With a new afterword by Natasha Wimmer 'Savagely comic yet equally tender ...This novel is an elegy for a generation' Independent New Year's Eve 1975, Mexico City. Two hunted men leave town in a hurry, on the desert-bound trail of a vanished poet. Spanning two decades and crossing continents, theirs is a remarkable quest through a darkening universe -- our own. It is a journey told and shared by a generation of lovers, rebels and readers, whose testimonies are woven together into one of the most dazzling Latin American ...
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With a new afterword by Natasha Wimmer 'Savagely comic yet equally tender ...This novel is an elegy for a generation' Independent New Year's Eve 1975, Mexico City. Two hunted men leave town in a hurry, on the desert-bound trail of a vanished poet. Spanning two decades and crossing continents, theirs is a remarkable quest through a darkening universe -- our own. It is a journey told and shared by a generation of lovers, rebels and readers, whose testimonies are woven together into one of the most dazzling Latin American novels of the twentieth century. 'The comic frenzy, the inventiveness of character and situation, and the mood-soaked depiction of 1970s Mexico is delightful' Times Literary Supplement 'A portrait of people for whom literature is bread and water, sex and death. The abiding message to be taken from Bolano's novel, and maybe from his fraught life, too: books matter' GQ 'It's no exaggeration to call Bolano a genius. The Savage Detectives alone should grant him immortality' Washington Post 'Bolano makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world' Guardian
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Seller's Description:
Very good in Very good jacket. VGC. Picador, 2007. First UK edition-first printing(1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2). Red hardback(silver lettering to the spine, small nick on the edges of the cover) with Dj (a couple of small nicks, ink marks and crease on the edges of the Dj cover), both in VGC. Illustrated with b/w drawings. Nice and clean pages with small ink marks and light shelf wear on the outer edges, two small creases on the edges of the pages. The book is in VGC with light shelf wear on the Dj cover (ink marks inside the edges of the Dj cover). 577p. Price un-clipped. Heavy book. First edition.
Roberto Bolaño's dazzling novel, which first appeared in 1998 and received its first English translation last year, ostensibly about the so-called visceral realists, a group of avante-garde poets in Mexico City in the mid-1970s, led by Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, is a mammoth work. It is in three parts, the first and third are from the diaries of the 17-year old law student and poet Juan Garcia Madero, and the second part (which, at over 400 pages, make the bulk of the book) features over fifty different first person narratives delivered by a vast and disparate cast of characters from all over the world. While the narrative has a strange power of taking hold of the reader and transporting them to a world just like ours, and yet not quite (the work strangely feels full of magic realism, but everything being described is ground in reality); the length of the novel occasionally causes some tedium. Also, and this may be due to the translation, for all the dazzling array of characters, I didn?t really find a great difference in the voices used, and they all sounded very similar to me.