The Savage Detectives
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.
Fifty-odd narrators from different countries and decades all come out “written in the same exact voice,” which undoes the book’s whole method for its detractors. They also recall decades-old conversations verbatim, so the interviews stop being credible as interviews. “A reader needs a flowchart to keep track.” Across six hundred pages of testimony Belano and Lima stay blank, and one reader concludes “This book might have been better if it were only 150 pages.” The conquest-counting and body-measuring banter reads as dated posturing whether or not Bolaño means it that way. “Felt like a long way to go for a cheese sandwich.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
