Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme that was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners. This meme is quite easy to follow – just randomly pick a book from your to-be-read list and give the reasons why you want to read it. It is that simple.
This week’s book:
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Blurb from Goodreads
New Year’s Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.
The explosive first long work by “the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.
A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.
Why I Want to Read It
Since I started expounding my reading horizon, one of the parts of literature that has captivated me is South American literature. Through Nobel Laureate in Literature Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I was initiated into the wonderful, colorful and diverse world of Latino literature which, I have later on learned, is a very established sector of literature with renowned writers such as Mexican poet Octavio Paz, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa to name a few. What is even more impressive, I have unconsciously came up with a list of authors who have also earned the honor of being named as Nobel Prize in Literature winners.
Apart from those I have named, there are also other South American authors whose works I kept encountering in numerous must-read lists. One such author is (yet another) Chilean writer, Roberto Bolaño. Because of this, and because of the impressive resume of South American authors, I resolve to take a deeper plunge into this spectacular world. What a better way to establish a better relationship than through one of Bolaño’s most seminal works, The Savage Detectives.
Reading the synopsis, my curiosity and interest is even more piqued. I’ve already had an Asian Literature, a European Literature and an African Literature months. Maybe a South American Literature month is in order? We’ll see in the future.
Happy start of the week everyone!
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 