The Savage Detectives: A Novel by Roberto Bolano
|
List Price: Our Price: $6.95 You Save: $9.05 (57%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $2.26 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Savage Detectives: A Novel
Book Review: The lives of the poets many
Summary: 5 Stars
This was my first Roberto Bolaño book ... and now I'm hooked (just picked up 2666!). He has an amazing storytelling ability--his use of conversation is mastery. He can jump in and out of one hundred characters with distinct voices and mannerisms and sayings, all interweaved with their own separate stories and emotion and tales. Many of these would be classic short stories in their own right.
The novel has three distinct sections. The first and third are narrated by a young visceral realist poet, the 17-year old Juan García Madero. These portions are linear and connected, and tell a specific story. The middle section is nonlinear and consists of a large number of characters (some imagined, some not) being "interviewed" and telling their stories as they relate to Arturo Belano (Bolaño's alter-ego in the book) and Ulises Lima. These stories are what I mentioned above, subsisting on their own but coming together to tell a grander tale of life and notoriety and expectation and aging. Note: I DID find the transition from the first to the second section abrupt and jarring--I had a harder time picking up the book as often once I reached that second section. BUT, after getting used to the new format, that section flowed as well as the others, especially toward its second half, when the pieces begin to fall together nicely and the many (many!) characters are recognizable both in their own subsequent interview entries and as the related characters tell their "other" sides of the story.
My writing has been inspired after reading The Savage Detectives. I have the desire to be a more active part of literary "movement," or collective--whatever. The good old visceral realists.
Fantastic book. I will need to read it again, if not only to gain the inspiration again, but to be able to understand the vast multitude of characters, and how such people can relate to the goings-on and relationships within my own life.
--- ---
A quote or two can sum up some themes in the book:
"writing poetry was the most beautiful thing anyone could do on this godforsaken earth" (134)
"Literature isn't innocent." (154)
"what a shame that time passes, don't you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us" (185)
"Do you know what the worst thing about literature is? ... That you end up being friends with writers. And friendship, treasure though it may be, destroys your critical sense." (359)
"a poem doesn't necessarily have to mean anything, except that it's a poem" (397)
"in a burst of utter Mexicanness, I knew that we were ruled by fate and that we would all drown in the storm, and I knew that only the cleverest, myself certainly not included, would stay afloat much longer" (406)
"I try not to rush the passage from comedy to tragedy. Life does a find job on its own." (500)
Book Review: A book about everything that matters...
Summary: 5 Stars
Every so often you come upon a book that you can only diminish the more you try to explain what it's about. "The Savage Detectives" is such a book. Ostensibly it's about a couple of wild young poets who revive an old literary movement and go in search of its forebears. Ultimately they grow older, become increasingly disillusioned, never attain their once-lofty aspirations, heading straight for neglect and oblivion...and yet through everything they still hold on to a belief--a faith, if you will--in poetry and revolution.
Okay, that's, in a nutshell, what the novel is "about."
But the experience of reading "The Savage Detectives" is one that cannot be described in words other than those Bolano himself used to create this passionate and poetic adventure of heart, mind, and soul. This is a book that follows two characters--through the eyes of a dozen or so other characters--who take literature seriously, as a matter of life and death, not as a mere pastime, not as simple entertainment. If you don't share something of the same conviction, you're likely not to get the point of this novel; actually, you're likely to conclude that there isn't any point to it at all.
This is a novel that cannot be contained, nor can it contain itself. If it's difficult to say precisely what it's about, that's in good part because it's about everything--about life and death, about love and art, about beauty and squalor, corruption and violence, humanity and inhumanity. "The Savage Detectives" has the tone and authority of a summing up of all that Bolano had seen and thought in his abbreviated life--a message he was desperate to get down, if not in the most symmetrical of forms, than in a far more honest, if messy, explosion of urgency.
This novel throbs with life and intensity--it manages to be both unbearably sad and irresistibly inspiring. Bolano writes as if he's running only a step or two in front of the burning fuse, which, as it turns out, he was. In the end, though, we all share the same fate. And it seems a good part of Bolano's intent to get us to realize, viscerally, as his fictional "visceral realist" poets do, that time is short and the world is big. Let's live while we can.
It's tempting to call "The Savage Detectives" the best book I've read all year, but such an assertion would no doubt be suspect because of the fact that it's the most recent book I've read. It is, however, at the very least, among the best books I've read in this or any year.
Take the negative reviews of "The Savage Detectives" under advisement. So many of them complain precisely about those things that make this novel so unique and so powerful. Like his even more ambitious "2666," "The Savage Detectives" simply isn't everyone's favorite slice of pie. There are people, after all, who hate coconut custard. Go figure.
Book Review: A Literary Adventure Novel
Summary: 5 Stars
I first discovered The Savage Detectives almost by accident. I was probably killing time
before work in a bookstore in downtown Berkeley and its cover was striking, not to
mention the title! After glancing at it several times and flipping through its pages
over the course of a few months I finally decided to buy it. It is rare that I buy a book
I've never heard of, simply out of curiosity. Usually I choose books based on friends'
recommendations or because the author is someone I've heard a lot about and have
been meaning to read.
I had never heard of Roberto Bolano before I bought "The Savage Detectives" about
six or seven months ago. Which, now, I find odd, because there is no doubt in my
mind that he belongs in the upper echelons of writing with all of those writers that
have simultaneously educated and entertained me along the way.
One striking feature of "The Savage Detectives", and the most obvious I suppose,
is that, despite its length of 649 pages, it is cleverly broken down into short diary
entries, from a paragraph to six pages in length, making it easier and more enjoyable
to read. This also exposes one of Bolano's greatest talents, that of perspective.
The novel is told from the point-of-view of at least twenty or thirty characters,
including its two quixotic main characters, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, Bolano's
alter-ego. The "voices" of his characters, from the paranoid Heimito Kunst, whom
Ulises meets in prison and who worries there are Jews underground building
atomic bombs to the young, naive intellectual Juan Garcia Madero who wants to
join the Viscerrealists, a new poetry movement begun by Lima and Belano,
to the dancer/prostitute Lupe who is friends with the poet, Maria Font, and
loves to brag about the length of her boyfriend/pimp's member which he often
measures with a knife, are flawless. Bolano pulled out the sculptor's carving tools
when he created his characters.
The novel is full of adventure and travel, migrant workers sleeping in caves by
the sea, a sword fight, death, imprisonment, and more travel with poetry
weaving its way through each page to its grand finale in the north of Mexico.
An unforgettable, cinematic ending. I would recommend "The Savage Detectives"
to just about anybody who enjoys reading.
Book Review: Stellar Performance
Summary: 5 Stars
Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives is the story of a group of young poets in Mexico in the early 1970's. The book is written in three parts. The first part is the story of the Visceral Poet group, young poets and writers living in Mexico City, all Hispanics from various countries. The founders of the group are Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, who named the group after an earlier set of visceral poets in the 1920's. That group centered around a female poet, Cesarea Tinajero, who disappeared mysteriously.
In the first part, we meet the various characters through the eyes of a 17 year old, who thinks he might be a poet. This young man, Juan Garcia Madero, spends his days reading and writing and discussing literature with the group members. He also discovers his sexuality, and much of the section deals with his sexual awakenings and various partners.
The second part is written forty years later, and is written as a series of short interviews with various people who have encountered either Lima or Belano over those years. Through these vignettes, we discover what has happened to these poets over the succeeding decades. The story winds through several countries and continents. Each person knows a bit of their stories, and the reader is able to slowly piece together their lives.
The third part is a flashback to the road trip that Belano, Lima, Madero and a prostitute take to try to find Cesarea and what caused her to disappear. The events of that trip fuel the rest of the book, although the reader only realises this in retrospect.
The Savage Detectives is a book that will be considered important for years, and will probably become a classic. Many readers might pick it up thinking it is a mystery, and they might be disappointed. But those readers that stick around for the ride will be entranced as they enter Bolano's world. This is definately a book that will bear rereads, and is recommended for readers who appreciate cutting edge literature and exposure to the literature of other countries.
Book Review: Brilliant and essential reading for Bolano Fans
Summary: 5 Stars
Here is a helpful note, if someone is recommending Bolano to you to read: read The Savage Detectives first, and then read 2666. The development in Bolano's writing mastery from The Savage Detectives, which is without a doubt brilliant, to 2666 is amazing. I read 2666 first so when I read SD, I was constantly aware of the difference in writing style/development/mastery from SD to 2666, though the awareness did not hurt my appreciation of The Savage Detectives.
SD is Bolano practice of the Spanish picaresque style where bohemian romantic ways are reduced to decadence, degeneracy and frequently madness in Europe, North America, South America and Africa. This is a cosmopolitan voice and writer who lives(d) in the world, rather than indigenously and speaking from a place of contained experience. Bolano's familiarity with the world, cities, their characteristics and detail is stunning in SD. His access to the world and his examination of it and the transient people who move about it is the riveting accomplishment of this work that also hinges on wonderful narrations, that convey the narrative and characterize the speaker and protagonists; and a structure deeply dependent upon motifs and leitmotifs that allow his themes and metaphors to reverberate with rich meaning. This is a very organically structured novel that lays the bed for the more complex structure of 2666.
Furthermore, the seeds of 2666 are in SD, the wandering, the random life influences that bring change, the very segmented narration and the Bolano characters' obsessions with quests, to investigate and understand people, things or circumstances that contribute meaning or no meaning and purpose to the characters' lives.
SD book is an original. The voice of Bolano is a big one and will last. He mixes Artaud, Celine, Burroughs, Kerouac, Baudelaire and Rimbaud in his own bohemian world. Yet his voice is new. SD book is amazing, a romantic road trip involving poets, artists, and bohemes and is as good as it gets, until you read 2666.