The Savage Detectives - Hardcover

Bolano, Roberto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374191484 ISBN 13: 9780374191481

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2007

Synopsis

This novelâ€"the major work from Chilean-born novelist Bolano (1953â€"2003) here beautifully translated by Wimmerâ€"will allow English speaking readers to discover a truly great writer. In early 1970s Mexico City, young poets Arturo Belano (Bolano's alter ego and a regular in his fiction) and Ulises Lima start a small, erratically militant literary movement, the Visceral Realists, named for another, semimythical group started in the 1920s by the nearly forgotten poet Cesarea Tinajero. The book opens with 17 year-old Juan Garcia Madero's precocious, deadpan notebook entries, dated 1975, chronicling his initiation into the movement. The long middle sectionâ€"written, like George Plimpton's Edie, as a set of anxiously vivid testimonies from friends, lovers, bystanders and a great many enemiesâ€"tracks Belano and Lima as they travel the globe from 1975 to the mid-1990s. There are copious, and acidly hilarious, references to the Latin American literary scene, and one needn't be an insider to get the...

About this title

Review:

'A sprawling treasure.' -- Observer Observer

'It is immensely cheering to read a book that celebrates life and, as something inseparable from it, literature.'
-- Daily Telegraph

`The novel is . . . one of the most original you are likely to read this year.' -- Sunday Times

Book Description:

An exhilarating, must-read novel from one of Latin America’s pre-eminent writers, and author of the acclaimed masterpiece 2666.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0374191484
• ISBN 13: 9780374191481
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 577