New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, poets and leaders of a movement they call visceral realism, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their mission: to track down the poet Cesarea Tinajero, who disappeared into the Sonora desert - and obscurity - decades before. But the detectives are themselves hunted men, and their search for the past will end in violence, flight, and permanent exile.In this dazzling novel, Roberto Bolano tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes on a twenty-year, multi-continent ...
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New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, poets and leaders of a movement they call visceral realism, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their mission: to track down the poet Cesarea Tinajero, who disappeared into the Sonora desert - and obscurity - decades before. But the detectives are themselves hunted men, and their search for the past will end in violence, flight, and permanent exile.In this dazzling novel, Roberto Bolano tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes on a twenty-year, multi-continent, tragicomic quest through a darkening universe. 'A unique voice asserting the importance and exuberance of literature...Bolano writes with such elegance, verve and style and is so immensely readable. He makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world' - "Guardian". 'Part road movie, part joyful, nostalgic confession. A masterpiece' - "Daily Telegraph" 'Extraordinary...A portrait of people for whom literature is bread and water, sex and death. The abiding message to be taken from Bolano's novel, and maybe from his fraught life, too: books matter' - "GQ".
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Add this copy of The Savage Detectives to cart. $39.07, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2008 by Picador.
Roberto Bolaño's dazzling novel, which first appeared in 1998 and received its first English translation last year, ostensibly about the so-called visceral realists, a group of avante-garde poets in Mexico City in the mid-1970s, led by Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, is a mammoth work. It is in three parts, the first and third are from the diaries of the 17-year old law student and poet Juan Garcia Madero, and the second part (which, at over 400 pages, make the bulk of the book) features over fifty different first person narratives delivered by a vast and disparate cast of characters from all over the world. While the narrative has a strange power of taking hold of the reader and transporting them to a world just like ours, and yet not quite (the work strangely feels full of magic realism, but everything being described is ground in reality); the length of the novel occasionally causes some tedium. Also, and this may be due to the translation, for all the dazzling array of characters, I didn?t really find a great difference in the voices used, and they all sounded very similar to me.
