The Savage Detectives

Bolaño wrote two epics: The Savage Detectives and the much more widely read 2666. Savage may be a sloppier novel—it follows two fictional founders of a fictional poetic movement called the visceral realists who are trying to track down the mysterious founder of the movement—but it’s also a novel about the elusiveness of meaning. With a lot of sex and violence thrown in for measure. The frame-story narrative informed my own, although I employed a lot less sex.  

Just when the novel seemed to be on its last pant, this Chilean writer revitalised the form in a baggy-monstered fiction that roams the world, stampeding a herd of sacred cows (e.g. Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz).

It fizzes with rebellious energy and humour, and makes one grieve for the works that Bolaño, like Chatwin, who also died before his time, still had to write.

I had long meant to read Bolano’s seminal novel and was not disappointed.

With a revolving cast of characters, generating cross-currents of intersecting subplots and drama, The Savage Detectives takes you on a kaleidoscopic spin through the fringes, lore, and shadowlands of Mexico, covering different time periods.

Part offbeat odyssey, part crime story, part derelict dissertation on tropes and archetypes, Bolano’s multi-form narrative comprises an adventure that is wary of its own movements.

Bolaño’s masterpiece follows two fictional poets (one of whom is closely modelled on the author himself) from their youthful heyday in 1970s Mexico through twenty years of wandering the globe. Narrated in a polyphonic array of voices, the novel is a funny, sexy, playful, surreal and deeply moving vision of the wasting away of youthful potential and the joys and agonies of devoting one’s life entirely to literature.