"Do you want Mexico to be saved? Do you want Christ to be our king?" "No."

The Savage Detectives is about two visceral realist poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Bolano, who leave Mexico City on the last night of 1975 and travel around the expanse of the globe, to Barcelona, to Tel Aviv, to Paris, Catalonia, Madrid, Mallorca, San Francisco, searching for themselves, for each other, for guidance, for a lost poet named Cesarea. The story is essentially a collage of hundreds of conflicting first-person monologues - told to an always absent interviewer, perhaps an inquiring mind, perhaps Bolano himself - which together paint two decades of a broken chaotic and insanely beautiful earth.

Roberto Bolano feverishly wrote this and his other sprawling epic, 2666, while fighting against the inevitability of a fatal liver disease. He died in 2003 at the age of 50, leaving behind nearly 1500 pages of the most heartbreaking, poetic, lucid prose I've ever read. 1500 pages of memories, of stories, of philosophy, of imagination. Bolano has deeply infiltrated my consciousness, my strange loop, and I'm very thankful for the afternoon that Zeke Sulkes mentioned his name and I thought to ask: who?