Reviews for The Savage Detectives

The average rating for The Savage Detectives based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-04-18 00:00:00 Frances Drzewicki I'll bet a lot of us walk around with some real concrete ideas about just who it is we could possibly fall in love with. Maybe the specifics of our ideas change over time and even become less rigid, but still we maintain that we know on some level what it is that we want. Maybe when we're nineteen, we're convinced we could only ever truly love a man with a neck tattoo who sings lead in an Oi! band and has great feminist politics and knows how to cook. Or maybe our criteria are purely negative, and we know for a fact that we could never love anyone who voted for Nader, who has facial hair, or is a Yankees fan, or knows about wine. Perhaps once we get a little older we insist we're not picky, and maintain it is just simple common sense that we could not under any circumstances possibly fall in love with someone who uses emoticons, smokes clove cigarettes, dislikes children, has a barcode tattoo, or watches too much television.... We will fall in love with a person who's got great taste in literature, who has beautiful arm muscles, who also can't dance, who's memorized Repo Man and is useful in a bar fight and knows how to sign. We say we're open-minded, but we have these ideas. We know what we want, what we are capable of falling for. We sense what it is that we can love and what we cannot, in the abstract, without even trying and waiting to see. Pretty much same thing goes for books: I tend to think that I know what I'll get into, just as I'm pretty sure that I know what I won't. I hate On the Road and shy away from what I perceive to be "dude books" or "dick lit" or anything too scenestery or self-consciously literary. For these reasons and more, I really wouldn't think that I'd particularly go for a longish, fairly plotless novel about a group of drunk, shaggy-haired, pot-smoking poets hanging out and getting laid all the time and bouncing around Latin America, Europe, and other sundry continents. In fact, this thumbnail description is sort of the book equivalent of the right-wing, cigar-smoking pharmaceutical rep blind date who loves jam bands. I would not have gone out with Roberto Bolaño in a million years based on my google-stalking his myspace page, if my friend's girlfriend and my coworker and my roommate's friend and the chick who cut my hair hadn't all happened to know him in one way or another and all universally insisted that I give this guy a shot. And whaddaya know: old spinster Jessica, swept off her feet! This was like when you find a guy who's cute but wearing sandals and a really ugly Hardrock Cafe tee shirt and has long, scruffly hair and listens to Latin Jazz and is really into capoeira and rock climbing -- like really into capoeira and rock climbing -- and you go over to his house and realize he owns no books, except like three Kurt Vonnegut paperbacks and maybe The Outlaw Poetry Anthology and a hardcover of Guns, Germs, and Steel that his aunt gave him for Christmas six years ago and which of course he never opened because he hasn't read a book since high school.... but then you go out into his backyard and both climb up into the tree there, and he makes you laugh a lot for some reason, and then you stay up until 6 am drinking ginger ale and talking about life, and then awhile after the sun comes up you both go to bed, and he doesn't even have blankets he has a sleeping bag even though he's actually almost thirty years old, but suddenly you don't care about that anymore, and pretty soon you're walking around in his baggy Hardrock Cafe tee shirt and sandals because you lost one of your shoes and your own clothes are too dirty to wear anymore since you haven't been home in a week and you're so stoned out of your mind just from being around him that you start to think that tee shirt is actually kind of cool, and anyway, it smells like him, and him is the best smell that you've ever smelt, the best idea you've ever even thought of, if that makes sense, which of course it doesn't, because at this point you're gone.... I already lent my copy out to a friend, which makes getting into specifics more difficult but should recommend the book on its own. If I remember correctly (the affair is already a bit of a blur), this book has three main parts. The first and last are the diary entries of a seventeen-year-old student with incredible stamina who's living in late seventies Mexico City, who gets caught up with the emerging "visceral realist" poetry moment. The huge middle portion sandwiched by the kid's diary entries is a series of depositions (or anecdotes, or monologues, or whatever they are) taken over three decades from characters whose paths have crossed, on one continent or another, those of the founders of visceral realism: the infamous poets Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. The quantity of characters here is a bit Dickensian/Russian (i.e., ridiculous), and I'd actually started making a list of them in the back flap, which I sort of recommend doing because it can get slightly confusing at times. However, the fact that making such a cheat sheet isn't strictly necessary is a testament to this guy's skill as a writer. His characters are distinctive from one another, and all speak in the author's style and yet also in their own recognizable and totally enthralling voices. Ay, those voices! This book changed the way I felt about that whole talking-to-the-camera device in fiction. This can work, and moreover, its effect can be incredible. This is how people honestly are, or maybe it's just how I want them to be. The way Bolaño writes about women is one of the reasons why I was able to give myself over so fully to this novel. While the world and characters described are far from egalitarian, I felt that the author took his female characters very seriously, and was equally adept at writing from a male or female perspective. This is a gift I maintain is fairly rare, and it really helped counter my impression that this was a dude novel. At the same time, I really liked the way he wrote about sex from a male perspective. This book is hot! I mean, parts of it are. This guy can write a sex scene, that's all I'm saying. I mean, you might not agree, in which case you'll probably think I'm weird. But whatever, I'm just calling it like I see it.... Jeez! Leave me alone! In any case, The Savage Detectives restored my somewhat agnostic faith in narrative, fictional characters, and humanity in general. This book was incredibly beautiful. It really was. I know I should come up with a better way to put that, but unfortunately that's all I got: if you want to read something wonderfully phrased, I suggest you jump ship on my review and grab yourself some Bolaño. Again, I wish I had a better way to say this, but The Savage Detectives caught some breathing, squirming, hot-blooded aspect of the experience of living, and bottled it for convenient distribution and mass consumption during dull moments such as train rides. For me, this book justified the importance of language by reminding us of the reason why it exists: as a form of expression and communication, as the medium which makes sense of our experience and helps the pain of living seem like something worth freaking out about in a grand and desperately passionate fashion. If I were more the type of girl to hand out five-star reviews, I'd have given one gratefully to The Savage Detectives. This novel singlehandedly transformed the way I felt about commuting, and I'm a little terrified by the prospect of returning to the subway (not to mention my life) now that I'm done with it. It's been awhile since I was this instantly and consistently caught up in a book. There was no getting-to-know-you period: I was immersed right away in the first few pages, and my interest never waned all the way through to its thoroughly satisfying close. There were no missteps in here, no off notes or dull parts or things that I felt were wrong or missing. Was it high passion? It wasn't high passion. I don't think this is the greatest thing I've ever read, and I'm still really not sure what was so wonderful about it, or why everyone else on here went so bananas over The Savage Detectives..... I just know that for some reason, I did kind of fall in love with this book. I think falling in love is the answer you get when you solve for a special, specific equation of familiarity and surprise. Falling in love is the recognition of yourself in someone else, shot through with a foreignness that shocks you with something beyond what you'd ever be capable of doing or imagining alone. Reading this book felt just like that to me. Falling in love, like reading great fiction, means trusting someone enough to let that person take your hand and then lead you gently, firmly, adoringly, right off a cliff. The Savage Detectives did exactly this, and at the end of the day, that's all I want.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-02-17 00:00:00 Bobby Fairchid Since there are so many fantastic reviews of The Savage Detectives, I thought I would offer a slightly different approach as per below. In Part 1, the first-person narrator, seventeen-year-old Juan Garcia Madero, tells us right off he is reading the erotic fiction of Pierre Louys (incidentally, one of Louys's novels was made into a Luis Buñuel film - That Obscure Object of Desire). Also, the way Juan speaks of the visceral realists, a group of wild avant-garde poets where young Juan is a member, reminded me of another group -- the League, a secret society in Hermann Hesse's The Journey to the East. I enjoy how Juan will list the authors -- various poets, novelists, short-story writers, essayists -- he comes across as his meanders through Mexico City. For example: when he goes into room of one of the visceral realists, Luscious Skin (what a name!), he spots a stack of books, one by Auguste Monterroso. Turns out, this author wrote one of my favorite short-stories -Mr. Taylor - about an American anthropologist who goes to a Central American country to live with a forest tribe. He sends the tribe's shrunken heads back to the US and makes a fortune. The demand for shrunken heads skyrockets but the tribe runs out. Well, the government finds out and, along with the anthropologist, comes up with some great plans to cash in on shrunken heads. How? Let me just say that if you are a poor person living in that country, you had better watch out! Anyway, associations like this make for rich, provocative reading. Poetic Novelist RB Young Juan's life in Mexico City is filled to the brim with young women and sexual encounters, conversations about poets and poetry and magazines, lots of coffee and marijuana, but through it all Juan is a kindred spirit to that narrator of Journey to the East, when Hesse's seeker says, "For our goal was not only the East, or rather the East was not only a country or something geographical, but it was the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times." Juan has a strong sense his true home is his poetic voice and, in a way, the visceral realists is his 'league'. I must say reading about the two worlds of Juan's life: the nitty-gritty of everyday Mexico City and the light-filled realm of poetry is most refreshing. Then, at one point, when Juan goes into a café. We read, "After dark I went back and found Jacinto Requena dying of boredom. None of the visceral realists except for him, he said, were showing their faces at the café. Everybody was afraid of running into Arturo Belano, though their fears were unwarranted since the Chelean hadn't been there in days. According to Requena, Arturo Belano had begun to kick more poets out of the group." You have to love a seventeen-year-old who is having sex left and right but still has his eye (and poetic soul) on his ray of light, his league of fellow questers, the visceral realists. And you have to admire an author who can splay himself into multiple characters within a novel. Roberto Bolaño - The Poet and Novelist as a Young Man And, thank goodness there are some sensitive seventeen-year-old souls who experience life as an artistic odyssey. The printing of this novel could have been set in gold. And perhaps a few pages coated with hallucinogens so the reader could lick the pages from time to time. -- this is one of the techniques used by a short-story writer in Moacyr Sclair's The Short-Story Writers. When we come to Part 2, there are multiple adult men and women first-person narrators who relate their experience with the visceral realists and Latin American poetry. The more I turned the pages, the more I was drawn into a mythic dimension of time. Such an uplifting, energizing experience to enter a world where the spirit and power of poetry is the polestar. And not only a poetic reaching up, as if the night sky contained a thousand poems for every star, but deep, deep down into the earth. Here are a few of my favorite lines, where Venezuelan poet Amadeo Salvatierra relates a conversation with his father and a friend riding through the country outside Mexico City: "He said that there was probably some pyramid lying buried under our land . . . deep underground there must be lots of pyramids. My father didn't say anything. From the darkness of the backseat, I asked him why he thought that. He didn't answer. Then we started to talk of other things but I kept wondering why he'd say that about the pyramids." Of course, there were pyramids at Teotihuacan, the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican city thirty miles outside present-day Mexico City. I wouldn't want to press the point too hard, but pyramids bring to mind inner depths of the psyche. The Jungian analyst Robert Moore talks a great deal of the archetypal pyramid each of us carries in our collective unconscious - the four sides are king/queen, warrior, lover and, magician, the magician being that part most directly connected to imagination, creativity, the inner quest and spiritual transformation. In traditional societies, those profoundly in touch with magician energy would be chosen to be shamans; in our modern, 'civilized' world, the role of shaman is inhabited by, among others, artists and poets. It is this magician power the narrators are in touch with as they move through their days and nights, their conversations and writing and reading of poems. Here is a reflection from one of the narrators, an Argentinian poet, as he is walking in Mexico City with a Mexican poet and a Chilean poet: "The three of us were quiet, as if we'd been struck dumb, but our bodies moved to a beat, as if something was propelling us through that strange land and making us dance, a silent, syncopated kind of walking, if I can call it that, and then I had a vision, not the first that day, as it happened, or the last: the park we were walking through opened up into a kind of lake and the lake opened up into a kind of waterfall and the waterfall became a river that flowed through a kind of cemetery, and all of it, lake, waterfall, river, cemetery, was deep green and silent." Young Juan makes his return in Part 3. After all the poetic voices and multiple journeys across many lands in Part 2, we have a deeper appreciation of Juan as a member of the visceral realists. And, my word, what a book. The Savage Detectives, a novel about those wild, ferocious, half-crazed men and woman driven to mythic, intoxicating summits by the carnival of words and the Latino rhythms of their poetry. 650 pages of breathtaking magic.