Novel
The Savage Detectives
Los detectives salvajes
Roberto Bolaño · 1998
Synopsis
Mexico City, late 1975. Juan García Madero, seventeen, who has left university, recounts in his diary how he joins the visceral realists, wandering poets led by Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima; they are looking for Cesárea Tinajero, a poet of the twenties regarded as the mother of the movement, who has since disappeared. The second part, the longest, gives voice to dozens of witnesses, from 1976 to 1996, from Mexico to Spain, Israel, Managua and Mozambique; the two poets never speak for themselves in it. The third returns to the diary, in January 1976, on the road to the Sonoran Desert.
Context
The novel was published by Anagrama, in Barcelona, in 1998; that year it won the Herralde Prize, then the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1999. According to the London Review of Books, Belano is the author's principal double, and the visceral realists are modelled on the infrarealists he had founded in Mexico. The second part, polyphonic, takes up nearly two thirds of the book. Robert Amutio translated it into French for Christian Bourgois in 2006, Natasha Wimmer into English in 2007.
Who it is for
A long novel made up of a diary and dozens of testimonies; the central part reads better if one accepts losing the thread.
Prizes and reception
Herralde Prize 1998 and Rómulo Gallegos Prize 1999; for The Modern Novel, often contradictory testimonies paint the portrait of the absent.
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