Mexico · Literary fiction
The Savage Detectives
In 1970s Mexico City, young poets gather around Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, whose literary rebellion becomes entangled with friendships, desire and the search for a vanished poet. Their departure for the Sonoran desert opens a story that eventually ranges far beyond Mexico, following their traces through the voices of people who knew them.
Bolaño gives the reader a restless city of conversations, rivalries and lives lived around literature. The book’s shifting narrators make memory part of the journey: people appear, disappear and return in someone else’s account. Mexico provides its beginnings and its urgent search, even as the novel carries its characters across continents.
Poetry; Youth; Literary life; Travel