**The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive,
and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of
our age.
**
**National Bestseller
**
New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the
visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed
white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet
Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search
to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.
The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from
south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles
Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the
eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe,
Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral
realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned
in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a
foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for
the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean
stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a
Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and
assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds,
real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.
A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the
hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where
national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the
avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first
great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.
