The Savage Detectives

Critics Review

• “Wildly enjoyable…Bolaño beautifully manages to keep his comedy and his pathos in the same family.”

  New York Times Book Review

• “The Savage Detectives, which, like 2666, has been translated with wonderful agility by Natasha Wimmer, catapulted [Bolaño] from obscurity to worshipful adulation.”

  Janet Maslin, New York Times

• “Deeply satisfying…Bolaño’s book throws down a great, clunking, formal gauntlet to his readers’ conventional expectations.”

  Los Angeles Times

• “An utterly unique achievement—a modern epic rich in character and event…[Bolaño is] the most important writer to emerge from Latin America since García Márquez.”

  San Francisco Chronicle

• “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.”

  Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

• “One of the most respected and influential writers of [his] generation…At once funny and vaguely, pervasively, frightening.”

  Nation

• “An instant cult hit among readers and practically a fetish object to critics.”

  Time

• “A bizarre and mesmerizing novel…It’s a lustful story—lust for sex, lust for self, lust for the written word.”

  Esquire

• “Roberto Bolaño’s masterwork…confirms this Chilean’s status as Latin America’s literary enfant terrible.”

  Vogue

• “An exuberantly sprawling, politically charged picaresque novel.”

  Elle

• “By turns humorous and sad, this literary mystery also affirms the value of literature and serves as a modern history of the Latin American literary scene. Critics praised Bolaño’s vivid, experimental novel, applauding Natasha Wimmer’s skillful translation from the chatty, slang-filled Spanish…inventive and entertaining.”

  Bookmarks Magazine

• “This novel—the major work from Chilean-born novelist Bolaño, here beautifully translated by Wimmer—will allow English speaking readers to discover a truly great writer…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…Bolaño fashions an engrossing lost world of youth and utopian ambition, as particular and vivid as it is sad and uncontainable.”

  Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• “The late Chilean writer Bolaño’s 1998 (US 2007) novel begins with a seventeen-year-old’s diary entries describing life in 1970 Mexico City. The narrative’s second part is a meditation on the visceral realism movement founded by poets Ulises Lima and Arturo Bolaño, capped by their search twenty years previously for the poet Cesárea Tinajero. This Latin American On the Road presents a dreamlike patchwork of Lima and Belaño’s adventures from which to reconstruct their literary pilgrimage. Narrators Eddie Lopez and Armando Duran reinforce the novel’s sense of place with their rounded pronunciations. Essential.”

  Library Journal, Best Audiobooks of 2009 (starred review)