The Savage Detectives

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 mission was to locate the unknown and missing poet Cesárea Tinajero. Twenty years after a bloody confrontation in the Sonora desert, Belano and Lima are still evading capture.

The Savage Detectives, the gripping first novel by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), follows Belano and Lima as seen by the individuals whose paths they cross in West Africa, Israel, Central America, and Europe. The gorgeous Font sisters, the muses of visceral realism; their father, an architect imprisoned in a Mexico City asylum; Octavio Paz's sensitive young disciple; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinean photojournalist in Angola; and a variety of hangers-on, critics, admirers, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances are included in this chorus.

Roberto Bolaño, a polymathic descendent of Pynchon and Borges, explores the unspoken relationship between violence and literature in a world where borders are blurred and death looms large over the avant-garde. The first really great Latin American book of the twenty-first century, The Savage Detectives is a brilliant unique work.