“The Savage Detectives” is a novel by Robert Bolano. Originally written in Spanish, the book is lengthy–672 pages–and a bit cumbersome, though entertaining and dynamic in parts. The main part of the story is told through the perspectives of many different characters and jumps around in time from 1975 to sometime in the mid-1990s.
This is the story of two poets, Belano and Lima, who found a group of poets called the Visceral Realists. The first part of the book is told from the pages of a 17-year-old’s journal, in 1975, as he drops out of law school to join this poetry movement and live as a vagabond among their group. With his new friends, he loses his virginity, gets shot at, and ultimately runs away with Belano, Lima and hooker who is being hunted by her pimp.
The second part of the book then shifts to “interviews” with various people who have encountered either Belano, Lima, or both during their travels across the world. These people have been lovers, enemies, friends, and general acquaintences of the two men. The stories move around between the years of 1975 and the mid-1990s. We learn of the adventurous lives these men led and how they are manipulative in ways that can make you both love and hate them. This long second part of the book is difficult and can be excrutiating to get through. While there are gems to be found in this 400-page stretch, it is far too easy to get lost.
The last part of the book circles back to our 17-year-old journalist and picks up where we left off at the beginning: his escape with Belano, Lima and Lupe, the hooker. To be quite honest, I merely skimmed the last 150 pages; by this point I was a bored with the men.
While I appreciate the writing of Bolano in this book, I am not certain that I truly understood the story other than as an adventure book.
