LOVE FOR LIVRES

0610

Publisher presentation: New Year’s Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run. The explosive first long work by “the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz a foul-mouthed American graduate student a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances. Prize Herralde (es) of the Novel in 1998 and Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1999.