damn nine minutes.

understanding this, time itself also emerges as a central character of bolano’s drama. the simple passage of time experienced by the human through the world, the slogging through the desert, tripping over your own feet, finding your way. as the tale one of the interviewers tells goes: five hundred thousand people are lost in a forest, walking and crying. asked why, one of them says, “we’re all alone, and we are lost”.

right here, we touch on another one of bolano’s driving themes: the death of the author. “we fucked up, we’d found cesarea just to bring her to her death”. how melvillean! on the human level, what we desire is completely obliterated when we come into contact with it. bursts into flames. dissipates. jenny holzer eat your heart out. protect me from what i want? protect what i want from me. an oedipean reading: instead of a protagonist who, running from what they fear, end up attaining that very thing, what the protagonist faces when they run towards what they want, is an abyssal, painful lack. on the level of interpretation, the mythology they built up throughout the novel and in their minds of the author falls apart the moment they meet the poet. far from the ideal they had in their head, the now-elderly poet shows herself as “nothing poetic”, hunched over a washing trough like a “rock or an elephant”. the poet they constructed in their heads is no more. and just paragraphs later, the corporeal manifestation of this poet is no more, as well, the fault squarely of the boys. she is caught is the crossfire of someone else chasing after them, and dies immediately from a gun.

the author dies a slow and long death throughout the novel. the author being the poets, lima and belano, themselves. their escapades and frankly, ridiculous, side quests are told in excruciating (and i mean excruciating) detail by, and this is crucial, other people. they dont narrate their own stories! this is a running theme throughout the book. opposed to derrida, who spoke of “nothing outside the text”, everything exists outside the text. people are taken the wrong way, poems are misunderstood, hell, not understood, poems are drawn out in shapes and lines, undecipherable to everyone but the author. this is ultimately a nihilistic philosophy, not of pessimism, but rather emblematic of how devoid of centre our reality is. above all, the futility not just of literature, but of language. but it closes out on a positive note. throughout the book there will be various diagrams drawn by the characters. in the final diary entry, madera draws a box out of dotted lines, captioned: “what’s outside the window”? for me, everything.

Clare B

I loved this book. Bolaño does this amazing trick - there are sections of this book that could effectively stand alone as stories and yet they work together to create a fuller picture of the characters. I was really impressed throughout.

Hellboy TCR

An Astonishing masterpiece! 

Full review (Malayalam) :- https://melethilwrites.wordpress.com/...

Anthony Sabourin

Traversing life's journey from comedy to tragedy by way of omission. Kinda haunting & will stick to your ribs, but I like the short stories better.

Donald

I read TSD for the first time in 2009. It was my first Bolaño, and immediately upon finishing it I headed to the bookstore to buy everything else. When I finished reading all of his fiction the other week, I decided the best thing to do was go back to where I began with him.

My first thought: this novel is better and more ambitious than 2666. There are a lot of connections between the two novels, both direct and indirect (Archimboldi, the Sonoran desert, Santa Theresa, Nazism, etc).

I'm sure there is a lot in this book I missed. Bolaño is very concerned with the fate of his literary generation (mostly in Latin America but not exclusively). My ignorance about his generation, especially the poets, leaves me outside of this concern. What's so amazing about this novel is that one can come in blind, appreciate only the outline of its (polemical) history and argument about a generation of poets without getting most of the references and details, and still love it. I can only imagine what it'd be like to read if I were part of or knowledgable about the world it describes/mourns/attacks/celebrates.

Bolaño, we don't deserve you.

Melody Izard

This writing. I'm going to say it. It's visceral. It's so beautiful it hurts. And here's what I mean. I want to rush forward to read the next thing but at the same time I want to savor the sentence, the thought, the image, the slight flicker of delight. I once had an aunt who drove her car with her right foot on the gas and her left on the brake. I feel like that's what I'm doing when I read Bolaño.

Joshua Line

I really wanted to give this book four stars, but I simply cannot. I found myself wanting to pick this book up every time I would finish a chapter or so. For pure space and weight considerations, I should not have brought this book with me on a trip to Pittsburgh. Instead, I packed it away, and finished it, with relish.

yuyu

Alithea

Kjell-Morten Bratsberg Thorsen

Lorenzo Caputo

Udit Desai

Robert Miller

With an afterword by Natasha Wimmer. Winner of the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Natasha Wimmer’s translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times. New Year’s Eve 1975, Mexico City. Two hunted men leave town in a hurry, on the desert-bound trail of a vanished poet. Spanning two decades and crossing continents, theirs is a remarkable quest through a darkening universe – our own. It is a journey told and shared by a generation of lovers, rebels and readers, whose testimonies are woven together into one of the most dazzling Latin American novels of the twentieth century.

Boxuan Mao

Abhinav Bhat

Laurin C Guthrie

Steve Langton

Hobbes

lucinda ventimiglia

Nav Singh

Alejandra 

Eitan Hershkovitz

An exhilarating, must-read novel from one of Latin America's pre-eminent writers, and author of the acclaimed masterpiece 2666.

The Savage Detectives A Novel

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