The Savage Detectives

Unfortunately, Bolaño died of liver failure before this novel—considered his most important work—made it into English translation. The Chilean-born writer, who later grew up in Mexico and settled down in Spain, never quite got his due with English readers. In Latin America he’s revered as one of the region’s finest writers, and has been compared favorably to perhaps the most beloved Latin American writer of all time: Jorge Luis Borges.

The Savage Detectives concerns two fictional poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (Bolaño’s alter ego), who have started a strident but otherwise vague literary movement called the Visceral Realists. The novel begins with the diary of Juan García Madero, the movement’s most recent inductee. García Madero’s entries make for hilarious satire, as the Visceral Realists talk more of sex than of poetry, and seem to practice the former more as well. From the get-go, the novel is rich with humor, but it’s perhaps most evident in García Madero’s poetic and conflicted innocence. When a waitress in a bar takes him into a backroom and offers to introduce him to the world of fellatio—one of the perks of being a poet, no doubt—he’s not sure what she means: “I looked at her blankly, although that truth, like a lone and flagging swimmer, was gradually making some headway in the black sea of my ignorance.”

The second section is a series of testimonials from people who knew Lima and Belano—fragmented anecdotes that portray the Visceral Realists in various stages of comic action and inaction. And the final, brief section returns to the journals of García Madero as he, Lima, Belano and a hooker named Lupe search for a long-lost poet who inspired the Visceral Realists.

Though it sounds like another long novel of literary gamesmanship—and it is—The Savage Detectives contains few inside jokes, and is as warm-blooded as “experimental novels” get. Here’s to more Bolaño in English. There’s no one quite like him.— Jonathan Messinger