Alumni Association of Portland presents "McGill Reads: "The Savage Detectives" by Roberto Bolaño"
Our meetings are held once a month, and at each session, one
member will lead the discussion of a book they recommended and
which was agreed upon by the group.
About The Savage Detectives:
This novel - the major work from Chilean-born novelist Bolaño
(1953-2003) here beautifully translated by Wimmer - will allow
English speaking readers to discover a truly great writer.
In early 1970s Mexico City, young poets Arturo Belano (Bolaño's
alter ego and a regular in his fiction) and Ulises Lima start a
small, erratically militant literary movement, the Visceral
Realists, named for another, semimythical group started in the
1920s by the nearly forgotten poet Cesárea Tinajero. The book opens
with 17 year-old Juan García Madero's precocious, deadpan notebook
entries, dated 1975, chronicling his initiation into the
movement.
The long middle section - written, like George Plimpton's
Edie, as a set of anxiously vivid testimonies from
friends, lovers, bystanders and a great many enemies - tracks
Belano and Lima as they travel the globe from 1975 to the
mid-1990s. There are copious, and acidly hilarious, references to
the Latin American literary scene, and one needn't be an insider to
get the jokes: they're all in Bolaño's masterful shifts in tone,
captured with precision by Wimmer.
The book's moving final section flashes back to 1976, as Belano,
Lima and García Madero search for Cesárea Tinajero, with a young
hooker named Lupe in tow. Bolaño fashions an engrossing lost world
of youth and utopian ambition, as particular and vivid as it is sad
and uncontainable. (Publishers Weekly)