The Savage Detectives
Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
04 September 2009
9780330509527608 pages
Synopsis
With an afterword by Natasha Wimmer.
Winner of the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Natasha Wimmer’s translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times.
New Year’s Eve 1975, Mexico City. Two hunted men leave town in a hurry, on the desert-bound trail of a vanished poet.
Spanning two decades and crossing continents, theirs is a remarkable quest through a darkening universe – our own. It is a journey told and shared by a generation of lovers, rebels and readers, whose testimonies are woven together into one of the most dazzling Latin American novels of the twentieth century.
Savagely comic yet equally tender . . . This novel is an elegy for a generation.Independent
The comic frenzy, the inventiveness of character and situation, and the mood-soaked depiction of 1970s Mexico is delightful.Times Literary Supplement
A portrait of people for whom literature is bread and water, sex and death. The abiding message to be taken from Bolaño’s novel, and maybe from his fraught life, too: books matter.GQ
