Benjamin Kunkel writes:

The Savage Detectives is made up of three sections. The first 120-odd pages consist of the teenage poet Juan García Madero’s diary for November and December 1975, and record his ecstatic initiation into the worlds of poetry and sex. Much of the action takes place in the chaotic household of Quim Font, a mentally crumbling Spanish architect (presumably an exile from Franco’s regime) who is the father of two lovely poet daughters and the designer of the only two issues of the visceral realist journal Lee Harvey Oswald. If this title makes the never defined visceral realist project sound at once silly, dangerous and borderline senseless, it suits the atmosphere of the Font household after the architect has taken in, evidently without consulting his wife, a prostitute by the name of Lupe. The ridiculous and the harrowing are always close in Bolaño, and before long Lupe’s pimp and his goons have laid siege to the architect’s house…

(LRB 6 September 2007)

Picador | hardback |ISBN: 9780330445146