Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives

I just finished Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. I first came across the author through an article that my Dad gave me about him a couple of years. It was this book, translated in 2008, that brought his name to the attention of the English speaking world. He died in 2003 and was only truly recognised internationally, after his death.

The book focuses on  two Mexican poets, Arturo Bolano (a ficticious alter-ego of the author) and Ulises Lima and documents their search, over twenty years, for Cisarea Tinajero, a mysterious dissappeared writer and founder of the real vicerismo movement. It is told in three parts. The first and last are diary entries by a young student who, through his involvement in Bolano and Lima's gang of real viceralistas, ends up leaving Mexico  DF with the two. The main, central part of the book consists of a series of various freinds' and acquaintances' accounts of meetings with and reflections on Bolano and Lima, and their lives between 1976 to 1996.

 The central part of the book is an audacious undertaking, in terms both of the scale of what it chronicles -twenty years of searching through Mexico, Spain, France, Israel and even Africa- and in the narative technique used to tell this. Some of the writers give numerous accounts, others appearing just once; some are a couple of paragraphs while others are over twenty pages long. What impressed me most was Bolano's ability to adopt the persona of these fictitious characters, and use them todescribe a certain period of one or the other of Lima or Bolano's lives. One character simply retells tales that Bolano told him. Fantastic tales and short stories in their own right. Another character is asked by Bolano to assist him in a duel with a critic who Belano feels has misrepresented him.  Later in the book, there's a passage from a woman whose spare room Belano rents. She's a body builder who falls in love with Bolano, but with whom Bolano has little, if anything, in common. Sometimes I found myself stunned by the brilliance of these first person naratives. The content is so rich, giving you an awful lot to dwell on.

The book is realist in its descriptions and has an incredible richness in terms of the language. I  have to admit that when I first picked up the book, I was overwhealmed. It had been a long while since I'd done much reaing in Spanish and it did seem a little daunting. It is certainly a book that you can return to, and understand more and more with time. It is the first book that I have read that is so closely tied to poetry and was an awakening, with regard to how beaurtiful writing can be. I'm now completely sold on LAm literiture. With Javier Marias and Jose Saramago, every book I pick up at the moment feels like it's the best book I've ever read.