The Savage Detectives: A Novel

Author - Roberto Bolano ... [Goo?] [Posters]
Natasha Wimmer ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Hardcover Book item from Farrar, Straus and Giroux was reviewed on 18-Oct-2008.

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1) Hardcover Book The Savage Detectives: A Novel by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I hesitate to criticize Roberto Bolano too much, because many people find great enjoyment in his work. You might be one of them. I simply did not like this novel.

Much has been written about the brilliance of The Savage Detectives, but I found it merely unusual, not brilliant. There are parallels to The Dharma Bums, with the aimless wanderings of the characters, their deliberate bohemian lives, and their radical ideas about literature, politics and sexuality. There is extensive discussion about literature, but it is mostly an absurd discussion, often written for laughs that I could not appreciate. The nihilism of the author, reflected in his characters, may strike a cord in those of similar outlook. Unfortunately, I did not like the main characters. They steal from helpless people, smoke dope, sell drugs, and occasionally write poetry which you never get to read. Worse, I have the impression that Bolano did not care for them either.

Reading this novel was a depressing experience. I find it difficult to enjoy a novel unless I care about someone in the book. Great literature does not have to be enjoyable, but there was more missing from this story than enjoyment. His wandering, discursive style is difficult to follow. Perhaps Bolano was making a point about pointlessness, but after several hundred pages, I didn´t care anymore. I don´t believe that this book deserves all of the praise that has been lavished upon it.¤

2) Hardcover Book The Savage Detectives: A Novel by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It was a great read. I have read other books by this author and I was pretty sure I would love this and I did.¤

3) Hardcover Book The Savage Detectives: A Novel by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The Savage Detectives, the Mexican novel of a Chilean writer that spent his last years of life in Barcelona, is one of the few masterpieces that Latin America has produced during the last years. The language skills, the rhythm, the story, the characters, everything is first class literature in this "Looking for a lost Poetess" novel. In spite of the high quality values of his next (posthumous) novel 2666, Roberto Bolaño reached with the Savage Detectives a height that is very difficult to meet again. As stated in the comment title: a masterpiece.¤

4) Hardcover Book The Savage Detectives: A Novel by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The worst book of the year for me. I quit after 150 pages. I figured an author should be able to develop characters and some sense of story by then. Didn´t happen.¤

5) Hardcover Book The Savage Detectives: A Novel by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book came with rave reviews on the cover -- blurbs stating it was a modern classic et etc (I´ll leave to another time my opinions about the corruption and dishonesty in the "blurb" industry where so much mutual back-scratching goes on)... Well, I found it interesting enough to finish but cannot concur about its so-called classic status.
The plot follows the adventures of two young men, a Mexican and a Chilean who call themselves the founders of some kind of progressive poetry movement called "visceral realism." The two, Arturo Balano ( who is evidently the author´s alter ego) and Ulises Lima, drift from Mexico to Spain to Israel to Rome to Africa and back over the course of about 20 years. They sell drugs, do drugs, fall into various relationships, beg, starve, live in caves, rob helpless old men and women, do various odd-jobs and occasionally write something. We´re never told what visceral realism is or stands for, if anything. In general, these two seem to be drifters (an unkinder way of putting it might be losers) and I found it increasingly difficult to sympathize with them or even know why the hell I should be interested.
One problem is that we never hear from them in their own voices. We see them through the eyes of a broad spectrum of other characters -- lovers, friends, associates and chance encounters. Many of these secondary characters are also deeply mentally disturbed. One character goes by the picturesque name of "Luscious Skin." Some of these vignettes are interesting but then the character disappears and never returns.
Maybe I´m just too old a fogey to get involved in the lives of these drifters, who after all belong to my own generation. That´s possible. Some books appeal mostly to the young. I did in fact meet some South Americans in my kibbutz volunteering days in the 1970s who were a bit like these guys -- long-haired, politically extreme left with uncertain personal cleanliness habits -- and I didnt like them much then either.
So if you´re an old fogey like me, this book may not be for you.¤

6) Hardcover Book The Savage Detectives: A Novel by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

7) Hardcover Book The Savage Detectives: A Novel by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Amazon Significant Seven, May 2007: The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation, but his novel The Savage Detectives is a lot closer to Y Tu Mamá También than it is to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, full of inside jokes about Latin American literati that you don´t have to understand to enjoy, The Savage Detectives is a companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It´s the first of Bolaño´s two giant masterpieces to be translated into English (the second, 2666, is due out next year), and you can see how he´s influenced an era. --Tom Nissley

Questions for Translator Natasha Wimmer

Natasha Wimmer translated books by Mario Vargas Llosa and Bolaño´s good friend Rodrigo Fresán, among others, before tackling Bolaño´s two long novels, The Savage Detectives and the upcoming 2666, which have had an immeasurable impact on modern Latin American fiction (and perhaps now on Anglo American writing as well). We asked her a few questions about the process of bringing such a vast and vital book into English.

Amazon.com: How did you come to literary translation, and to translating a work of such prestige? Is the community of Spanish-to-English literary translators small, given Americans´ famous lack of interest in translated work?

Wimmer: Luck, really. I lived in Spain when I was little, which is where I learned Spanish, and then I studied Spanish literature in college, but it was a job in publishing--at FSG, the publisher of The Savage Detectives--that made me realize that literary translation was something I could try. I’ve been translating now for eight years. My first project was a novel by the Cuban writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Dirty Havana Trilogy, and since then I’ve worked on books by Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Zaid, Rodrigo Fresán, and Laura Restrepo. When I read The Savage Detectives, I thought it was one of the best novels I had read in any language in years, but I was sure there was no chance I would get to translate it. Bolaño already had a great translator--Chris Andrews. But Andrews couldn´t do it, and I was the extremely fortunate runner-up.

The community of full-time translators is definitely small--it´s hard to make a living. But there are many great occasional translators--professors, editors, writers.

Amazon.com: We´re told that Bolaño towers over his generation of writers (and I can believe it). What did he do that was new? What has his influence been?

Wimmer: Bolaño was (is) the first to make a true break from the legacy of the Boom. Many other writers of his generation, and younger writers, too, have tried and are still trying to make a literature of their own, one that doesn’t languish in the long shadow of García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and the other novelists who exploded on the world scene in the 1960s. Bolaño made the leap seem effortless. The writers of the Boom put Latin America on the map. Bolaño creates a Latin America of the mind, a post-nationalist Latin America filtered through a rootless, restless, uncompromising literary sensibility.

Amazon.com: Could you describe Bolaño´s style and his sentences? (I love his parentheses.) How did you handle the dozens of voices in The Savage Detectives?

Wimmer: Bolaño is both a maximalist and a classicist. He loves to play with excess, with the notion of reckless abandon, but beneath that there is a very careful sense of balance. He was a poet for many years before he became a novelist, and he is an endlessly inventive stylist. But--more rarely for a poet--he also has an unerring sense of character and a palpable fondness for his characters. The Savage Detectives could never have worked otherwise. There are very few writers who could write a novel from the perspective of fifty-odd characters and make each character´s story seem urgent and intimate.

From the translator´s perspective, some voices were definitely more difficult than others, but I rarely felt that I had to strain to make them distinct from each other. Mostly, it just involved following Bolaño´s cues. The hardest thing, oddly enough, was getting the rhythm of his sentences right. There is something syncopated and unpredictable about them that would have been all too easy to smooth over as a translator, and I made a concerted effort not to do that.

Amazon.com: All of his books are full of references to, and appearances by, Latin American writers both fictional and real and I´m sure as a clueless American reader I´m missing hundreds of inside jokes. What´s it like to read his work when you actually know the people he´s referring to?

Wimmer: It adds a little something, but not as much as you might think. And many of his references are obscure even to Spanish-language readers. There is something cultish and purposefully arcane about the literary world that Bolaño´s protagonist, García Madero, yearns to join, and like García Madero, the reader is entranced by authors´ names and book titles without knowing exactly where they come from.

Amazon.com: You are working on translating his other giant masterpiece, 2666, the even larger novel that he completed just before his death. How is it going? What can we expect from 2666?

Wimmer: It´s an extremely long novel (1100 pages in the Spanish edition ), so it´s a test of stamina, but it´s going very well. Like The Savage Detectives, it revolves around a lost writer (Cesárea Tinajero in TSD and Benno von Archimboldi in 2666), and the crucial episodes take place in the north of Mexico, but it is a darker book. The lurking sense of dread that many of the characters feel in TSD becomes something more palpable and sharply defined in 2666, and is linked to the killings of women in the Mexican city of Santa Teresa (modeled on Ciudad Juárez) and the legacy of the wars of the 20th century, particularly World War II.

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 15-Nov-2008, 03741914849780374191481, 850-430-9X0-840-280-740-991-J2B-8

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