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A review by copper_rose45
Los detectives salvajes by Roberto Bolaño
3.0
This is one of those cases where the rating I want to give can't be given. For me this is a 3.5 star book, but I don't feel like rounding it up to 4 stars because it's not where I think it should be.
This is a novel - a celebrated novel - that tells the story of two main characters: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. The novel is composed in the form of journal entries by a third character (these are in the begining and in the end), and a series of testimonial pieces of a wide array of other characters that tell their stories through a span of twenty-two years which follow Arturo and/or Ulises or characters directly related to them.
In often crude, mysogynistic language and literary imagery, interspersed with "big words", the book takes us into the world of a group of Latin American poets who want to bring forth a new literary or artistic movement they call "real visceral", which follows on the footsteps of an obscure poet, Cesárea Tinajero, a women who wrote poetry in the 20's (that's 1920's), who was exceptional and the origin of the movement, but who one day disappeared and none of her poems was ever found.
Time flows and there seem to be a search for Cesárea Tinajero and her poems, but often the scenes don't seem to suggest anything leading to this poet. A thread, like a flashback keeps tying together the story as time goes by until it is finally brought to the topic the book has been skirting about.
The writing is interesting, out of the norm, and the narrative is multi-voiced and particular, but it was not my thing. Sometimes the stories didn't seem to go nowhere, the connections were uninteresting or heavy with mysogyny and gratuitous in vulgarities.
This is a novel - a celebrated novel - that tells the story of two main characters: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. The novel is composed in the form of journal entries by a third character (these are in the begining and in the end), and a series of testimonial pieces of a wide array of other characters that tell their stories through a span of twenty-two years which follow Arturo and/or Ulises or characters directly related to them.
In often crude, mysogynistic language and literary imagery, interspersed with "big words", the book takes us into the world of a group of Latin American poets who want to bring forth a new literary or artistic movement they call "real visceral", which follows on the footsteps of an obscure poet, Cesárea Tinajero, a women who wrote poetry in the 20's (that's 1920's), who was exceptional and the origin of the movement, but who one day disappeared and none of her poems was ever found.
Time flows and there seem to be a search for Cesárea Tinajero and her poems, but often the scenes don't seem to suggest anything leading to this poet. A thread, like a flashback keeps tying together the story as time goes by until it is finally brought to the topic the book has been skirting about.
The writing is interesting, out of the norm, and the narrative is multi-voiced and particular, but it was not my thing. Sometimes the stories didn't seem to go nowhere, the connections were uninteresting or heavy with mysogyny and gratuitous in vulgarities.