The Savage Detectives in Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Feb 13, 2008 Maggie rated it it was ok

Where to begin?

The Savage Detectives is one of those titles I couldn't seem to avoid. When it was originally released in 1998 it won a slew of awards I had never heard of, and upon the release of its 2007 English language translation it was met with a loads of new praise. The New York Times named it one of the Ten Best Books of 2007, it was featured in the Morning News's Tournament of Books, and the dust cover is littered with glowing reviews from at least ten critics, calling it "brilliant," "i Where to begin?

The Savage Detectives is one of those titles I couldn't seem to avoid. When it was originally released in 1998 it won a slew of awards I had never heard of, and upon the release of its 2007 English language translation it was met with a loads of new praise. The New York Times named it one of the Ten Best Books of 2007, it was featured in the Morning News's Tournament of Books, and the dust cover is littered with glowing reviews from at least ten critics, calling it "brilliant," "important," "a glittering diamond," "magnificent," and Bolaño lauded as a "genius" and "the next Garcia Marquez." Oddly, what the dust jacket does not say is what the book is about.

Turns out there's a very good reason for that, since the book isn't really about anything. (And since it clocks in at a whopping 557 pages, I, for one, found that tremendously annoying.)

To the best I could figure, The Savage Detectives tells the story of a semi-fictitious underground poetic movement native to Mexico and operating in the 1970's called visceral realism, a movement which I wasn't much closer to understanding at the end of the book than I was before I began. The first 120 or so pages focuses on a young college student's discovery of visceral realism and his interactions with the outlaw, oversexed oddballs connected with the movement, but after this first act the novel completely shifts. The remaining 400+ pages are a collection of short interviews with 20-30 people conducted by an unknown interviewer who's attempting to piece together the stories of Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (modeled after Belaño, I presume) - the founders and leaders of the visceral realists. This section is difficult, occasionally entertaining but more often interminable, and a reader needs a flowchart to keep track of the myriad narrators. Even then there's precious little storyline tying this mess together.

And now I'm left wondering: What did I miss? Did I read the same book as everyone else? Part of me even wonders if the critics who hailed it ever bothered to finish reading the cumbersome, beastly thing, or if they dubbed it brilliant simply because it's so damn difficult to read. Call me crazy, but difficulty need not be the standard to which brilliance is measured. There's often brilliance in simplicity, and while interesting sentences and experimental styles certainly have their place, if you're going to go on for nearly 600 pages, there should at least be a satisfying story to make it worth the reader's while.

(But with that said, there were a heckuva lot of super sexy/borderline obscene parts in the book, in case that does it for you.) ...more

8 likes · Like · see review

Apr 26, 2021 Stacie rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: i-own, abandoned, 1001books

I have two rules before giving up on a book:
1. I have to read at least half of it.
2. If I don’t pick up the book every day, then it’s a sign I’m really not that into it.

People whose opinions I respect deeply loved this book; I just didn’t care. There is a part of me who feels I’m not cerebral enough to understand...that being said, I did love 2666.

3 likes · Like · see review

Apr 28, 2018 Arukiyomi rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books

I can’t think another novel this year will be as powerful as this one when it comes to the desire to simply make it stop.

The Guardian describes this as a “a shaggy dog story.” Merriam-Webster defines that as “of, relating to, or being a long-drawn-out circumstantial story concerning an inconsequential happening that impresses the teller as humorous or interesting but the hearer as boring and pointless” That’s spot on. Bolaño did this for his own enjoyment, not mine.

Publishers [sic] Weekly sa

I can’t think another novel this year will be as powerful as this one when it comes to the desire to simply make it stop.

The Guardian describes this as a “a shaggy dog story.” Merriam-Webster defines that as “of, relating to, or being a long-drawn-out circumstantial story concerning an inconsequential happening that impresses the teller as humorous or interesting but the hearer as boring and pointless” That’s spot on. Bolaño did this for his own enjoyment, not mine.

Publishers [sic] Weekly said that “It is safe to predict that no novel this year will have as powerful an effect on the reader as this one.” and in that they are right. I can’t think another novel this year will be as powerful as this one when it comes to the desire to simply make it stop. Mind you, I’m not sure I trust what I read from any publishing company that can’t even accomplish the basic punctuation needed for its own name.

It starts out OK with this student guy joining a group of poets at university. Their philosophies rub off on him, and he tunes in and drops out as you’d expect. Then the book takes the inevitable Bolañesque shift to a series of narrations by all sorts of different characters all over the world. You’re left to piece together the relevance of all of this and, if you dare, make some sort of narrative out of it.

For the brave, the narrative that emerges is a patchwork that represents the lives of two of the founding members of this group of poets. This is then followed by a hardly-related and entirely useless final section where the original student guy is looking for another poet who is supposed to be the origin of the style of poetry this group was formed in honour of.

As my aim in these reviews is not to spoil your reading experience, I’ll tell you now that they don’t find her.

Can Bolaño write? Yes. Can he write anything worthwhile for the reader? Yes. But can he stop himself from writing hundreds of pages more than he needs to just for the sake of writing and thereby subsuming anything worthwhile in a turgid mass of drivel? Nope. He most definitely can’t.

...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Dec 25, 2007 Chloe rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, latin-america, 1001-list, mexico

Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives is not a new book; it was published in 1998. Instead, it is the fact that it was only recently translated and made available to the English-speaking world that landed it on The New York Times annual "10 best of 2007" list. The fact that we have been made to wait 10 years to read a most interesting piece of fiction is reason enough to learn Spanish right now. What else could I have been missing out on?

The Savage Detectives is ostensibly about the creation an ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Jul 27, 2009 Jacob rated it really liked it

“For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it’s the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Jun 27, 2009 Heather rated it really liked it

The intertwined lives of people all over the world mixes with an urban escape from Mexico City to the deserts of North Mexico. Continuously moving through time, place and life stories-the book deals with searches for objects of obsession and the wanderings of people. The book has a cinematic feel to it, as the stories cut from person to person.

Like · see review