Review: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

And then I never saw him again”: this phrase recurs with eerie frequency in the work of the Chilean-born writer Roberto Bolaño, who died four years ago, in Barcelona, at the age of fifty. In Bolaño’s ten novels and three story collections—all completed in his torrential final decade, before he succumbed to a chronic liver ailment that he suspected would seal his fate—characters go through life in a state of agitated migration. They sever friendships, quit jobs, abandon apartments without giving notice, skip the return flight home, assume new identities, flee combustive love affairs, cut off ties to everyone they have ever known, head off into the desert, simply disappear.
Relationships, in Bolaño’s world, tend to be febrile but fleeting, yielding memories suffused by the afterglow of emotion; his narratives are often the testimonies of people the wanderers leave behind. It’s no coincidence that Bolaño’s most heartbreaking creation—the rebellious, doomed poet at the heart of his 1998 masterwork, “The Savage Detectives,” which Farrar, Straus has just published in translation—is named Ulises.

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Chilean Literature

This was the first book I read by Roberto Bolaño and of that I got addicted to his prose. They say that Bolaño is the new Cortazar… could be. This is the history of two Mexican young poets the “wild detectives”, Their mission to track down the poet Cesarea Tinajero. And this search extends in the time, and spans beyond the Mexican borders taking us to Guatemala, Barcelona, Paris, Israel, Congo, Liberia, and the U.S. and intercrosses numberless stories. That is, in my opinion, the best thing of Bolaño: those thousand histories that intermingle in the plot and where you can find everything: love stories, crimes, humorous anecdotes…(...)
(sent by Nelly)