pynchon-l-digest V2 #5127

[Francois Monti]

On 1/4/07, pynchon-l-digest <owner-pynchon-l-digest at waste.org> wrote:
>
> Date: Thu, 04 Jan 2007 16:38:47 +0200
> From: "Ya Sam" <takoitov at hotmail.com>
> Subject: RE: Savage Detectives
>
> Thanks. Sounds cool.
>
> "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."


The comparison with Borges is spot on, but I really don't get the Pynchon
reference. I'm sure Bolañno, like Enrique Vila-Matas, did read Pynchon but I
can´t really see the influence in his writing.
The book was published in 1998, so it's not "the first great Latin American
novel of the twenty-first century", but the last one of the 20th century.
Bolaño is a major writer, the Cortazar of his time and I'm very glad the US
readers are getting the chance to discover his work. Too bad he died in 2003
at the tender age of 50...

" In turn coming-of-age story, roman noir, literary quest, this is a real
tour de force, reminiscent of *Julio Cortazar* and *Jack Kerouac* while
remaining deeply original. Bolano passed away in 2003. He was fifty years
old, and I just can't help thinking about what else might have been coming
from him. He was undoubtedly a unique South-American writer; dare I say the
best of his generation?"

http://www.themillionsblog.com/2006/12/year-in-reading-tabula-rasa.html

For the Borges-Bolano link, read this:
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article.php?lab=BorgesAndBolano

F.
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