The Biblio Blogazine

Still unsure I made the right decision to join my first Read-Along, I was excited to see the Bibliolatrist’s recent blog entry about her experience with Bolaño’s story. I immediately grabbed my copy and started reading in order to catch up.

First of all, I am not one to read introductions, but this is a translation so I feel it necessary to glean as much information as I can in order to better understand the author and his work.

Natasha Wimmer, the translator, provides wonderful insights I know will help me in approaching this read:

Bolaño once described The Savage Detectives as his own answer to Huckleberry Finn. Like its precursor, The Savage Detectivesis about friendship – not just between Belano and Lima, but between them and the chorus of fellow writers who help narrate the book. It is also, like Huckleberry Finn, a story of lost innocence. Beginning in Mexico City, the novel travels to Paris, Israel, Vienna, and Barcelona, and, most of all, through twenty years of irreversible experience and generalized disappointment. As Bolaño said in his acceptance speech for the Premio Rómulo Gallegos, “All of Latin America is sown with the bones of its forgotten youths.” In The Savage Detectives, he brings those youths back to life.

The first section of the book is narrated by a teenage boy in Mexico City, apparently patterned after the author’s own experiences and of those who dropped “out of school to devote himself to reading and writing and adolescent rebellion”. It was also at this time that the passion for poetry came to the forefront of the author, and his narrator’s, life.

I agree with Bibliolatrist that there is more humor than expected, but also bittersweet feelings as Juan García Madero loses himself and his innocence. It’s just as the title of the section says: Mexicans Lost In Mexico.

Just as we discover that Madero and others are seeking someone, we also come to see they are also seeking something: an identity.

This is a book about friends, but more so a journey of discovery.

I am intrigued enough, so far, to follow them as they wander.

If you are interested in joining, please read this post.