The Savage Detectives

When he died in 2003 at age 50, Chilean expatriate and sometime revolutionary Roberto Bolaño was regarded as a preeminent Latin American writer, largely due to this book, first published in Spanish in 1997 and now beautifully translated by Natasha Wimmer. Bolaño’s masterpiece is a long, complex and obsessive adventure, spanning 20 years, 1976 to 1996, and two continents: Latin America and Europe (mostly Spain). Opening in Mexico City, it follows two outcast poets, Arturo Belano (Bolaño’s fictional alter ego) and Ulises Lima, the founders of an obscure literary movement called “visceral realism.” After the two visceral realists save a prostitute friend from her enraged pimp, they borrow an Impala and, along with poet Juan García Madero, head for the Sonoran Desert in search of Cesárea Tinajero, whom they consider to be their artistic matriarch.

The breadth of what happens is almost impossible to summarize. In his journals, Madero narrates the events of 1976 that begin and end the book, recounting the anxious lives of his literary peers as they squabble over publications in tiny literary magazines and indulge in promiscuous sex. The 400 pages in between comprise dozens of vignettes in which Belano and Lima live out Rimbaud-like lives—full of lust and odd jobs—during their two decades of errant wandering.

These wayward poets become metaphors for the dispossessed youth of a politically unstable Latin America (the violent aftermath of the Pinochet coup always looms). Bolaño masterfully and compassionately interweaves the stories of countless believable and unforgettable characters, displaying humanity in a variety of extremes, from lonely desperation to humorous self-seriousness. The Savage Detectives is not a quick read, but it’s engaging, important and spellbinding at every turn.—Craig Morgan Teicher