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Great Translations: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
In this quasi-autobiographical story, a group of intense young poets, men and women, knock around Mexico City. Their lives revolve around poetry: reading it, writing poems, trying to get their poems published in fly-by-night literary magazines that only they read. The intensity of their love for poetry is disarming.
The Setting: Mexico City in the 1970s. The young people exist in odd hours, wandering aimlessly through the city, drinking, making love, stealing books from bookstores, and talking poetry constantly. As they get older they become émigrés in Europe, mainly in Paris and Barcelona, but also in Germany, Israel and Africa. This is Jack Kerouac’s story if he had been a Latin American.
The Story: The book is structured in three parts. The first part is their youth in Mexico City as described above. A group of them free a woman from her pimp and flee to the northwestern Mexican desert in search of a perhaps-mythical woman poet. They are chased by the pimp and the police. The third section of the book is the conclusion of this story.
The middle of the book is a series of 4- and 5-page vignettes by folks who knew these poets throughout their lives. Some parents, friends, acquaintances and distant relatives who fed and housed them…
