Customer Reviews

Los Detectives Salvajes/the Savage Detectives (Spanish Edition)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was there, I saw them walking on the street leaving the world behind. I was there when they left Mexico and when they came back. I was one of the few who remembers the chilean who saved the girl. I was there when Belano arrived to Africa. I've never understood their motives. I was a distant witness of a story thousands and thousands larger than mine. I was there, like a ghost.

Los Detectives Salvajes is the kind of book that you read to realize that you haven't read enough. This astounding novel takes you in a strange journey following the steps of two latinoamerican poets while they escape from an unknown past. It's a novel about the books that will never be written and the writers who were condemned to be their authors.

I strongly recommend you this book. This is Bolaño's best, and Bolaño is, undoubtly, one of the best spanish-speaking writters of late 20th century.

Enrique VilaMatas said about this book, "And historic Move on to Cortazar's Rayuela". Since then, and a year after Bolaño's death, I've hear all kind of opinions. The real fact is, that in despite of comparing the quality, the structure or the author, this book is a step over the latinamerican literature.

In a time when all the american boom's writters had started to repeat each others, "Los detectives Salvajes" is proposing a new kind of literature. A literature that is easy to read (fluid) but hard to understand. As Carver, everything is a metaphore of something big, in an aparently common anecdote.

Maybe you could like this book, maybe not. But it is a MUST if you want to keep in touch with the new literature.

NOCTURNO DE CHILE is a short book, 150 pages. Its text is presented without subdivisions: no chapters, no parts I, II etc. The book is the final confession of a dying priest Father Sebastian Urrutia , in essence, the story of his life. The events are presented in chronological order. The author often strays into metaphoric soliloquies and sometimes springs us with shower of strange, names. Beware, this eclectic bibliographies do very little to obscure a straight forward plot:

While, still an adolescent seminarian, Sebastian receives and unexpected invitation by a famous critic, Farewell, to a week-end stay at a his country estate. More than ever, Sebastian considered himself now favored by the muses and his Christian God. All goes well: during the visit he is introduced by Farewell, to the Chilean Nobel Laureate poet Pablo Neruda. And he meets many other Chilean poets. After the official recitations and laudations of the night,the host invites Sebastian to secretely watch Neruda, reciting by moonligh in the garden, the entranced young man is abruptly brought back to reality, as he finds himself the object and subject of Farewell's sexual advances.

No, this novel is not another case presentation of character disorders or about Gothic class injustice. Farewell's weaknesses are not much of the story. But maybe Bolano is introducing a portent, a foreboding for Sebastian's gathering storm. The communist revolution is due in Chile and so is the blood bath of Pinochet following in step.

After having read four books by Bolano, I consider myself an initiated fan. I thus do not hesitate to recommend him as new genius. If you are concerned about buying a relatively expensive paper- back, by an unknown author, I suggest you may start with this book. NOCTURNO DE CHILE is easy to read, poetic and interesting, and equal to the best of Latin American prose styles.

Happy reading

Muchos dicen que es lo mejor de Roberto Bolaño. Un libro difícil de categorizar. Algunas partes son un poco pesadas pero cuando llegas al final te das cuenta que en su conjunto es un libro muy bueno.

Recomendaría leer este libro sí y solo sí estas en alguna de las siguientes condiciones: en un hospital, en la cárcel, en una isla desierta, o en algun otro lugar donde no tengas acceso a ningún otro libro; en otras palabras: si es la única opción disponible. Yo lo he leído porque tardé un poco en hacer un nuevo pedido y no tenía nada más a mano. Ya antes de llegar a la mitad me sentía decepcionada y abrumada, el libro me resulta algo así como un sudoku diabolico al que se le han añadido letras para hacerlo todavía más incómodo. Sea cual sea la intención de su autor a mi me ha parecido incoherentemente anárquico y viceversa. Es el primer libro de Bolano que leo y no me he quedado con deseos de seguir su obra.

El libro, a la vez que describe la vida de jovenes poetas en el DF durante los años 70 y subsiguientes,nos mantiene hechizados en cuanto a la desaparicion de dos de ellos y tambien con la busqueda de la misteriosa poetisa Cesarea Tinajeros. El autor nos permite seguir la trama mediante los recuerdos de las diferentes personas que se cruzan en el camino de los jovenes poetas utilizando un lenguage fluido y claro.Un libro excelente muy dificil de poner a un lado luego que lo empezamos.

I bought this book in Spanish for my sister in law and decided to buy it in English for myself. Although I speak, read and write Spanish also, I'm more accustomed to reading in English. Bolano is a prolific writer and if you are a serious reader you will thoroughly enjoy this literary work.

Get hip to Bolano. His short stories are electrifying, a real revelation. I am enjoying Los Detectives Salvajes right now. Bolano was an intelligent writer: nuanced like Dylan Thomas, suspenseful like Kafka, learned like Borges, but with a modern fierceness and humor. Bolano is the heir to the wealth of all the best writers before him. I am thrilled to be reading such a talented writer.

Este es el primer libro que leo de Roberto Bolaño. Sus libros tienen buena crítica pero a mi este me ha dejado decepcionado.

Es un libro corto, de 150 paginas. Tiene dos párrafos y el segundo esta en la pagina 150 con 8 palabras solamente. Encontré bastante incomodo leer un libro sin párrafos (por no mencionar capítulos, etc). Cuando estas leyendo te sientes como que vas en un tren de alta velocidad, lo mejor es leer el libro completo de una vez.

El libro se pone interesante cuando el personaje principal, Fr. Urrutia
comienza a dar clases a un grupo particular de personajes.

De todas formas espero que sus dos libros más famosos; Los Detectives Salvajes/the Savage Detectives (Spanish Edition) y 2666 (Spanish Edition) sean mas interesantes y mas "digeribles" que este.

Ever since this Bolaño fellow died--prematurely, as it happens--a couple of years ago, there's been quite a fuss about his work. I read _Los detectives salvajes_ to find out what all that fuss was about. Now, more than six hundred pages and hours of reading later, I'm still waiting to find out.

First of all, some of the many folks--Amadeo Salvatierra, for one--in this long, polyphonic novel are annoying. Others--Ulises Lima comes to mind--are downright repulsive. For the the young Chilean Arturo Belano, the writer, strangely enough, seems to have some sympathy. The reader will find it difficult to do likewise.

Second, there are descriptions of dreams. Not too many, but enough to grate. When will writers ever learn that the quickest way to lose readers is to describe dreams?

Finally, not once, not once in almost seven hundred pages, did this book make me laugh. The only mildly funny thing about it is the way the "wild detectives" go about their ridiculous and immature undertakings with utter humorlessness. In fact, now that I think about it, the novel is probably about immaturity.

But I did give the thing three stars, didn't I? And it does have some virtues. But they are mostly virtues of omission. There is, thank the Lord, no magic realism. There is little exoticism. Cities are described very succinctly (largely by listing names of streets; reading _Los detectives_ was in some ways like perusing the index to a city atlas). Bolaño doesn't use ostentatious tricks to prove he's a genuine postmodernist.

On the whole, I'd say _Los detectives_ is somewhat inferior to Julio Ramón Ribeyro's _Los geniecillos dominicales_, another book with similar themes and a similar cast of characters.