RARA-AVIS: Re: Savage Detectives

From: Michael Saler ( mtsaler@ucdavis.edu)
Date: 18 Feb 2008


I'm a long-time lurker (and long-time appreciator) of this group, but as a Bolano fan have to strongly second mrt's endorsement of _The Savage Detectives_. It's a brilliant novel on its own, sort of an _On The Road_ with paragraph breaks, and while it is not wholy concerned with criminals (though there are plenty of them), Bolano himself appreciated crime fiction and said in his last interview that if he could be anything other than a writer, he'd be a detective.

The following description of _2666_, which is currently being translated into English for Farrar, Straus & Giraux, indicates that it falls directly into noirish territory:

"Divided into five sections that Bolano first envisioned as separate novels, to be published one a year, "2666" begins with the hunt for a writer who has disappeared. But the search for the writer converges with the efforts of police confronting a serial killer who preys on female factory workers in a Mexican border town."

A shorter novel about the search for a serial killer is his _Distant Star_, which is an extended version of the final story that appears in his latest "novel," _Nazi Literatures in the Americas_.

Mike



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