The Savage Detectives: A Novel

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Author(s):

Roberto Bolano

Label: Picador
Publisher(s):

Picador

Studio: Picador
Manufacturer: Picador
Binding: Paperback
List Price: $15.00
Our Price: $10.20
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

National Bestseller

In this dazzling novel, the book that established his international reputation, Roberto Bolaño tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes--the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself--on a tragicomic quest through a darkening, entropic universe: our own. The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age.

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Significant Seven, May 2007: The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation, but his novel The Savage Detectives is a lot closer to Y Tu Mamá También than it is to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, full of inside jokes about Latin American literati that you don't have to understand to enjoy, The Savage Detectives is a companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It's the first of Bolaño's two giant masterpieces to be translated into English (the second, 2666, is due out next year), and you can see how he's influenced an era. --Tom Nissley

Questions for Translator Natasha Wimmer

Natasha Wimmer translated books by Mario Vargas Llosa and Bolaño's good friend Rodrigo Fresán, among others, before tackling Bolaño's two long novels, The Savage Detectives and the upcoming 2666, which have had an immeasurable impact on modern Latin American fiction (and perhaps now on Anglo American writing as well). We asked her a few questions about the process of bringing such a vast and vital book into English.

Amazon.com: How did you come to literary translation, and to translating a work of such prestige? Is the community of Spanish-to-English literary translators small, given Americans' famous lack of interest in translated work?

Wimmer: Luck, really. I lived in Spain when I was little, which is where I learned Spanish, and then I studied Spanish literature in college, but it was a job in publishing--at FSG, the publisher of The Savage Detectives--that made me realize that literary translation was something I could try. I?ve been translating now for eight years. My first project was a novel by the Cuban writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Dirty Havana Trilogy, and since then I?ve worked on books by Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Zaid, Rodrigo Fresán, and Laura Restrepo. When I read The Savage Detectives, I thought it was one of the best novels I had read in any language in years, but I was sure there was no chance I would get to translate it. Bolaño already had a great translator--Chris Andrews. But Andrews couldn't do it, and I was the extremely fortunate runner-up.

The community of full-time translators is definitely small--it's hard to make a living. But there are many great occasional translators--professors, editors, writers.

Amazon.com: We're told that Bolaño towers over his generation of writers (and I can believe it). What did he do that was new? What has his influence been?

Wimmer: Bolaño was (is) the first to make a true break from the legacy of the Boom. Many other writers of his generation, and younger writers, too, have tried and are still trying to make a literature of their own, one that doesn?t languish in the long shadow of García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and the other novelists who exploded on the world scene in the 1960s. Bolaño made the leap seem effortless. The writers of the Boom put Latin America on the map. Bolaño creates a Latin America of the mind, a post-nationalist Latin America filtered through a rootless, restless, uncompromising literary sensibility.

Amazon.com: Could you describe Bolaño's style and his sentences? (I love his parentheses.) How did you handle the dozens of voices in The Savage Detectives?

Wimmer: Bolaño is both a maximalist and a classicist. He loves to play with excess, with the notion of reckless abandon, but beneath that there is a very careful sense of balance. He was a poet for many years before he became a novelist, and he is an endlessly inventive stylist. But--more rarely for a poet--he also has an unerring sense of character and a palpable fondness for his characters. The Savage Detectives could never have worked otherwise. There are very few writers who could write a novel from the perspective of fifty-odd characters and make each character's story seem urgent and intimate.

From the translator's perspective, some voices were definitely more difficult than others, but I rarely felt that I had to strain to make them distinct from each other. Mostly, it just involved following Bolaño's cues. The hardest thing, oddly enough, was getting the rhythm of his sentences right. There is something syncopated and unpredictable about them that would have been all too easy to smooth over as a translator, and I made a concerted effort not to do that.

Amazon.com: All of his books are full of references to, and appearances by, Latin American writers both fictional and real and I'm sure as a clueless American reader I'm missing hundreds of inside jokes. What's it like to read his work when you actually know the people he's referring to?

Wimmer: It adds a little something, but not as much as you might think. And many of his references are obscure even to Spanish-language readers. There is something cultish and purposefully arcane about the literary world that Bolaño's protagonist, García Madero, yearns to join, and like García Madero, the reader is entranced by authors' names and book titles without knowing exactly where they come from.

Amazon.com: You are working on translating his other giant masterpiece, 2666, the even larger novel that he completed just before his death. How is it going? What can we expect from 2666?

Wimmer: It's an extremely long novel (1100 pages in the Spanish edition ), so it's a test of stamina, but it's going very well. Like The Savage Detectives, it revolves around a lost writer (Cesárea Tinajero in TSD and Benno von Archimboldi in 2666), and the crucial episodes take place in the north of Mexico, but it is a darker book. The lurking sense of dread that many of the characters feel in TSD becomes something more palpable and sharply defined in 2666, and is linked to the killings of women in the Mexican city of Santa Teresa (modeled on Ciudad Juárez) and the legacy of the wars of the 20th century, particularly World War II.

Customer Reviews

Not for everybody

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.

Required reading for any poet

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.

Brilliant and essential reading for Bolano Fans

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.

A great book

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,

beyond a savage style

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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