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David Kurnick argues that the controversies surrounding Roberto Bolañös life and work have obscured his achievements¿and that
The Savage Detectives is still underappreciated for the subtlety and vitality of its portrait of collective life. He explores the novel as an epic of social structure and its decomposition.
List of contents
Introduction
I. Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975)
Some Neighborhoods of Part I
II. The Savage Detectives (1976–1996)
Some Microclimates of Part II
III. The Deserts of Sonora (1976)
Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the author
David Kurnick is associate professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (Princeton, 2012) and the translator of Julio Cortázar’s Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires (Semiotext[e], 2014). His writing has also been published in a variety of publications, including boundary 2, ELH, PMLA, Raritan, Victorian Studies, NOVEL, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and Public Books
Summary
The Savage Detectives elicits mixed feelings. An instant classic in the Spanish-speaking world upon its 1998 publication, a critical and commercial smash on its 2007 translation into English, Roberto Bolaño’s novel has also been called an exercise in 1970s nostalgia, an escapist fantasy of a romanticized Latin America, and a publicity event propped up by the myth of the bad-boy artist.
David Kurnick argues that the controversies surrounding Bolaño’s life and work have obscured his achievements—and that The Savage Detectives is still underappreciated for the subtlety and vitality of its portrait of collective life. Kurnick explores The Savage Detectives as an epic of social structure and its decomposition, a novel that restlessly moves between the big configurations—of states, continents, and generations—and the everyday stuff—parties, jobs, moods, sex, conversation—of which they’re made. For Kurnick, Bolaño’s book is a necromantic invocation of life in history, one that demands surrender as much as analysis.
Kurnick alternates literary-critical arguments with explorations of the novel’s microclimates and neighborhoods—the little atmospheric zones where some of Bolaño’s most interesting rethinking of sexuality, politics, and literature takes place. He also claims that The Savage Detectives holds particular interest for U.S. readers: not because it panders to them but because it heralds the exhilarating prospect of a world in which American culture has lost its presumptive centrality.
Additional text
How to read The Savage Detectives anew? By providing a fresh, comprehensive, and detailed close reading that engages with the specificities of the book’s tantalizing idiosyncrasies without pandering to reductionist critical stances. Kurnick vindicates enthusiasm as a critical point of departure, a methodology almost, without succumbing to hagiography or fandom.
