About this title: Bolano 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 21st century.
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Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date Published: 4-3-07
ISBN-13:9780374191481ISBN:0374191484
Description: FINE. Crisp, clean, unread hardcover with some light shelfwear to the dust jacket and a publisher's mark to one edge-Nice! 1.95 lbs. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN-13:9780374191481ISBN:0374191484
Description: New. 0374191484 **Hardcover**--Exact ISBN Match--Dust Jacket is in perfect condition. No personalizations, writing or marks in the text. Clean, Tight and Neat. Ships Quickly-IN STOCK-Satisfaction Guaranteed! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date Published: 2007-04-03
ISBN-13:9780374191481ISBN:0374191484
Description: New. Hardback w/ DJ. You are buying a Book in NEW condition with very light shelf wear to include very light edge and corner wear. Buy it Now! ! ! As always, thank you for buying this book from International Book Source, YOUR ONE source FOR ALL your BOOK related NEEDS. Please remember to CHOOSE carefully how QUICKLY you would like to RECEIVE this material FAST, or standard (on next page). Thanks again! ! ! ! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Picador
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780330445146ISBN:0330445146
Description: Good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: PAN MACMILLAN Country = UNITED KINGDOM
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780330509527ISBN:0330509527
Description: BRAND NEW PAPERBACK. New year's eve, 1975: arturo belano and ulises lima, poets and leaders of a movement they call visceral realism, leave mexico city in a borrowed white impala. their mission: to track down the poet cesarea tinajero, who disappeared into the sonora desert-and obscurity-decades before. but the detectives are themselves hunted men. (Paperback) read more
Description: NEW. Hardcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780374191481. read more
"One of the great troubles with reading borrowed books is that when it comes time to write about such a book, there are no quotations ready and at hand. One cannot browse pages looking for that one line of dialogue, that single narrative flourish, that lone twist of phrase with which to properly set off ones review. Borrowed books present a problem of weight and heft for those who would review such books. And The Savage Detectives was certainly a borrowed book, lent from the library for three weeks (and returned in thirteen pieces). So since I'm denied a juicy quotation for my hook, let's begin with this: whether one understands it or not, The Savage Detectives is a Great Book.
In the Winnie the Pooh sense, using Important Capitals and all that.
Bolaño's 1998 novel is, like many things, many things. Its tentacular themes squirrel and writhe all over a canvas that we never get to see directly. The book is one those that is, frankly, hard to pin down, difficult to categorize. The facility with which one describes the story of The Savage Detectives may actually be a mark of how little one has understood the work.
But here goes.
So far as I can gather, one might best summarize Bolaño's novel here as describing the life and death of a movement of literary desperation. He uses this tacit resemblance to a plot as a device by which he can criticize desperation in its various forms as being wholly the province of either the immature or the lifelong imbecile. In many ways, The Savage Detectives is about the futility of the written word. And so, the novel stands as withering self-criticism.
In 2666, Bolaño criticizes not only those that believe they've been a part of some great historic moment, but even those who believe such moments can be apprehended (even if they do exist, of which he remains skeptical):"I get the idea perfectly, Mickey," said Archimboldi, thinking all the while that this man was not only irritating but ridiculous, with the particular ridiculousness of self-dramatizers and poor fools convinced they've been present at a decisive moment in history, when it's common knowledge, thought Archimboldi, that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.In The Savage Detectives, he criticizes the value of the literary though he himself cannot give it up. The writer is that poor kind of fool who is convinced that his words have value and in whose meaning there is power and purpose, when it's common knowledge (as Bolaño teaches us) that literature is a whore and is naught but the proliferation of disparate voices, desperate to be heard and vying with one another in monstrousness.
Bolaño's perspective on the human animal (as revealed in this and 2666 is not particularly cheery. Through his characters, we can see that despite its occasional burst of beauty and vitality, humanity is base and vulgar and arrogant and deceitful and cruel and selfish and wholly ignorant of its place in the world. Humanity, in his novels, wanders around, inflicting loneliness upon itself, searching for a lost roadmap to purpose and meaning and revolution. His characters never find their maps, never discover anything about the world other than its transcendancy, and only ever end their stories in the grasp of indefatigable futility.
Bolaño proves himself, like many poets, to harbour interest in giving (or obscuring) meaning through structure. The framework through which he unfolds The Savage Detectives is novel and while confusing the storytelling, ties well to his purpose. The first and third sections of the novel, are written in a simple enough fashion, following several months of journal entries from seventeen year-old Garcia Madero. While Madero is not the protagonist, his narrative introduces them and bids them farewell. Halfway through Madero's journaling through the months comprising the tail of 1975 and head of 1976, the author inserts his second section, abandoning entirely Garcia Madero and telling through a series of (perhaps imaginary) interviews more stories related to his two protagonists. These interviews begin in January 1976 and extend twenty years into their future, giving the reader some kind of consensually confused understanding of the two protagonists. Bolaño then returns to Garcia Madero's journals to give shape and colour to the events that will follow whatever it is he reveals.
The author's structure plays further into his argument for futility, for with his fifty-or-so narrators, it becomes easy to see that however we view the characters, it is our own perceptions that govern our vision of them and their worths. Bolaño has sold us a work that lies to us knowingly and with pedagogical purpose. If we recognize the lies that our own perceptions craft while we read, it is only a small step to recognize that Bolaño himself must be lying to us as well—especially when he thinks he's being truthful and despite his desperation to make himself heard. Because anything he can tell us about the world is wholly based upon his fallible perception of that world, a perception based upon preconceived notions and a world built upon the more insidious lie of history.
The Savage Detectives, regardless of its average length, is a massive work—one that bears multiple readings. I hope to reread it again soon in order to discover whether I understood it or not, to discover whether I believe that Bolaño's words are as futile as he seems to want me to believe. And I can't wait."
"My interpretation of 90% of the passages I encountered in Savage Detectives
I walked around Mexico City for a while. And then I sat in a coffee shop and wrote poetry for seven hours. And then I saw a crazy poet I know and we argued about Octavio Paz. And then I read (name drop about 30 Latin American poets of whom I've never heard). And then I wanted to see Maria.
But somebody who cares a lot about the history and insider references of Latin American poetry might love it. I only managed 150 pages."
"The genius of Bolano for me is that he can take a theme which I cannot relate to at all, one which I don't care much about (I don't even really like poetry), throw out so many names that they make my head spin, pepper it with foreign street names that say nothing to me, characters and an era I don't know anything about, and write a book that goes right through to the essence of my life somehow. I think he has figured out something about life and how to put it on a piece of paper, something so fundamentally human, maybe it's about perception, I don't know, and so far I haven't read a review that could quite put a finger on what it is.
One thing about the Savage Detectives is it forces you to zoom in and out and again and again, to switch your viewpoint hundreds of times, and it is this that makes you see and feel things in a totally unique way, losing the focus gives you the freedom of the experience somehow.
I'm so glad I'm not done with the book yet.
...
I'm so sad that I'm done with the book. And I don't want to read 2666, because after that there'll be nothing left. What a literary chasm Bolano left after himself.
My last thought at the end of the first section was that Garcia Madero is writing these diary entries on a different day, and when I saw that he started with this observation when the diary resumed, I burst out laughing. But I felt like crying."
"Well first of all it took me forever to read this novel. Not because it was boring or even great, just the fact that the structure of the novel made me put it down and read other things. For one, it's an incredible guide to avant-garde literature that has affected the world or at least my world. The only names I didn't get were one's from Latin Americas. I knew all the French references. It makes me want to list all the authors that are mentioned and get their books. There should be a book on the books that are mentioned in this novel.
Bolano is great. My only complaint is that I wished that the novel was either shorter or I read it in a serial format. In fact I did ! I would put this book down, and pick it up a week later. For me it works in that style.
I also like it because in a sense it's a travel journal as literature. I like it when cities are mentioned in fiction. Now more then ever I want to visit Mexico City. There are parts of the novel that i found boring and others that were totally fascinating and couldn't put the book down. So in a way this novel is like life. If you love literature as a force in nature you are going to love this novel."
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