The Savage Detectives: A Novel by Roberto Bolano (Paperback Edition): Booknear.com

"Over the last few years, Roberto Bola?o's reputation, in English at least, has been spreading in a quiet contagion; the loud arrival of a long novel, The Savage Detectives, will ensure that few are now untouched . . . The novel is wildly enjoyable (as well as, finally, full of lament), in part because Bola?o, despite all the game-playing, has a worldly literal, sensibility . . . The Savage Detectives is both melancholy and fortifying; and it is both narrowly about poetry and broadly about the difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth. Bola?o beautifully manages to keep his comedy and his pathos in the same family."-James Woods, The New York Times Book Review

"Bola?o's fiction is, in large part, an ironic mythologization of his personal history, and The Savage Detectives hews closest to what Latin-American writers call the Bola?o legend. The novel, which has been given a bracingly idiomatic translation by Natasha Wimmer, is a teeming, 'Manhattan Transfer'-like collage featuring more than fifty narrators . . . When The Savage Detectives was published, Ignacio Echevarr?a, Spain's most prominent literary critic, praised it as 'the kind of novel that Borges could have written.' He got it half right. Borges, whose longest work of fiction is fifteen pages, would likely have admired the way Bola?o's novel emerges from a branching tree of stories. But what would he have made of the delirious road trip, the frenzied sex, the sloppy displays of male ego? Bola?o fills his canvas with messy Lawrencian emotions but places them within a coolly cerebral frame. It's a style worthy of its own name: visceral modernism."-Daniel Zalewski, The New Yorker

"A magnum opus of serial narration and collective testimony . . . A work that established Bola?o's reputation in the Spanish-speaking world as a successor to Borges, Garc?a M?rquez, and Julio Cortazar, this 600-page novel has finally been published in English in a translation by Natasha Wimmer . . . It is an extraordinary work; obsessive, uneven, and magnificent, The Savage Detectives is a picaresque of late capitalism that demands utter submission from the reader as it presents an account in multiple voices of the adventures of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of a short-lived poetry movement called 'visceral realism.' Ostensibly about a quest by Belano and Lima for a mythical woman poet from the 1920s, The Savage Detectives is a hustler of a book."-Siddhartha Deb, Harper's Magazine

"The fifth of Bola?o's books to appear in English, and the first in a translation by Natasha Wimmer (who is best known for her work on Mario Vargas Llosa), The Savage Detectives was published in Spanish in 1998, under the title Los detectives salvajes. An outsized, autobiographical travelogue-in the course of which Bola?o and his friend Mario Santiago appear as the 'visercal realist' poets, pot dealer, drifters, and literary detectives Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, respectively-it was Bola?o's most ambitious work to date. That it works quite well as a mystery is the least of this novel's many surprises . . . But the bulk of The Savage Detectives is montage: an oral history narrated by male hustlers, female bodybuilders, mad architects, shell-shocked war correspondents, and Octavio Paz's personal secretary. There are fifty-two voices in all-jokers in the pack, Belano and Lima are not given speaking roles, appearing only in the recollections of others-and the stories they tell shade into one another, encompass historical forces and personages, and allude to specifics of the author's own biography . . . The savagery of the title is the savagery of youth-poetry, poverty, fiery idealism, quick fucks, blind drive, the threat of violence, and violence itself . . . The Savage Detectives can be read as a love letter to the Mexico they knew in the '70s, but much of the book sees Belano and Lima in Europe, and one, climatic chapter takes place in Liberia's killing fields. Like the films of Alejandro Gonz?lez I??rritu, The Savage Detectives is kaleidoscopic and antiprovincial-and the world it describes is recognizably our own . . . The Savage Detectives is good art. When it is dark, it is very dark. At other times, it is very funny, thrilling, tender, and erotic. At its best, it is dark, funny, thrilling, tender, and erotic at one and the same time, in a way few novels before it have been . . . Natasha Wimmer's translation, too, is lucid."-Alex Abramovich, Bookforum

"While norteamericanos were rereading dog-eared copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, a dyslexic, gl

Natasha Wimmer translated books by Mario Vargas Llosa and Bola?o's good friend Rodrigo Fres?n, among others, before tackling Bola?o's two long novels, The Savage Detectives and the upcoming 2666, which have had an immeasurable impact on modern Latin American fiction (and perhaps now on Anglo American writing as well). We asked her a few questions about the process of bringing such a vast and vital book into English.

Amazon.com: How did you come to literary translation, and to translating a work of such prestige? Is the community of Spanish-to-English literary translators small, given Americans' famous lack of interest in translated work?

Wimmer: Luck, really. I lived in Spain when I was little, which is where I learned Spanish, and then I studied Spanish literature in college, but it was a job in publishing--at FSG, the publisher of The Savage Detectives--that made me realize that literary translation was something I could try. I've been translating now for eight years. My first project was a novel by the Cuban writer Pedro Juan Guti?rrez, Dirty Havana Trilogy, and since then I've worked on books by Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Zaid, Rodrigo Fres?n, and Laura Restrepo. When I read The Savage Detectives, I thought it was one of the best novels I had read in any language in years, but I was sure there was no chance I would get to translate it. Bola?o already had a great translator--Chris Andrews. But Andrews couldn't do it, and I was the extremely fortunate runner-up.

The community of full-time translators is definitely small--it's hard to make a living. But there are many great occasional translators--professors, editors, writers.

Amazon.com: We're told that Bola?o towers over his generation of writers (and I can believe it). What did he do that was new? What has his influence been?

Wimmer: Bola?o was (is) the first to make a true break from the legacy of the Boom. Many other writers of his generation, and younger writers, too, have tried and are still trying to make a literature of their own, one that doesn't languish in the long shadow of Garc?a M?rquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and the other novelists who exploded on the world scene in the 1960s. Bola?o made the leap seem effortless. The writers of the Boom put Latin America on the map. Bola?o creates a Latin America of the mind, a post-nationalist Latin America filtered through a rootless, restless, uncompromising literary sensibility.

Amazon.com: Could you describe Bola?o's style and his sentences? (I love his parentheses.) How did you handle the dozens of voices in The Savage Detectives?

Wimmer: Bola?o is both a maximalist and a classicist. He loves to play with excess, with the notion of reckless abandon, but beneath that there is a very careful sense of balance. He was a poet for many years before he became a novelist, and he is an endlessly inventive stylist. But--more rarely for a poet--he also has an unerring sense of character and a palpable fondness for his characters. The Savage Detectives could never have worked otherwise. There are very few writers who could write a novel from the perspective of fifty-odd characters and make each character's story seem urgent and intimate.

From the translator's perspective, some voices were definitely more difficult than others, but I rarely felt that I had to strain to make them distinct from each other. Mostly, it just involved following Bola?o's cues. The hardest thing, oddly enough, was getting the rhythm of his sentences right. There is something syncopated and unpredictable about them that would have been all too easy to smooth over as a translator, and I made a concerted effort not to do that.

Amazon.com: All of his books are full of references to, and appearances by, Latin American writers both fictional and real and I'm sure as a clueless American reader I'm missing hundreds of inside jokes. What's it like to read his work when you actually know the people he's referring to?

Wimmer: It adds a little something, but not as much as you might think. And many of his references are obscure even to Spanish-language readers. There is something cultish and purposefully arcane about the literary world that Bola?o's protagonist, Garc?a Madero, yearns to join, and like Garc?a Madero, the reader is entranced by authors' names and book titles without knowing exactly where they come from.

Amazon.com: You are working on translating his other giant masterpiece, 2666, the even larger novel that he completed just before his death. How is it going? What can we expect from 2666?

Wimmer: It's an extremely long novel (1100 pages in the Spanish edition ), so it's a test of stamina, but it's going very well. Like The Savage Detectives, it revolves around a lost writer (Ces?rea Tinajero in TSD and Benno von Archimboldi in 2666), and the crucial episodes take place in the north of Mexico, but it is a darker book. The lurking sense of dread that many of the characters feel in TSD becomes something more palpable and sharply defined in 2666, and is linked to the killings of women in the Mexican city of Santa Teresa (modeled on Ciudad Ju?rez) and the legacy of the wars of the 20th century, particularly World War II.

The Savage Detectives: A Novel

The Savage Detectives: A Novel
by Roberto Bolano

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Book Review: A Tough Slog, But Worth the Effort
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