The Savage Detectives in The Roundtable

May 02, 2013 El rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: biddles, 1001-books-list, put-it-in-your-journal, 20th-centurylit-late, permanent-collection, anarchism-revolutions, wanderlust, swashbuckling-is-hott

Literature isn't innocent.

There are some books one reads that hit the reader in some place the reader didn't know existed until the book just discovered it; where the reader feels s/he knows the characters so well, like they've interacted before, which is impossible because these are characters, not real flesh-and-blood people that the reader encountered through their life's journey; where the reader is so completely heartbroken that the author has died so young because there would have b

Literature isn't innocent.

There are some books one reads that hit the reader in some place the reader didn't know existed until the book just discovered it; where the reader feels s/he knows the characters so well, like they've interacted before, which is impossible because these are characters, not real flesh-and-blood people that the reader encountered through their life's journey; where the reader is so completely heartbroken that the author has died so young because there would have been so many more amazing stories and adventures to come.

This is one of those books. For me.

2666 blew my brains out. But that was more in that I am still thinking about it, still puzzling it out, wondering what it all means; whereas with The Savage Detectives, which also blew my brains out, it was done in a more artistically holyfuckingshitthisisamazing way. I can't say one is better than the other. They're connected, I'm sure, in ways that we haven't even figured out yet because Bolaño died before all the pieces of the puzzle could be layed out. I want to read and re-read both books and try to piece it all together, but realize that what I really want to do with either one of those books is just to jump in at random and read passages. Because it's like fucking poetry. Gritty, dirty, raunchy poetry.

One review I saw early on compared this book (or the author himself) to Murakami and Bukowski. Meh. I'm currently reading 1Q84, and you know what's missing from Murakami? The grit. He's not a gritty writer. Bukowski knew grit, but this is different. This is... Bolaño put himself out there on paper in this book, more so than even in 2666 in my opinion. This is his sweat, his blood, his tears, his bile, his excrement, his cum. His writing was dirty and raunchy in a completely non-dirty and non-raunchy way, where it feels more like poetry than anything.

While it's more annoying for me to admit, this is more Kerouac than Murakami. I hate to say it only because I didn't care for On the Road all that much - but the similarities are there between the authors. Both vagabonds, both nomadic spirits. But I felt that Bolaño was real, his experiences more authentic, less posed. I have no desire to sit and pick Kerouac's brain, but would give my left tit for the opportunity to do so with Bolaño. He did what Kerouac wanted to do and he did what Murakami wishes he could do with his writing. Bolaño was a master. I've just decided. Period.

This book makes me want to find the vagabonds from my past and talk to them about this book and Bolaño. They're still out there somewhere. I like to think Bolaño is as well. ...more

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Dec 17, 2013 Christopher rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 500-pages-or-more, 20th-century, fiction, epistolary, latin-american

Instead of reading my dumb review, you should read this amazing piece from the New Yorker about Robert Bolaño's life and works.

As an experimental writer, Bolaño only pleases me about half the time. Half of 2666 enthralled and terrorized me, half of it just didn't work. I really enjoyed The Third Reich. I hated Antwerp.

The Savage Detectives works. Really, really well. It's got all the hallmarks of Bolaño's work: fictionalized versions of himself and other authors, discussions of literature betwe ...more

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May 07, 2013 Lauren rated it really liked it

This is clearly a 5-star book, but I am giving it 4 stars. Why? Because it somehow didn't quite work for me.

I don't read poetry. I have never led anything other than an utterly non-vagabound existence. I spent my teens and early twenties living embarrassingly responsibly. I am the opposite of the visceral realists, and I could not relate to them at all. The characters that I did relate to were the characters that were probably meant to be the sell-out characters, and this quite frankly depresse ...more

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