The Savage Detectives
Bolano, Roberto

RRP
A$22.99

New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Bolano and Ulises Lima, poets and leaders of a movement they call visceral realism, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their mission: to track down the poet Cesarea Tinajero, who disappeared into the Sonoran Desert (and into obscurity) decades before. But the detectives are themselves hunted men, and their search for the past will end in violence, flight, and permanent exile. In this dazzling novel, the book that established Roberto Bolano's international reputation, he tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes - the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself - on a tragicomic quest through a darkening, entropic universe: our own.

Author Information

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile. Arrested and briefly jailed by the Pinochet regime in 1973, he lived the rest of his life in El Salvador, Mexico, France, and finally Spain, where he settled outside Barcelona. In his early forties, he began to publish short stories and novellas. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998. When Roberto Bolaño died, at the age of fifty, he left behind a second full-length novel, 2666, which Picador Australia will publish in 2008.