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The Savage Detectives

First edition (Spanish)
Author	Roberto Bolaño
Original title	Los Detectives Salvajes
Translator	Natasha Wimmer
Language	Spanish
Publisher	Anagrama (Spanish)
Publication date	1998
Publication place	Chile
Published in English	2007
Pages	610
ISBN	8433910868

The Savage Detectives (Spanish: Los detectives salvajes) is a novel by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño published in 1998. Natasha Wimmer's English translation was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007. The novel tells the story of the search for a 1920s Mexican poet, Cesárea Tinajero, by two 1970s poets, the Chilean Arturo Belano (alter ego of Bolaño) and the Mexican Ulises Lima.

The Savage Detectives has been translated into several languages, and won the Herralde prize in 1998 and the Rómulo Gallegos prize in 1999. The novel has received a great deal of praise, both from writers and specialized critics.

Plot summary

The novel is narrated in first person by several narrators and divided into three parts. The first section, "Mexicans Lost in Mexico", set in late 1975, is told by 17-year-old aspiring poet, Juan García Madero. It centers on his admittance to a roving gang of poets who refer to themselves as the Visceral Realists. He drops out of university and travels around Mexico City, becoming increasingly involved with the adherents of Visceral Realism, although he remains uncertain about Visceral Realism.

The book's second section, "The Savage Detectives," comprises nearly two-thirds of the novel's total length. The section is a polyphonic narrative which features more than forty narrators and spans twenty years, from 1976 to 1996. It consists of interviews with a variety of characters from locations around North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, all of whom have come into contact with the founding leaders of the Visceral Realists, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. Each narrator has his or her own opinion of the two, although the consensus is that they are drifters and literary elitists whose behavior often leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of those they meet. We learn that the two spent some years in Europe, frequenting bars and camp sites, and generally living a bohemian lifestyle. Lima, the more introverted of the two, serves a short sentence in an Israeli prison, while Belano challenges a literary critic to an absurd sword fight on a Spanish beach.

The third section of the book, "The Deserts of Sonora", is again narrated by Juan García Madero, and chronologically takes place straight after the first section, now in the Sonora Desert in January 1976, with Lima, Belano and a sex worker named Lupe. The section involves the "Savage Detectives" closing in on Cesárea Tinajero, an elusive poet who is the founder of Visceral Realism, while they are chased by a pimp named Alberto and a corrupt Mexican police officer.

Characters

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A partial character list.

Critical reception

Several critics have compared the novel to Rayuela (translated into English as Hopscotch) by Argentinian novelist Julio Cortázar, whom Bolaño greatly respected, both because of its non-linear structure and its portrayal of young, bohemian artists. According to Book Marks, the book received a "rave" consensus, based on eleven critic reviews: seven "rave", three "positive", and one "mixed". In Bookmarks Magazine July/Aug 2007 issue, a magazine that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a (4.00 out of 5) from based on critic reviews with the critical summary saying, "Though Richard Eder found fault with the "cacophonous Greek chorus" (Los Angeles Times) and others found the work too fragmentary, most critics regarded the technique as inventive and entertaining".

James Wood wrote in The New York Times, "A novel all about poetry and poets, one of whose heroes is a lightly disguised version of the author himself: how easily this could be nothing more than a precious lattice of ludic narcissism and unbearably "literary" adventures... The novel is wildly enjoyable (as well as, finally, full of lament), in part because Bolaño, despite all the game-playing, has a worldly, literal sensibility."

Benjamin Kunkel, writing for London Review of Books, "It’s something close to a miracle that Bolaño can produce such intense narrative interest in a book made up of centrifugal monologues spinning away from two absentee main characters, and the diary entries of its most peripheral figure. And yet, in spite of the book’s apparent (and often real) formlessness, a large part of its distinction is its virtually unprecedented achievement in multiply-voiced narration."

Slate wrote, "The Savage Detectives sings a love song to the grandeur of Latin American literature and to the passions it inspires, and there is no reason to suppose that, in spite of every prediction, these particular grandeurs and passions have reached their appointed end."

Elements in common with 2666

2666, Bolaño's final, posthumous novel has many points in common with The Savage Detectives.

• Both conclude in the fictional city of Santa Teresa, in the Mexican state of Sonora, which acts as a stand-in for Ciudad Juárez.
• In the second part of The Savage Detectives, an author named Arcimboldi is mentioned. In 2666 he will become the central character Benno von Archimboldi.
• In a dialogue about Cesárea Tinajero, the year 2600 is referred to as "the year of misfortunes".
• Late in the novel there is a section where, 'Cesárea said something about days to come... and the teacher, to change the subject, asked her what times she meant and when they would be. And Cesárea named a date, sometime around the year 2600. Two thousand six hundred and something.'

According to the Note to the First Edition of 2666, among Bolaño's notes is a line saying that "The narrator of 2666 is Arturo Belano," a character from The Savage Detectives, as well as a line for the end of 2666, "And that's it, friends. I've done it all, I've lived it all. If I had the strength, I'd cry. I bid you all goodbye, Arturo Belano".

References

1. ""A mí me gusta más Bolaño que García Márquez con diferencia", afirma Jorge Herralde | soitu.es". www.soitu.es. Retrieved 2023-06-29.
2. ^ Berman, Paul (2007), "Mayhem in Mexico: Roberto Bolaño's great Latin American novel", Slate, 10 September 2007: "Bolaño himself, in recounting these literary doings, slyly molds his story around a style that will be familiar to the readers of Paz's circle in Mexico—the style of the writer and critic Juan García Ponce, a lesser member of the Paz entourage, famous in Mexico, though maybe not in many other places, for his priapic mischief. In the novels of the real-life Juan García Ponce, every innocent conversation seems to inspire the conversationalists to doff their clothes; and in the adventures of Bolaño's teenage narrator, Juan García Madero, something similar does seem to occur."
3. Roberto Ontiveros, "For Bolaño, No Divine Miracles", The Texas Observer, 10 August 2007: "Bolaño must have felt that the story of Auxilio Lacouture, based on real-life Uruguayan poet-exile Alcira who went mad hiding out for 10 days during a 1968 military raid, needed its own plane."
4. "¿Quién era Auxilio Lacouture?". Mimalapalabrahn.blogspot.mx. 23 January 2009. Retrieved 20 January 2018.
5. Harvesting Fragments From a Chilean Master Was Bolaño's friend and literary executor
6. "The Savage Detectives". Book Marks. Retrieved 17 February 2024.
7. "The Savage Detectives By Roberto Bolaño". Bookmarks Magazine. Archived from the original on 21 Sep 2015. Retrieved 14 January 2023.
8. Wood, James (2007-04-15). "The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolaño - Books - Review". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-08-23.
9. Kunkel, Benjamin (2007-09-06). "In the Sonora". London Review of Books. pp. 5–8. ISSN 0260-9592. Retrieved 2019-08-23.
10. Berman, Paul (2007-09-10). "The great novel of Mexico City". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2019-08-23.

External links

• Review of The Savage Detectives at The New Yorker
• Review of The Savage Detectives at The New York Times Book Review

• 1998 Chilean novels
• Works by Roberto Bolaño
• Novels set in Mexico City
• Novels set in deserts
• Editorial Anagrama books
• Roman à clef novels
• Postmodern novels