![]() ![]() Anyway, the forward-rushing momentum of The Savage Detectives owes nothing at all to the real-life Mexico City personalities and misadventures that people in the know are able to identify. A mythology has sprung up about Bolaño, entirely of his own devising, and the mythology could end up eclipsing his actual writings, which would be a shame. But you might be better off not knowing any of these autobiographical details. And The Savage Detectives, in its account of the “visceral realist” leader “Arturo Belano,” hints at the real-life Bolaño’s poor health and sufferings-the physical decline that led to his early death in 2003. ![]() ![]() The reviews have already pointed out that in The Savage Detectives, as in his much shorter novel Amulet, Bolaño has offered up a fictional version of his own experiences-his adventures as a Chilean student who came of age in Mexico City and helped found an avant-garde poetry movement in the mid-1970s, and his movement’s pesky habit of mischievously persecuting its literary elders and rivals and generally wreaking mayhem in the brio style of the surrealists of yore, or maybe in the style of the revolutionary student left, post-1968. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |