Review by David Givens - Monograph Acquisitions Coordinator
One should begin, perhaps, by saying that Roberto Bolaño’s novel, “The Savage Detectives,” is a masterpiece; an aching, grand, tilting piece of literary art. This is not to say that it is without flaws -- far from it. It is miasmatic and digressive, it lurches from plot to near plotlessness, it is tangled and bellicose, confusing and confused. But all of that is less criticism than observation; what it is above all is deeply alive! It breathes in the way that few works of art do these days. In these days when much of literature is meekly good, it is profoundly, drunkenly great. Reading it is like reading great works of old.
A brief plot summary is nearly impossible, but, loosely, the novel concerns the literary and life (mostly life) goings-on of a number of poets and hangers-on, centered on a wannabe avant-garde poetry collective called the Visceral Realists, in Mexico City (and, as things get going, ranging across all of Latin America) in the 1970’s. After a 100+ page introductory section narrated by a 17 year old who gets caught up with the group, the novel abruptly changes form and begins a long intermediary section, a kaleidoscopic tapestry of voices and moods and data, rapidly moving from character to character and investigating character’s lives and episodes from multiple perspectives. |
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 Bolaño began his literary life as a poet, and there are breathtaking moments of near-poetry and evocative, miracle description to be found on nearly every page of this book. Though this novel is the most recent of his to be translated into English, it is the first novel he wrote (originally published in 1998) and is shaggier, more complex, and more experimental (as well as longer) than his other two great triumphs (Last Evenings on Earth, a book of short stories, and By Night in Chile, a short novel). Given more time and space I could attempt to more adequately limn the contours, or map the intricacies, of the narrative such as it is. Suffice to say that it contains all of the great and terrible things of the human conditions. There is love in it, and anger: along with violence, pity, ennui, jealousy, tedium and much more. There are passages of the most moving description stitched to half pages of lists of names, or puzzling disquisitions. And in the end one is left with the most astonishing feeling; that one has heard at once the tiniest, gentlest whisper. That was somehow louder than a bomb. |
