The Savage Detectives: A Novel
The explosive first long work by “the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.
A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bola?o traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.
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- ISBN: 9780374191481
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39 Reviews
| From: Amazon Posted: Mar 09, 2008 Type: User Review |
huh?
This books starts out great. I could identify with Garcia Madera, and I enjoyed learning about the various characters and visceral realism from his sort of naive perspective.
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 2.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Feb 29, 2008 Type: User Review |
Epically uninteresting
Is the point of this book to mock young literati by constructing a 575 page demonstration of how they think they're important but they are actually spectacularly boring? The book is composed of descriptions in many different voices of...
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2.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jan 27, 2008 Type: User Review |
Not for me.
I tried and tried, but could not get into this book. It appears to be a collection of musings that were stapled together and given a title. Neither the characters nor the writing were engrossing. If you enjoy reading two solid pages of artists'...
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2.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jan 16, 2008 Type: User Review |
nostalgic
This book reminded me of my college years. The wondering, the group/ group leader thing, living upon the belief that art and poetry could make a difference, but not really believing it, or caring, really. I highly recommend this book.
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 5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jan 04, 2008 Type: User Review |
Wading in quick sand...
This novel is about two young poets who lead a literary movement of poets from Mexico City in the course of a decade.
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2.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Dec 15, 2007 Type: User Review |
Bolano is Overrated
Keep in mind, this opinion makes me decidely in the minority. Most readers apparently love Roberto Bolano, and "the Savage Detectives". While he certainly has a unique style, I found it irratating trying to keep the different narrators,...
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2.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Dec 02, 2007 Type: User Review |
I Don't Get It
At first I thought Bolano was going to turn out to be some sort of Mexican J.D. Salinger, and the tale of a young man who runs away and joins the poetic circus, and gets involved with a group of magical realists or surrealist magicians or savage...
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2.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Nov 28, 2007 Type: User Review |
interesting read!
I had no idea what I was getting into when I purchased this book, and at first I found it fairly hard to follow, what with "visceral realism" and all! But, as I got into it and got to know the characters better I actually found this book to be...
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 4.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Oct 09, 2007 Type: User Review |
Bolano = Lezama-Lima
I venture to say that "The Savage Detectives" is the second best novel by a Latin-American writer. The inner workings of the book remind me of Lezama-Lima's "Paradiso." I would put him on the same level as Kafka, Nabokov and Genet. How sad he...
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Oct 05, 2007 Type: User Review |
Who are the savage detectives?
This book is a translation of Roberto Bolao's first full length novel after publishing short stories and poems. The novel probably suffers in the translation of mexicanismos; otherwise the author captures the flavor of the 60's - 90's...
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5.00/5 |
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