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Try using the Translator for the Microsoft Edge extension instead. Poets, pimps and prostitutes. The poet's troubled odyssey is the dominant theme of both Last Evenings and Bolano's novel The Savage Detectives (both brilliantly translated). The latter begins in the 1970s in City, where two poets - Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima - are leading a literary movement called visceral realism. The first part of the novel is told in diary form by one of their young disciples - a puzzling figure not remembered by others in the movement - who interrupts observations on Belano and Lima to recount his early sexual encounters. This section ends abruptly with the poets, in the company of a whore fleeing her pimp, commandeering a car and heading for the desert. Their quest is to find a lost poet from an earlier literary movement, the wonderfully named "stridentists" (lost, missing, exiled and orphaned poets are - along with prostitutes - a key motif in Bolano's work). It is a shaggy dog story, but is the dog chasing its nose or its tail? The second part of the novel gives a dazzlingly different perspective (or multiple perspectives) on Belano and Lima by introducing a series of diverse witness testimonies from those who encounter them. These include descriptions of their behaviour on their return from the desert and the various roads of madness and ruin that they travel. In the final phase, we return to the first youthful narrator, who gives an account of the dramatic events during the quest for the lost poet. Bolano is not reticent about mixing his life story - or at least a mythologised version of it - with his work. He pops up in various guises, principally as the Chilean Arturo Belano, so it is worth pausing to consider his biography. Bolano left when young to live in Mexico, returning briefly to his home country just before the Pinochet coup; he was briefly detained but then reverted to a nomadic, bohemian, heroin-fuelled existence as a vagabond poet before settling in . He turned to prose to pay the rent, and there were times in reading The Savage Detectives when I wondered if it represented Bolano's revenge on the novel for this enforced career choice. Exercised by the "who's-the-daddy?" bickering that is a lamentable aspect of Latin American literature, he was not short of acerbic opinions on his peers. He was scornful of Isabel Allende, whose healthy sales figures and ability to smile on her book jackets have irritated more than a couple of his male contemporaries too. At times the obsession with the role of enfant provocateur , which surfaces repeatedly in Bolano's fiction, becomes tiresome. In the short story "Dance Card", he assumes the mantle of literary drama queen to demand rhetorically: "Do we have to come back to Neruda as we do to the cross, on bleeding knees, with punctured lungs and eyes full of tears?" And it is difficult to resist a shrug. Well, not if you don't want to, Roberto. It is also easy to become exasperated with the poets depicted in Bolano's work, who are of a particular type that treads dangerously close to cliche. They are itinerant, they steal books, they walk the city at night, they read in the shower, they screw and scowl and drink and brawl and pick up scabies from cheap dives. We rarely get any insight into what they actually write or think about poetry, beyond their railings against predictable enemies such as and Pablo Neruda. This is accompanied by endless dropping of literary names, usually of French surrealists. And because Bolano identifies himself so clearly with them, one's exasperation extends sometimes to the author. He has described The Savage Detectives as a "love-letter to his generation". Fair enough, but it's a partly imagined generation that does not seem very broadly conceived; the uncharitable might describe the novel more as a love-letter to Roberto Bolano. All of this is redeemed, however, by the fact that Bolano writes with such elegance, verve and style and is so immensely readable. Much of my frustration arose when I was thinking or talking about the two books (a good sign in itself), but I read them in great gulps. He also undercuts the obvious accusation of literary solipsism with sly humour, self-mockery and a wicked eye for pomposity. At one point in the novel, Lima joins a solidarity delegation of Mexican poets to Nicaragua, and Bolano gleefully sends up the often absurd nature of these occasions. He is extremely clever at switching mood and tone, so that even the comedy is interspersed with hints of catastrophe and loss. Bolano is both aware of and indulgent towards the futility of poetic rebellion, which is why so many of his characters carry a sense of doom with them. But he also succeeds in injecting his lost and wandering poets with nobility and pathos. Truth arrives in many vehicles; through nonsense, through endurance, through literary preening. It is the dance of literature and life in which Bolano participated so fully until his own untimely death four years ago. The most important test that Bolano triumphantly sails through as a writer is that he makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world. His vision can be disturbing and dark but it is not cold: humour and compassion are never far away. Nowhere more so than in this elegy from the brilliantly disturbing story "Mauricio 'The Eye' Silva". "That night when he went back to his hotel, he wept for his dead children and all the other castrated boys, for his own lost youth, for those who were young no longer and those who died young, for those who fought for Salvador Allende and those who were too scared to fight." It is a shame that Bolano has no more evenings on earth - his unique voice asserting the importance and exuberance of literature is one that will be sorely missed. · Ben Richards's novel The Mermaid and the Drunks (Phoenix) is set in Chile. To order Last Evenings on Earth for pounds 14.99 or The Savage Detectives for pounds 17.99, both with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. Reviewed by Ted Gioia. Before his death in 2003, Roberto Bolaño was little known in the United States. Perhaps everything else makes its way easily across the Mexican border – people, drugs, manufactured goods, killer bees - but the border patrol doesn’t require a big fence to stop literary works at the Rio Grande. Indifferent publishers and a shortage of good translations are sufficient obstacles. Even Bolaño’s translator Natasha Wimmer admits that she had not heard much about the author before encountering The Savage Detectives . But the tables have turned for Bolaño, who is enjoying aposthumous boom of dramatic proportions. Just six weeks before his death, at age fifty from a liver disorder, he was hailed as the most influential novelist of his generation by a group of his peers at a conference in Seville. Around the time of the book's publication in the US, the Colombian magazine Semana ranked The Savage Detectives third on its list of the greatest novels in Spanish of the past 25 years. And Bolaño’s last work, an 1,100-page novel entitled 2666 – soon to be published in English – ranked fourth. Perhaps Bolaño would have been better received during his lifetime, had he not worked so hard at making enemies. He despised the literary establishment, and attacked even Nobel laureates Gabriel García Márquez and Octavio Paz with vehemence and venom. Isabel Allende, whom he denounced as a scribbler and guilty of kitsch, commemorated Bolaño’s passing with a succinct verdict. Recalling Bolaño as “extremely unpleasant,” she explained that “death does not make you a nicer person.” English-speaking readers who are unfamiliar with the intricacies of Latin American literary politics will miss many of the subtleties of The Savage Detectives . The novel includes references, either explicit or thinly disguised, to more than 100 Latin American writers, and some (such as Paz) figure as characters in the narrative. The main protagonist, Arturo Belano, is based on Bolaño himself, and like the author is a Chilean-born exile from the Pinochet era who settles in Mexico, but also wanders in Central America and overseas. Belano, along with his friend Ulisses Lima (based on poet Mario Santiago) travel farther, and even more aimlessly, than that other Ulysses of epic fame. And though they see themselves as poets and arbiters of literary taste, they publish little and spend their days selling marijuana, moving listlessly from relationship to relationship, and getting caught up in a series of violent escapades, ranging from robbery to dueling — and eventually including murder. Here is the clever conceit of the novel: although The Savage Detectives is apparently about poetry – the school of “visceral realists” led by Belano and Lima – hardly a line of verse appears in its pages. The novel’s opening paragraph starts the ruse with a diary entry by an aspiring teenage writer. “I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.” And though, in the ensuing pages, the visceral realists bicker and banter, disrupt writing workshops, scrounge for money, drink and hop from bed to bed, the poetry itself never figures in the story. It is much like what screenplay writers call a “MacGuffin” in a suspense film, a pretext for action and adventure that serves as motivation without ever being explained or validated. Through much of the novel, Belano and Lima travel in search of a missing poet, Cesàrea Tinajero, from the 1920s, who was involved in an earlier movement also called visceral realism. The fact that the “detectives” have never seen a single line of Tinajero’s work merely adds to the bizarre quality of Bolaño’s novel, where poetry is a posture rather than a literary endeavor. When they finally uncover an example of her poetry, from a forgotten literary magazine, the protagonists are surprised — but not the reader, by this point — to see that it uses no words, just a few childish drawings. The Savage Detectives is a rich, rambling book that ends up almost exactly where it begins. Even the chronology is circular – the narrative starts in the 1970s, advances to the late 1990s, then returns to the 1970s. But again the analogy with Ulysses is an apt one. The wandering here is more exciting than any final destination. And Bolaño, like an experienced travel guide, knows how to keep his audience captivated by even the wildest detours. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. - Return to top of the page - See our review for fuller assessment. Review Summaries Source Rating Date Reviewer Bookforum . 25/5/2007 Alex Abramovich Entertainment Weekly B+ 30/3/2007 Jennifer Reese The Globe & Mail A 9/6/2007 Michael Redhill The Guardian . 23/6/2007 Ben Richards Harper's . 4/2007 Siddhartha Deb The Independent . 24/8/2007 Jason Wilson London Review of Books . 6/9/2007 Benjamin Kunkel The LA Times . 8/4/2007 Thomas McGonigle Neue Zürcher Zeitung . 27/4/2002 Andreas Breitenstein The New Republic . 7/5/2007 Chloë Schama The NY Observer . 1/4/2007 Emily Bobrow The NY Rev. of Books . 19/7/2007 Francisco Goldman The NY Sun . 28/3/2007 Benjamin Lytal The NY Times Book Rev. . 15/4/2007 James Wood The New Yorker . 26/3/2007 . San Francisco Chronicle . 1/4/2007 Vinnie Wilhelm Sydney Morning Herald . 25/5/2007 Andrew Riemer The Telegraph . 2/8/2007 Jonathan Gibbs The Telegraph . 18/8/2007 Ed King TLS . 29/6/2007 Siddhartha Deb The Washington Post A 6/5/2007 Ilan Stavans. Generally impressed, some very much so. " The Savage Detectives is good art. When it is dark, it is very dark. At other times, it is very funny, thrilling, tender, and erotic. At its best, it is dark, funny, thrilling, tender, and erotic at one and the same time, in a way few novels before it have been." - Alex Abramovich, Bookforum. - Return to top of the page - The Savage Detectives is part quest-tale, part paean to the Latin American -- and specifically Mexican -- literary scene. The novel has three sections, beginning and ending with ones consisting of the journal entries of teenage student Juan García Madero in late 1975 and 1976, as he is drawn into the world of the 'visceral realists'. The longer middle section consists of short accounts from dozens of other characters from the period 1976 to 1996, making for all sorts of other perspectives on events and the two literary leaders García Madero gets caught up with, Ulises Lima and the Bolaño-like Arturo Belano . The novel begins simply enough, a young man beginning his studies and more drawn to literature than something serious like law. He gets caught up in a swirling literary circle -- where it can be hard to differentiate between poseurs and those with any real literary interest (and/or talent). The school of thought he finds himself confronted with is 'visceral realism', and though it's not entirely clear what that is ("I am not really sure what visceral realism is" he begins the second entry in this journal -- the day after he accepted membership in the group), that suits him just fine. And they do offer adventure enough, as he gets his first real taste of sex and the literary lifestyle -- which, in this case, is hardly anything like what one might expect. García Madero is young and a bit naïve, but he's also more serious than many of those he comes across. Familiar with poetic terminology and what seems like every obscure rhyme scheme and metre ever conceived, he's different from the more carefree (and careless) friends he makes; "It's just a question of memory. I memorize the definitions, that's all" , he explains, but it's still something that sets him apart. Lima and Belano are the confounding leader-figures, their semi-mythical reputations kept up with a decent dose of mystery and the fact that they are apparently so outside any mainstream ("Belano and Lima are like two ghosts", García Madero finds) -- part of what García Madero wants to plumb, though he also seems happy enough to be along for this particular (and peculiar) ride. Much of the novel is given to this literary movement of visceral realism (echoing, presumably, Bolaño's own 'infrarealism'). With the focus on poetry rather than fiction the establishment-figure that is the biggest target of attack is Octavio Paz, an amusing running joke that also includes them meeting the hated master (though without the hoped-for real confrontation). The Savage Detectives is a road-trip book of sorts, too, straying very far and wide. Like Bolaño, Belano is a Chilean who winds up in , and the novel is full of displacements; eventually, many of the characters find themselves very far afield. With all the travelling that goes on there's a pervasive sense of rootlessness throughout the novel , and one of the central plot- threads is a search for roots, for the origins of visceral realism and the (naturally elusive) poet Cesárea Tinajero. As one character diagnoses: