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nj-classifieds.net - The Savage Detectives: A Novel
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List Price: $27.00
Our Price: $15.00
Your Save: $ 12.00 ( 44% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 863.64
EAN: 9780374191481
ISBN: 0374191484
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 592
Publication Date: 2007-04-03
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date: 2007-04-03
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not for everybody
Comment: Bolaño is undoubtedly a very important writer, and the reasons for this are expressed in the book's introduction by the translator of The Savage Detectives, Natasha Wimmer. The Savage Detectives is also one of the most critically acclaimed novels to come around in a long time.
Maybe you'll love it-- lots of people do, clearly. And it's worth a try if you're really into Latin American literature.
For me, the large number of narrators turned me off. After the first part, each one speaks for a few pages only, for hundreds of pages. Once in a while a certain voice would grab me, and I felt compelled to read, but then two or three pages later, Bolaño shifts to another voice. This kind of structure has always been a turn-off for me, and if it is for you too, you may have trouble appreciating this novel.
I also realize that I don't really care about the poetry and literary scene in Mexico in the 1970's. There are tons of "in" references to Mexican poets, critics, and places in Mexico City that will be completely cryptic to most lay readers.
Some of the sex scenes are over the top. Like the woman with the outrageously smelly vagina that would smell up the apartment. I guess that was intended to be funny, but I'm not really sure.
Well, I'm sorry to be in the minority here. I regret missing this train. I will try 2666 soon.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Required reading for any poet
Comment: This is Bolano's first masterpiece which just so happens to reflect his life, a life which also must be viewed as a masterpiece of sorts in all of its wayfaring depth. This is required reading for any poet or any prospective poet from every continent on this rotating globe. The writing transcends country and culture and reminds us how interconnected we all are. Although this is a novel, the savage detective within you will recognize the poetry. Beware, when you read this book you will be changed. Of course, you will also experience the universality of this true poet and that should seem like a fair deal if you are so inclined. Natasha Wimmer's first remarkable translation of Bolano succeeds on every level.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and essential reading for Bolano Fans
Comment: Here is a helpful note, if someone is recommending Bolano to you to read: read The Savage Detectives first, and then read 2666. The development in Bolano's writing mastery from The Savage Detectives, which is without a doubt brilliant, to 2666 is amazing. I read 2666 first so when I read SD, I was constantly aware of the difference in writing style/development/mastery from SD to 2666, though the awareness did not hurt my appreciation of The Savage Detectives.
SD is Bolano practice of the Spanish picaresque style where bohemian romantic ways are reduced to decadence, degeneracy and frequently madness in Europe, North America, South America and Africa. This is a cosmopolitan voice and writer who lives(d) in the world, rather than indigenously and speaking from a place of contained experience. Bolano's familiarity with the world, cities, their characteristics and detail is stunning in SD. His access to the world and his examination of it and the transient people who move about it is the riveting accomplishment of this work that also hinges on wonderful narrations, that convey the narrative and characterize the speaker and protagonists; and a structure deeply dependent upon motifs and leitmotifs that allow his themes and metaphors to reverberate with rich meaning. This is a very organically structured novel that lays the bed for the more complex structure of 2666.
Furthermore, the seeds of 2666 are in SD, the wandering, the random life influences that bring change, the very segmented narration and the Bolano characters' obsessions with quests, to investigate and understand people, things or circumstances that contribute meaning or no meaning and purpose to the characters' lives.
SD book is an original. The voice of Bolano is a big one and will last. He mixes Artaud, Celine, Burroughs, Kerouac, Baudelaire and Rimbaud in his own bohemian world. Yet his voice is new. SD book is amazing, a romantic road trip involving poets, artists, and bohemes and is as good as it gets, until you read 2666.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A great book
Comment: It is a longish book but not really a slow read although at times a bit demanding of tbe reader. But your effort will be highly rewarded. I finished the book this summer and will take a break before taking on 2666. But I am excited about 2666 after being so highly rewarded by "The Savage Dectectives."
Also would strongly recommend his poetry. He really was a poet more than a novelist,
Customer Rating:
Summary: beyond a savage style
Comment: Bolano's piece shows him to be a writer above the crowd, capturing the paradoxes of our lives in the 20th-21st centuries through his characters, their relationships, and morales. All this while showing wit and elegance in his unique style.
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Editorial Reviews:
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New Year’s Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.
The explosive first long work by “the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.
A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.
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