The Savage Detectives: A Novel [Paperback]

National Bestseller

In this dazzling novel, the book that established his international reputation, Roberto Bola?o 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.The Savage Detectivesis an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age.

Roberto Bola?owas born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealist poetry movement. His first full-length novel,The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize and the R?mulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998. Roberto Bola?o died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty.

An utterly unique achievement--a modern epic rich in character and event. . . . [He is] the most important writer to emerge from Latin America since Garc?a M?rquez. San Francisco Chronicle

My favorite writer . . .The Savage Detectivesis an ark bearing all the strange salvage of poetry and youth from catastrophes past and those yet to come. Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love

The Savage Detectivesis deeply satisfying. . . . Bola?o's book throws down a great, clunking, formal gauntlet to his readers' conventional expectations. . . . A very good novel. Thomas McGonigle, Los Angeles Times

One of the most respected and influential writers of [his] generation . . . At once funny and vaguely, pervasively, frightening. John Banville, The Nation

A bizarre and mesmerizing novel . . . It's a lustful story--lust for sex, lust for self, lust for the written word. Esquire

Roberto Bola?o's masterwork, at last translated into English, confirms this Chilean's status as Latin America's literary enfant terrible. Vogue

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