The Savage Detectives - Softcover

"An utterly unique achievement--a modern epic rich in character and event. . . . [He is] the most important writer to emerge from Latin America since Garcia Marquez."--"San Francisco"" Chronicle""" "My favorite writer . . . "The Savage Detectives "is an ark bearing all the strange salvage of poetry and youth from catastrophes past and those yet to come."--Nicole Krauss, author of "The History ""of Love" ""The Savage Detectives" is deeply satisfying. . . . Bolano's book throws down a great, clunking, formal gauntlet to his readers' conventional expectations. . . . A very good novel."--Thomas McGonigle, "Los Angeles"" Times" "One of the most respected and influential writers of [his] generation . . . At once funny and vaguely, pervasively, frightening."--John Banville, "The Nation" "A bizarre and mesmerizing novel . . . It's a lustful story--lust for sex, lust for self, lust for the written word."--"Esquire" "Roberto Bolano's masterwork, at last translated into English, confirms this Chilean's status as Latin America's literary enfant terrible."--"Vogue" "Combustible . . . A glittering, tumbling diamond of a book . . . When you are done with this book, you will believe there is no engine more powerful than the human voice."--Emily Carter Roiphe, "Star Tribune "(Minneapolis)"" "An exuberantly sprawling, politically charged picaresque novel."--"Elle""" "Wildly enjoyable . . . Bolano beautifully manages to keep his comedy and his pathos in the same family.""--The New York Times Book Review"

With a new afterword by Natasha Wimmer `Savagely comic yet equally tender . . . This novel is an elegy for a generation' Independent 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. `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 Bolano's novel, and maybe from his fraught life, too: books matter' GQ `It's no exaggeration to call Bolano a genius. The Savage Detectives alone should grant him immortality' Washington Post `Bolano makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world' Guardian