The Savage Detectives

A Novel

By: Roberto Bolaño

Narrated by: Eddie Lopez, Armando Durán

Length: 26 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation.

The Savage Detectives is a hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It is the first of Bolaño's two giant works, with 2666, to be translated into English and is already being hailed as a masterpiece.

©2007 Translation by Natasha Wimmer (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Wildly enjoyable . . . Bolano beautifully manages to keep his comedy and his pathos in the same family." ( The New York Times Book Review)

" The Savage Detectives is deeply satisfying. . . . Bolano's book throws down a great, clunking, formal gauntlet to his readers' conventional expectations. . . . A very good novel." (Thomas McGonigle, Los Angeles Times)

"An instant cult hit among readers and practically a fetish object to critics." ( Time)

Bolaño Poetic Gyre

This is a book that is nearly impossible to review, absolutely impossible to summarize, and simultaneously amazing and frustrating. Bolaño created a novel and a narrative that (IMHO) attempted to capture the energy, the personalities, the youth and the mortar that held together Mexican and Latin American poets during the mid-1970s. It feels like he took every poetic image, idea, stray hair and paper from every Mexican poet during the past forty years and laid them all down on black velvet to be examined. He found poetry in the "visceral realists" excesses and his semi-autobiographical confessions. Bolaño jumps from chapter-to-chapter, from scene-to-scene, from sunset-to-sunset and keeps reinventing his PoMo novel as he writes it.

I have to be fair. It wasn't my favorite novel, but it seems the most likely (of all the novels I've read these last two or three years) to suddenly become animated. If any novel is going to jump off my lap, and wander off into the wilderness -- this is the one. It seems to be written not just in ink, but in blood, tears, seed, and fire.

It someways it reminds me of the beginning of Yeat's poem 'Second Coming':

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

With Roberto Bolaño the center of this gyre is Mexico City and with each page he writes (forward and back in time) Bolaño seems to be adding potential energy to the explosion that will loose his mad, Mexican poets, these thieves and dealers, these visceral realists, around the world. As I chew on this image, I think the idea of vortexes and gyres is equally applicable to ALL poets. It captures the way creativity often explodes, demands to be exposed, and drives before its flood chariots of innocence, creativity and youth.

Visceral Realism

This challenging novel is largely numerous first-person monologs that describe the vortices and gyres of ideas, events, places, and relationships. It is nonlinear and extremely character based, the story must be inferred from the characterizations. It is extraordinary, yet subtlety, humorous. Although it is difficult to keep track of it all, this novel is easy to enjoy and respect.

The narration is excellent.

One of the best novels of the 20th century

This is my second read/listen through. A beautiful, crushing story about young poets who get older, always drifting, always paying penance. The performances in this reading are perfectly done. While one actor reads the vast majority of the narratives, each account has a distinct tone that comes across wonderfully. This is one of my absolute favorites, I can't recommend it highly enough.

he was writing for a narrow audience

struggling to follow. he seemed not to care if anybody gets what and whom he was writing for. lots of name, lots of book names dropped in a show of way. god bless his soul. I think he knew he was dying and wanted to tell his close friends things at the best. no unfinishable for me.

Bolaño gets another great treatment

Bolaño writes a modern classic and gets a perfectly suited reading from two readers who truly make it work better than one should or would expect. More readers could have made the middle section pop a bit more but at the same time that can be very jarring and very risky. In the end, I am more than glad they went the route they did and picked these two talents to bring this to audio format.

Started slow but ended great

I really did NOT like this book for the first 90 minutes or so - Part I. But then the narrator changed from the sex-crazed, 17 year-old, wanna-be Visceral Realist poet to an older man and the stories of people who knew Arturo and Ulisses, Visceral Realists. This was much better than the first part and drew me in regularly. The third part goes back to the 17 year-old again, but he and Aruturo and Ulisses are seeking Cesarea Tinajero, the original Visceral Realist. The book just grew and grew on me and in the end I really didn't want it to end.
I didn't notice any pronunciation errors - I thought the narration was excellent.

Great epic tale

If you like elliptically-perspectived, global-multi-charactered universes that meander through epic truths/comedies/tragedies, then you will love this book. Bless his heart for minimizing Papa.

Relentless

This book
will make you want to
laugh and cry at the same time,
it is relentless.

It will fill a hole in your heart,
but create many more,
but the blood doesn't stop spilling

What's outside the window?

What's outside the window? A book, a poem, a people, a nation. The Visceral Realists.

Amazing experience

The story is told by large cast of characters who seem to be responding verbally to questions about two poets, a Mexican and a Chilean. But somehow, these two end up seeming mythical and insubstantial while the supporting characters become full blown companions through their unique voices telling stories combining the mundane and bizarre. A latticework of detail is provided (You always know the date and place of a narration.), but motivation almost always remains mysterious. By some inexplicable means, the narrative tension is sustained through many adventures in Mexico City and Europe.
The readers are absolutely great. I'm sure that their good pronunciation of Spanish words (as well as German and even Latin) and the excellent definition of the characters through their voices and accents made this novel a much greater pleasure to listen to than it would have been to read in print.