I just started reading the newly translated book The Savage Detectives by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. He wrote this in 1998 and this is its first appearance in English. He spent the last ten years of his life writing most of his body of work after a pretty adventurous and itinerant life. He died in 2003 at the age of 50 in Spain, widely considered to be one of the most influential South American writers of the late 20th century. New Directions translated and published his shorter works over the last couple of years, but his novels until now had remained untranslated. So this is a bit of a publishing event. And if that weren't already clear The New Yorker has a fantastic piece about Bolaño and this novel in their most recent issue, which I highly recommend.

I'm jumping the gun a bit in talking about this book today. It won't be available until next week (April 2nd), but I'll be sure to remind you in my next missive.

The opening of the book details a young student's initiation into a gang of renegade poets, the Visceral Realists. It had me at 'nicharchean'. He is lured away from his university class in poetry by these brazen poets and doesn't turn back.

I did stumble a bit at the opening, but not from the text. I opened the book and the first thing I saw was a quote from Malcolm Lowry. This worried me. I thought it might not bode well. Malcolm Lowry is an author I've found to be enormously difficult. You see, I've tried to read Under the Volcano, I mean seriously tried, not just a couple of pages tried, at least three seperate times. These times were punctuated by years between them! The first time was for a Modern American Writers class. Tortuous. I forced myself to get through at least 100 pages for the sake of being a half-way decent student, but I just couldn't go on. This book was in the Modern Library Top 100 Novels list! It was #11 on the Board's List and #39 on the Reader's List! What's wrong with me? Of the books on that list that I've read I think I feel good about almost all of them, except Mr. Lowry's. The ensuing attempts were just as frustrating and ultimately abortive. Somehow I just couldn't get into his lugubrious Mexican epic. But as for Bolano, I pushed past the quote and I haven't looked back.