The Savage Detectives

Name: The Savage Detectives
Author: Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño · 1998

Two poets vanish into the Sonoran desert. The middle section of the novel consists of testimony from dozens of people across twenty years who encountered them. Bolano published it in 1998 and won the Romulo Gallegos Prize, the most important award in Spanish-language fiction. Where 2666 is about horror, The Savage Detectives is about youth, poetry, and the slow discovery that your heroes were not what you thought.

The case against

on the length
“often maddening 577-page novel, The Savage Detectives, if I were not paid to do so”
Jennifer Reese · Entertainment Weekly, 2007
on the poets
“It is also easy to become exasperated with the poets depicted in Bolano’s work”
Ben Richards · The Guardian, 2007
on the reading effort
“did not merit the effort and concentration that the book required”
a book blog
on the visceral realists
“teenagers without responsibility who worship poetry, yet refuse to do anything to enhance its gospel”
a book blog