The wild detectivesthe portentous novel by the Chilean Roberto Bolaño considered by many as the last great latin american novelcelebrates 25 years of its publication this month with the vitality of books about which readers often say: “I’m rereading…”.
This novel, which belongs to the family of books that, according to Italo Calvino“they never finish saying what they have to say,” is divided into three parts with a non-linear structure and deep, musical prose with moments of humor, sometimes painful.
Arturo Belano, Bolaño’s alter ego, and Ulises Lima, inspired by the Mexican poet Mario Santiagothey are looking for Cesárea Tinajero, founder of the movement visceral realisma way of calling infrarealism, that group of young people who advised “live a lot, read a lot and fuck a lot”.
The search through various places in the world lasts 20 years, in which there are encounters, loves, books, deaths, spectacular escapes and moments of madness on the part of some characters.
[”Los detectives salvajes” puede comprarse en formato digital en Bajalibros clickeando acá]
“A historic and brilliant folder Hopscotchof Cortazar. A crack that opens gaps through which new literary currents will have to circulate,” said the Spanish novelist. Enrique Vila Matas when referring to what is perhaps the great novel of Latin America in the last 25 years.
The beginning of the book, with the diary of law student Juan García Madero, recruited to visceral realism, passes at great speed and then gives way to a second part with a chorus of voices that portrays Belano and Lima from different angles. The third segment takes up García Madero’s notes.
“I think that Hopscotch It was the novel of the 20s and The wild detectivesthe one at 40. Bolaño died in 2003 and since then we have been from the drug war to living without ideology; “We don’t know how Bolaño was going to feel ideologically, but he narrated the great defeat of the left,” the writer assured EFE this Monday. Monica Maristain.
As a journalist, the Argentine author was the last to interview Bolaño, she studied his work and some time later wrote Mister Playa’s son, a profile that reveals aspects of the author’s life and work. The novel, published in 1998, touches on themes such as the passion for literature, exile, displacement, the passage of time, identity and the desperation of young people, obsessed with founding and fixing the world.
Bolaño’s jewel painted a line with the ‘Latin American boom’ that revolutionized Latin American literature in the 20th century, but it deserved praise from authors of that group such as that of one of its icons, the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner. Mario Vargas Llosa.
[Otros libros de Roberto Bolaño pueden comprarse en formato digital en Bajalibros clickeando acá]
“It is an ambitious novel, wonderfully well started; The first 100 pages with the description of the Mexican world, bohemian semi-rulfianesque marginal, is well done. Then the novel changes and becomes a game,” said the author of The city and the Dogs.
Last April 28 marked the 70th anniversary of the birth of Bolaño, a writer who barely went to school, but who early on drank the books necessary to write and became a scholar with clean prose.
After his death on July 15, 2003, at the age of 50, he has remained vital with works such as 2666, Amulet and distant staralthough he is still identified with the portent written 25 years ago.
“From Bolaño’s books I stay with The wild detectives, the most endearing, the closest, the craziest and funniest. I lived through that time, I met the infrarealists and I once went on a drunken bender with them,” the writer revealed to EFE. Benito Taibo.
García Madero’s diary begins on the second day of November 1975 in a fictional world. In real life that day, 23 years later, the novel won the Anagrama award and in 1999 the Rómulo Gallegos award.
Source: EFE
