The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño - Words Without Borders
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The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño - Words Without Borders
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The itinerant, Chilean-born writer Roberto Bolano, who died in 2003, has become one of the most internationally recognized and influential of Latin American novelists despite the fact that much of his work wasn’t even published while he was alive.
In contrast to other celebrated South American literary exports such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Bolano wasn’t much interested in magical realism. (He accused the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, one of magical realism’s most commercially successful practitioners, of writing anemic “kitsch.”) That is not to say that Bolano’s writing was conventional or realist in any typical sense. His style is deliberately fragmented, often to frustratingly elusive effect. His body of work returns often to the same characters, themes, and incidents, which are described from different and sometimes contradictory angles and from the perspectives of a legion of interlocutors. As with Jorge Luis Borges, one of his influences, B