The Savage Detectives Reread

Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-0-231-19411-2
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 224 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 199 mm x 129 mm, Gewicht: 252 g

Reihe: Rereadings

The Savage Detectives elicits mixed feelings. An instant classic in the Spanish-speaking world upon its 1998 publication, a critical and commercial smash on its 2007 translation into English, Roberto Bolaño’s novel has also been called an exercise in 1970s nostalgia, an escapist fantasy of a romanticized Latin America, and a publicity event propped up by the myth of the bad-boy artist.

David Kurnick argues that the controversies surrounding Bolaño’s life and work have obscured his achievements—and that The Savage Detectives is still underappreciated for the subtlety and vitality of its portrait of collective life. Kurnick explores The Savage Detectives as an epic of social structure and its decomposition, a novel that restlessly moves between the big configurations—of states, continents, and generations—and the everyday stuff—parties, jobs, moods, sex, conversation—of which they’re made. For Kurnick, Bolaño’s book is a necromantic invocation of life in history, one that demands surrender as much as analysis.

Kurnick alternates literary-critical arguments with explorations of the novel’s microclimates and neighborhoods—the little atmospheric zones where some of Bolaño’s most interesting rethinking of sexuality, politics, and literature takes place. He also claims that The Savage Detectives holds particular interest for U.S. readers: not because it panders to them but because it heralds the exhilarating prospect of a world in which American culture has lost its presumptive centrality.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kurnick, David

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Romanische Literaturen Lateinamerikanische Literaturen, Spanische Literatur außerhalb Europas

Über Autor(innen)

Kurnick, David
David Kurnick is associate professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (Princeton, 2012) and the translator of Julio Cortázar’s Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires (Semiotext[e], 2014). His writing has also been published in a variety of publications, including boundary 2, ELH, PMLA, Raritan, Victorian Studies, NOVEL, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and Public Books

David Kurnick is associate professor of English at Rutgers University at New Brunswick. He is the author of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (2012). His writing has appeared in the Village Voice, Public Books, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and his translations from Spanish include Julio Cortázar’s Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires (2014) and work by Álvaro Enrigue.