The Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolaño
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Before his death in 2003, Roberto Bolaño
was little known in the United States.
Perhaps everything else makes its way
easily across the Mexican border – people,
drugs, manufactured goods, killer bees -
but the border patrol doesn’t require a big
fence to stop literary works at the Rio
Grande. Indifferent publishers and a
shortage of good translations are sufficient
obstacles. Even Bolaño’s translator Natasha
Wimmer admits that she had not heard
much about the author before encountering
The Savage Detectives.
But the tables have turned for Bolaño, who is enjoying aposthumous
boom of dramatic proportions. Just six weeks before his death, at
age fifty from a liver disorder, he was hailed as the most influential
novelist of his generation by a group of his peers at a conference in
Seville. Around the time of the book's publication in the US, the
Colombian magazine Semana ranked The Savage Detectives third on
its list of the greatest novels in Spanish of the past 25 years. And
Bolaño’s last work, an 1,100-page novel entitled 2666 – soon to be
published in English – ranked fourth.
Perhaps Bolaño would have been better received during his lifetime,
had he not worked so hard at making enemies. He despised the
literary establishment, and attacked even Nobel laureates Gabriel
García Márquez and Octavio Paz with vehemence and venom. Isabel
Allende, whom he denounced as a scribbler and guilty of kitsch,
commemorated Bolaño’s passing with a succinct verdict. Recalling
Bolaño as “extremely unpleasant,” she explained that “death does not
make you a nicer person.”
English-speaking readers who are unfamiliar with the intricacies of
Latin American literary politics will miss many of the subtleties of The
Savage Detectives. The novel includes references, either explicit or
thinly disguised, to more than 100 Latin American writers, and some
(such as Paz) figure as characters in the narrative. The main
protagonist, Arturo Belano, is based on Bolaño himself, and like the
author is a Chilean-born exile from the Pinochet era who settles in
Mexico, but also wanders in Central America and overseas.
Belano, along with his friend Ulisses Lima (based on poet Mario
Santiago) travel farther, and even more aimlessly, than that other
Ulysses of epic fame. And though they see themselves as poets and
arbiters of literary taste, they publish little and spend their days
selling marijuana, moving listlessly from relationship to relationship,
and getting caught up in a series of violent escapades, ranging
from robbery to dueling — and eventually including murder.
Here is the clever conceit of the novel: although The Savage
Detectives is apparently about poetry – the school of “visceral
realists” led by Belano and Lima – hardly a line of verse appears in its
pages. The novel’s opening paragraph starts the ruse with a diary
entry by an aspiring teenage writer. “I’ve been cordially invited to join
the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation
ceremony. It was better that way.” And though, in the ensuing pages,
the visceral realists bicker and banter, disrupt writing workshops,
scrounge for money, drink and hop from bed to bed, the poetry itself
never figures in the story. It is much like what screenplay writers call a
“MacGuffin” in a suspense film, a pretext for action and adventure
that serves as motivation without ever being explained or validated
Through much of the novel, Belano and Lima travel in search of a
missing poet, Cesàrea Tinajero, from the 1920s, who was involved in
an earlier movement also called visceral realism. The fact that the
“detectives” have never seen a single line of Tinajero’s work merely
adds to the bizarre quality of Bolaño’s novel, where poetry is a posture
rather than a literary endeavor. When they finally uncover an
example of her poetry, from a forgotten literary magazine, the
protagonists are surprised — but not the reader, by this point — to see
that it uses no words, just a few childish drawings.
The Savage Detectives is a rich, rambling book that ends up almost
exactly where it begins. Even the chronology is circular – the
narrative starts in the 1970s, advances to the late 1990s, then returns
to the 1970s. But again the analogy with Ulysses is an apt one. The
wandering here is more exciting than any final destination. And
Bolaño, like an experienced travel guide, knows how to keep his
audience captivated by even the wildest detours.
by Roberto Bolaño
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Before his death in 2003, Roberto Bolaño
was little known in the United States.
Perhaps everything else makes its way
easily across the Mexican border – people,
drugs, manufactured goods, killer bees -
but the border patrol doesn’t require a big
fence to stop literary works at the Rio
Grande. Indifferent publishers and a
shortage of good translations are sufficient
obstacles. Even Bolaño’s translator Natasha
Wimmer admits that she had not heard
much about the author before encountering
The Savage Detectives.
But the tables have turned for Bolaño, who is enjoying aposthumous
boom of dramatic proportions. Just six weeks before his death, at
age fifty from a liver disorder, he was hailed as the most influential
novelist of his generation by a group of his peers at a conference in
Seville. Around the time of the book's publication in the US, the
Colombian magazine Semana ranked The Savage Detectives third on
its list of the greatest novels in Spanish of the past 25 years. And
Bolaño’s last work, an 1,100-page novel entitled 2666 – soon to be
published in English – ranked fourth.
Perhaps Bolaño would have been better received during his lifetime,
had he not worked so hard at making enemies. He despised the
literary establishment, and attacked even Nobel laureates Gabriel
García Márquez and Octavio Paz with vehemence and venom. Isabel
Allende, whom he denounced as a scribbler and guilty of kitsch,
commemorated Bolaño’s passing with a succinct verdict. Recalling
Bolaño as “extremely unpleasant,” she explained that “death does not
make you a nicer person.”
English-speaking readers who are unfamiliar with the intricacies of
Latin American literary politics will miss many of the subtleties of The
Savage Detectives. The novel includes references, either explicit or
thinly disguised, to more than 100 Latin American writers, and some
(such as Paz) figure as characters in the narrative. The main
protagonist, Arturo Belano, is based on Bolaño himself, and like the
author is a Chilean-born exile from the Pinochet era who settles in
Mexico, but also wanders in Central America and overseas.
Belano, along with his friend Ulisses Lima (based on poet Mario
Santiago) travel farther, and even more aimlessly, than that other
Ulysses of epic fame. And though they see themselves as poets and
arbiters of literary taste, they publish little and spend their days
selling marijuana, moving listlessly from relationship to relationship,
and getting caught up in a series of violent escapades, ranging
from robbery to dueling — and eventually including murder.
Here is the clever conceit of the novel: although The Savage
Detectives is apparently about poetry – the school of “visceral
realists” led by Belano and Lima – hardly a line of verse appears in its
pages. The novel’s opening paragraph starts the ruse with a diary
entry by an aspiring teenage writer. “I’ve been cordially invited to join
the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation
ceremony. It was better that way.” And though, in the ensuing pages,
the visceral realists bicker and banter, disrupt writing workshops,
scrounge for money, drink and hop from bed to bed, the poetry itself
never figures in the story. It is much like what screenplay writers call a
“MacGuffin” in a suspense film, a pretext for action and adventure
that serves as motivation without ever being explained or validated
Through much of the novel, Belano and Lima travel in search of a
missing poet, Cesàrea Tinajero, from the 1920s, who was involved in
an earlier movement also called visceral realism. The fact that the
“detectives” have never seen a single line of Tinajero’s work merely
adds to the bizarre quality of Bolaño’s novel, where poetry is a posture
rather than a literary endeavor. When they finally uncover an
example of her poetry, from a forgotten literary magazine, the
protagonists are surprised — but not the reader, by this point — to see
that it uses no words, just a few childish drawings.
The Savage Detectives is a rich, rambling book that ends up almost
exactly where it begins. Even the chronology is circular – the
narrative starts in the 1970s, advances to the late 1990s, then returns
to the 1970s. But again the analogy with Ulysses is an apt one. The
wandering here is more exciting than any final destination. And
Bolaño, like an experienced travel guide, knows how to keep his
audience captivated by even the wildest detours.
The New Canon focuses on
great works of fiction
published since 1985. These
books represent the finest
literature of the current era,
and are gaining recognition as
the new classics of our time. In
this installment of The New
Canon, Ted Gioia reviews The
Savage Detectives by Roberto
Bolaño.
great works of fiction
published since 1985. These
books represent the finest
literature of the current era,
and are gaining recognition as
the new classics of our time. In
this installment of The New
Canon, Ted Gioia reviews The
Savage Detectives by Roberto
Bolaño.
| The New Canon |
| The Best in Fiction Since 1985 |
The New Canon
Home Page
Gabriel García Márquez:
Love in the Time of Cholera
David Foster Wallace:
Infinite Jest
Margaret Atwood:
The Handmaid's Tale
Toni Morrison:
Beloved
Jonathan Franzen:
The Corrections
Don DeLillo:
Underworld
Zadie Smith:
White Teeth
Roberto Bolaño:
2666
Mark Z. Danielewski:
House of Leaves
Cormac McCarthy:
Blood Meridian
Philip Roth:
American Pastoral
Jonathan Lethem:
The Fortress of S0litude
Haruki Murakami:
Kafka on the Shore
Edward P. Jones:
The Known World
Ian McEwan:
Atonement
Michael Chabon:
The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay
Philip Roth:
The Human Stain
Mario Vargas Llosa:
The Feast of the Goat
Marilynne Robinson:
Gilead
David Mitchell:
Cloud Atlas
José Saramago:
Blindness
Jennifer Egan:
A Visit from the Good Sqad
W. G. Sebald:
Austerlitz
Jeffrey Eugenides
The Marriage Plot
Donna Tartt:
The Secret History
Michael Ondaatje:
The English Patient
Saul Bellow:
Ravelstein
A.S. Byatt:
Possession
Umberto Eco:
Foucault's Pendulum
Cormac McCarthy:
The Road
David Foster Wallace:
The Pale King
J.K. Rowling:
Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone
Arundhati Roy:
The God of Small Things
Roberto Bolaño:
The Savage Detectives
Paul Auster:
The New York Trilogy
Per Petterson:
Out Stealing Horses
Ann Patchett:
Bel Canto
Ben Okri:
The Famished Road
Joseph O'Neill:
Netherland
Haruki Murakami:
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Marisha Pessl:
Special Topics in Calamity
Physics
Jonathan Franzen:
Freedom
Colm Tóibín:
The Master
Denis Johnson:
Tree of Smoke
Richard Russo:
Empire Falls
Alice Munro:
Runaway
Martin Amis:
London Fields
Mark Haddon:
The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night-Time
John Banville:
The Sea
Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club
Jeffrey Eugenides:
Middlesex
Junot Diaz:
The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao
Aravind Adiga:
The White Tiger
Tim O'Brien:
The Things They Carried
Irvine Welsh
Trainspotting
Tobias Wolff:
Old School
Tim Winton:
Cloudstreet
David Foster Wallace:
Oblivion
Oscar Hijuelos:
The Mambo Kings Play
Songs of Love
More to come
Recommended Links:
Great Books Guide
Conceptual Fiction
Postmodern Mystery
Fractious Fiction
Ted Gioia's personal web site
Ted Gioia on Twitter
American Fiction Notes
LA Review of Books
The Big Read
Critical Mass
The Elegant Variation
Dana Gioia
The Literary Saloon
The Millions
The Misread City
Page-Turner
Page Views
Disclosure note: Writers on this site and its
sister sites may receive promotional copies of
works under review.
Home Page
Gabriel García Márquez:
Love in the Time of Cholera
David Foster Wallace:
Infinite Jest
Margaret Atwood:
The Handmaid's Tale
Toni Morrison:
Beloved
Jonathan Franzen:
The Corrections
Don DeLillo:
Underworld
Zadie Smith:
White Teeth
Roberto Bolaño:
2666
Mark Z. Danielewski:
House of Leaves
Cormac McCarthy:
Blood Meridian
Philip Roth:
American Pastoral
Jonathan Lethem:
The Fortress of S0litude
Haruki Murakami:
Kafka on the Shore
Edward P. Jones:
The Known World
Ian McEwan:
Atonement
Michael Chabon:
The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay
Philip Roth:
The Human Stain
Mario Vargas Llosa:
The Feast of the Goat
Marilynne Robinson:
Gilead
David Mitchell:
Cloud Atlas
José Saramago:
Blindness
Jennifer Egan:
A Visit from the Good Sqad
W. G. Sebald:
Austerlitz
Jeffrey Eugenides
The Marriage Plot
Donna Tartt:
The Secret History
Michael Ondaatje:
The English Patient
Saul Bellow:
Ravelstein
A.S. Byatt:
Possession
Umberto Eco:
Foucault's Pendulum
Cormac McCarthy:
The Road
David Foster Wallace:
The Pale King
J.K. Rowling:
Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone
Arundhati Roy:
The God of Small Things
Roberto Bolaño:
The Savage Detectives
Paul Auster:
The New York Trilogy
Per Petterson:
Out Stealing Horses
Ann Patchett:
Bel Canto
Ben Okri:
The Famished Road
Joseph O'Neill:
Netherland
Haruki Murakami:
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Marisha Pessl:
Special Topics in Calamity
Physics
Jonathan Franzen:
Freedom
Colm Tóibín:
The Master
Denis Johnson:
Tree of Smoke
Richard Russo:
Empire Falls
Alice Munro:
Runaway
Martin Amis:
London Fields
Mark Haddon:
The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night-Time
John Banville:
The Sea
Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club
Jeffrey Eugenides:
Middlesex
Junot Diaz:
The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao
Aravind Adiga:
The White Tiger
Tim O'Brien:
The Things They Carried
Irvine Welsh
Trainspotting
Tobias Wolff:
Old School
Tim Winton:
Cloudstreet
David Foster Wallace:
Oblivion
Oscar Hijuelos:
The Mambo Kings Play
Songs of Love
More to come
Recommended Links:
Great Books Guide
Conceptual Fiction
Postmodern Mystery
Fractious Fiction
Ted Gioia's personal web site
Ted Gioia on Twitter
American Fiction Notes
LA Review of Books
The Big Read
Critical Mass
The Elegant Variation
Dana Gioia
The Literary Saloon
The Millions
The Misread City
Page-Turner
Page Views
Disclosure note: Writers on this site and its
sister sites may receive promotional copies of
works under review.