Book Review: Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives

The Savage Detectives may be classified as a novel, but its proper description is a masterpiece.

I read dozens of books each year, and I can think of few that have captivated, stimulated and enthralled me the way Roberto Bolaño's first novel has done.

The book follows the adventures of a group of Mexican poets called the Visceral Realists, some of whom are forced to leave town and attempt to locate the group's founder.

The Savage Detectives is divided into three sections, the middle section taking the form of a series of short narratives, and the other two taking the form of a diary written by Juan García Madero, a wonderfully fleshed out character.

Madero is full of teen angst, but never becomes cliched. His discovery of the Visceral Realists and his observations as an outsider are raw and realistic.

Juan García Madero flees Mexico City, along with Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, who founded the poetry group.

The second and largest section of The Savage Detectives is a series of accounts by people across the world who came into contact with Lima and Belano, all of whom have rich and fascinating stories of their own to tell, each one revealing a little more of what the pair did after leaving Mexico City on New Year's Eve.

Daniel Zalewski in the New Yorker comments that: "These accounts, each preceded by a journalistic dateline, resemble extended interviews—and reading them feels like combing through the unedited footage of a documentary.

The final section reverts to the diary of Juan García Madero, beginning the day after the first section ends. The pair are searching for Cesárea Tinajero, who founded the Visceral Realists, and the book ends with a little puzzle, which I must confess I am unable to solve.

However, perhaps the puzzle does not have one correct answer but instead is what the reader imagines it to me.

The Savage Detectives fired my imagination and totally engrossed me in the lives of Madero, Lima, Belano, Tinajero and the people they spent a little time with.

I am a huge fan of diaries both real and fictional*, but even those who prefer more traditional formulas will love this magnificent tome, a book to be devoured for an hour a time in bed at the end of a day, to drown out one's surrounding on public transport, to take one away from dreary reality to Mexico City in the 1970's and a young man's adventures in the world of poetry.

I've only just started Bolaño's second novel, 2666, but so far it is as captivating as The Savage Detectives.



*Kenneth Tynan's are particularly worth a look.