Mexican poets on a wild quest / Terror lurks below surface of sprawling epic as dozens of narrators build a funny, unsettling universe – The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

“When he died in Barcelona at 50 in 2003, the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño was already a legend in the Spanish-speaking world — the most important writer to emerge from Latin America since Garcí Márquez, and the voice of a generation devastated by war and the ascendance of oppressive dictatorships across the region. When I began reading “The Savage Detectives” last month, I had already devoured the first three of Bolaños books to arrive in English — two short novels, “By Night in Chile” and “Distant Star,” and the story collection “Last Evenings on Earth” — and become a devoted fan. But I was still unprepared for “The Savage Detectives,” the work that made his reputation when it first appeared in 1998, and for which he was awarded the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Available now in a seamless translation by Natasha Wimmer, this novel is an utterly unique achievement — a modern epic rich in character and event, suffused in every sentence with Bolaños unsettling mix of precision and mystery. Its a lens through which the strange becomes ordinary and the ordinary is often very strange.”

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