The Savage Detectives

Certain books haunt you long after you're done reading them. Images, passages, scenes, or entire texts can remain as reminders of another world for months. Not all writers strive for this affect, that's for sure, but it's a rare writer indeed, Roberto Bolano for one, who seems to create in such an ethereal manner that you're not quite sure why you're entranced by the prose or enchanted by the characters or their situations. A love for literature, poetry primarily, infuses his novel The Savage Detectives. Lost souls in search of the written word, who in fact have the written word infused into their DNA, populate the world Belano has created, one very much based on real life. Reading the book, however, bordered, at times, on the burdensome in nature. It was only after the book was long finished that I realized that I was missing it in so many ways. It gave a portrait of a world entirely alien to me, but at the same time infinitely ideal. Living a life as such a literary vagabond borders on the cliche and tiresome, but it's certainly one of the more dreamlike occupations anyone who feels the written word fantasizes about.