Sometimes they wrote poetry, but I don't think they were poets either." I assume it was Arturo and Ulises but they could not have been there in Jan 1976. His two novels published this spring in America, The Savage Detectives and Amulet, each include Arturo Belano, a Chilean living in Mexico City. Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Plot Summary of “The Savage Detectives” by Roberto Bolano. Bolaño is in their company: the quotation here is broken off of a phrase that takes about a page in the book. The Savage Detectives recounts the history of avant-garde poets from 1975 in Mexico City until 1996 in Africa. He also liked what he didn’t see. Lima, he says, is living in Mexico City. Or maybe our criteria are purely negative, a, I'll bet a lot of us walk around with some real concrete ideas about just who it is we could possibly fall in love with. . Like much of his work, the novel is craftily autobiographical. I am struggling over writing this review. . They exist in odd hours, wander aimlessly through the city, drink, make love, steal books from bookstores, and talk poetry constantly. Why is this troublesome then? Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. It will not surprise you to learn that Roberto Bolaño wrote poetry before he wrote fiction. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for The Savage Detectives: A Novel at Amazon.com. There's nothing. A brilliant novel, fully deserving of … Natasha Wimmer's English translation was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007. Lima goes to Nicaragua, and disappears there; two years later he has returned to Mexico City, and is glimpsed by the secretary of Octavio Paz. The Savage Detectives tells the story of a fictional poetic movement called visceral realism, founded in Mexico City in the mid-1970s. It’s really tough for me to do a proper analysis without spoilers. This is the second time I’ve read TSD, and this time I read it differently, for lack of a better term, I read it more slowly, closely if you will, things began to appear to me that hadn’t with the first reading. From Wolfgang Iser we learn (perhaps, more than we’d like) about the Implied Reader. A soaring tale of literary adventure, Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives is packed with pimps, poets, detectives and dealers. The one who’s taken all the various pieces, strands, stories of known origin but unknown behest, and determinedly (savagely?) Borges and Pynchon for those who don't need that sort of nonsense? Buy The Savage Detectives Main Market by Bolaño, Roberto, Wimmer, Natasha (ISBN: 8601404783050) from Amazon's Book Store. What all the characters share is a sense of instability and terror lurking just beneath the surface, a pervasive disquiet that drives the prose." In fact, given the range of styles and approaches he employs, perhaps a correspondingly wide range of responses is also to be expected. A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The novel follows "savage detectives" Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima as they try to track him down. Aiming to usurp the throne of literature from Octavio Paz (and, later, Gabriel Garcia Marquez), Roberto Bolaño produced something unselfconsciously yet distinctly his own. The Savage Detectives Summary. It reminded him of, What differentiates Bolaño from other much-loved authors is that he does not have a singular, distinctive style by which he can be universally recognised. In The Savage Detectives, Belano, alongside his fellow poet, compatriot, and enigma Ulises Lima, plays a central role. They exist in odd hours, wander aimlessly through the city, drink, make love, steal books from bookstores, and talk poetry constantly. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. To begin with, the story of Amadeo Salvatierra (dated January 1976): in an extended ‘testimony’ which spans 13 of the section’s 26 chapters, Salvatierra recounts the night and morning spent with Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, drinking heavily, discussing Cesárea Tinajero, and analyzing the only poem of her’s Salvatierra has; Lima and Belano explain to Salvatierra that the poem is a joke. The Savage Detectives is an 1998 novel, Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s epic on the life of storytellers. by Roberto Bolaño & translated by Natasha Wimmer ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 2007. There are scads of great reviews for TSD, covering themes, impressions, and how Bolaño fits into the mindscapes of the various reviewers. It works or it doesn’t, but you can’t fault the song—not without being a dick. He knew time was short: the fiction that is currently being translated — there are more novellas to come, and a huge novel, "2666," will appear in English next year — was written in a spasm of activity in his last years. The musical control is impeccable, and one is struck by Bolaño's ability to nudge on his long, light, ethereal sentence — impossibly, like someone punting a leaf — image by image: the falcon, the red hue, the sunset, the dawn, the dawn seen from a plane, the femoral artery, the blood vessel, the abstract painter. The best way to offer a sense of this writer might be to take a scene, and a sentence, from "By Night in Chile," still his greatest work. This review focuses on The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. In Turin, Father Angelo has a fearsome falcon called Othello; in Strasbourg, Father Joseph has one named Xenophon; in Avignon, the murderous falcon is named Ta Gueule, and the narrator watches it in action: "Ta Gueule appeared again like a lightning bolt, or the abstract idea of a lightning bolt, and stooped on the huge flocks of starlings coming out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening the sky with their erratic fluttering, and after a few minutes the fluttering of the starlings was bloodied, scattered and bloodied, and afternoon on the outskirts of Avignon took on a deep red hue, like the color of sunsets seen from an airplane, or the color of dawns, when the passenger is woken gently by the engines whistling in his ears and lifts up the little blind and sees the horizon marked with a red line, like the planet's femoral artery, or the planet's aorta, gradually swelling, and I saw that swelling blood vessel in the sky over Avignon, the blood-stained flight of the starlings, Ta Guele splashing color like an Abstract Expressionist painter.". Well, that's not quite accurate. Bolaño beautifully manages to keep his comedy and his pathos in the same family. A long list of characters fishing for the lay reader's empathy? probably the young, and definitely the formerly young; people who like to read, I'll bet a lot of us walk around with some real concrete ideas about just who it is we could possibly fall in love with. Lima is based on one of Bolaño's friends, the poet Mario Santiago, and Belano is based on ... Bolaño. (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. Read The Savage Detectives book reviews & author details … Father Urrutia discovers that the chief threat to the churches comes from pigeon excrement, and that all over Europe churches have been using falcons to kill the pests. Where did they go after the Sonoran Desert? The Catholic Church is likened to a bird of prey, murderous and blood-red in its second capital, Avignon, and we are free to link this, without coercion, to the Chilean situation and the ethical somnolence of Father Urrutia. The search for a missing poet is the nominal subject of the late (1953–2003) expatriate Chilean author’s blazingly original 1998 masterpiece. . Unless we assume that Bolaño was sloppy with his timeline, we have to believe someone asked Salvatierra to account for his night with Lima and Belano—someone other than Belano, as during January, 1976, Belano was chasing all over the desert and there’s no indication he’d contacted anyone from the road. An Israeli friend of Ulises Lima's says that the importance of the poets' lives had nothing to do with visceral realism: "It has to do with life, with what we lose without knowing it and what we can regain." Over the last few years, Roberto Bolaño's reputation, in English at least, has been spreading in a quiet contagion; the loud arrival of a long novel, "The Savage Detectives," will ensure that few are now untouched. I am told this novel made some minor splash upon its publication. Like. It took me more than 3 weeks to get here and I just can't continue. These are all people whose lives intersected, however briefly, with the two visceral realists, from 1976 to 1996. What differentiates Bolaño from other much-loved authors is that he does not have a singular, distinctive style by which he can be universally recognised. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century. that's nothing compared to this book. Originally written in Spanish by Roberto Bolaño, translated into English by Natasha Wimmer. band and has great feminist politics and knows how to cook. Again, it should be stressed that this is not just a postmodern game about the fictionality of novelistic characters (though it is that, too). This novel has caused me great distress (not so much reading, but trying to figure out just how many of those little stars to dish out). Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for The Savage Detectives at Amazon.com. This almost aggressively literary novel, which won major Latin American literary prizes and follows into English translation several briefer works ( Last Evenings … One of the titles from my Favorites shelf, do I really need to tell you how much I like it? The Savage Detectives is an ark bearing all the strange salvage of poetry and youth from catastrophes past and those yet to come.” ―Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love “The Savage Detectives is deeply satisfying. The novel follows "savage detectives" Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima as they try to track him down. Ladies and Gentlemen, you want to know wh. Because it seems almost impossible to organize ideas for this review, in ode to the author I will present it as so: I have a good feeling about this, based on the first few pages. Go figure. If you enjoy the first 120 pages, read on and you'll likely find your voice added to those in … In the first, a square that looks a bit like a boat on a horizon, sits on a calm, straight line. Likewise, this fantasia about falcons in every European city might have been thuddingly allegorical or irritatingly whimsical, and isn't. In a wonderfully sad scene, Lima approaches Paz, and the two sit on a bench, talking. When it was released, The Savage Detectives received incredibly positive reviews. So in a way when we talk about a shared appreciation of. Minutes after delivering this wisdom this same man dies in a car accident. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. Maybe when we're nineteen, we're convinced we could only ever truly love a man with a neck tattoo who sings lead in an Oi! A rave rating based on 11 book reviews for The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, Trans. . Are they the unnamed interviewers of the various testimonies in section II (which would include Belano)? In the penultimate interview, and it’s clearly an interview addressed to an anonymous ‘sir,’ Ernesto García Grajales (Dec. ’96) summarizes what became of the Visceral Realists premised on the research he’s done for a book: “Yes, you could say I’m the foremost scholar in the field, [visceral realism/visceral realists] the definitive authority, but that’s not saying much. Salvatierra tells his story while Lima and Belano are off in the desert, far, far away from Mexico City. The least we can do is point it out and follow it back to its sordid origins, especially for a book such as this, one that follows the trail of wannabe written word devotees and doesn't tune out a single one. The Savage Detectives (Los Detectives Salvajes in Spanish) is a novel by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño published in 1998. by Natasha Wimmer Like his even more ambitious "2666," "The Savage Detectives" simply isn't everyone's favorite slice of pie. Roberto Bolaño's alter ego, Arturo Belano, whose life so closely shadows Bolaño's own (night watchman and dishwasher, life in Paris and Barcelona, and so on), disappears from the story — to re-emerge, of course, as the man willing to "commit the vulgarity of writing stories," the man who triumphantly wrote this marvelous, sad, finally sustaining novel. The young diarist falls in with a mad family and loses his virginity to one of the daughters, María Font. . He uses a variety of story telling techniques to craft a novel that is anything but ordinary. The intensity of their love for poetry is disarming. From Wayne C. Booth we learn (perhaps, more than we’d like) about the Implied Author. The first part of the novel, set in 1975, follows 17-year-old Juan García Madero , a young aspiring poet who becomes involved with a group of poets called the Visceral Realists. Hold that thought. The Savage Detectives, a novel about those wild, ferocious, half-crazed men and woman driven to mythic, intoxicating summits by the carnival of words and the Latino rhythms of their poetry. JP, gone too soon. On the one hand, we have the enfant terrible, the avant-garde poet and Trotskyite who crashed readings and wrote manifestos. Biblioklept has already published two reviews of Roberto Bolaño's big novel The Savage Detectives. Word Count: 814. I have found in my experience, and from reading the reviews of others, that having enjoyed one Bolaño novel is no guarantee that you will enjoy the next. Why troublesome? Alienum phaedrum torquatos nec eu, vis detraxit periculis ex, nihil expetendis in mei. In 2007, the literary critic James Wood meditated on the Chilean author’s legacy in a review of the English translation of Bolaño’s “The Savage Detectives.” Below is an excerpt. Stopped at p. 400. For instance, it is at once very funny and oddly appalling that not once does Bolaño quote a single poem of Lima or Belano. It is as if the novelist has taken a tape recorder and journeyed around the world, from Mexico City to San Diego to Barcelona to Tel Aviv, desperate to find out what became of the young, optimistic, but perhaps now doomed poets. The Savage Detectives. The Savage Detectives: a novel. Maybe the specifics of our ideas change over time and even become less rigid, but still we maintain that we know on some level what it is that we want. The group is led by two young poets, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, a wild duo who appear elsewhere in Bolaño's work (in "Amulet," for instance). How fact (fictive fact) and myth (fictive myth) and creative license combine to create Legend. Roberto Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. Those without Spanish have had to rely on the loyal intermittence of translation, beginning with "By Night in Chile" (2003), two more short novels — "Distant Star" (2004) and "Amulet" (2007) — and a book of stories, "Last Evenings on Earth" (2006), all translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions. a reviewer wrote that she enjoyed Savage Detectives, but complained that it was 'about nothing' -- that she read nearly 700 pages and left with this notion proves her a total jackass and describes precisely why this is a great book: as with a life, My interpretation of 90% of the passages I encountered in Savage Detectives. band and has great feminist politics and knows how to cook. I see no ecstatic over-the-top declarations of lust for this novel. I mean, is one critical word about writing ever spoken? Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of, Published Now comes the Implied Editor from this guy. "The Savage Detectives" is a high-end tour-de-force, includes the testimony of so many characters and the thread of enough lives and stories that it warrants a … If the interviewer was, in fact, Belano, I suspect he’d regard this interview as something of a joke, like the poem of Cesárea Tinajero. Let's pretend this is the picture on the cover: An artist about to paint a self-portrait was situating his mirror when it slipped through his fingers and crashed to the floor. RB, gone too soon. July 6, 2007 Print this page. He places us there, in Mexico City, and reminds us of the excitement and boredom, the literary pretentiousness and ignorance, the erotic ambition and anxiety of being a young writer or reader in the company of like-minded friends. (This review has some vague spoilers, just as a warning. Or: "Nothing happened today. The first part of the novel, set in 1975, follows 17-year-old Juan García Madero , a young aspiring poet who becomes involved with a group of poets called the Visceral Realists. Read them all; they’re worth it. It could have been Alberto the pimp or his policeman accomplice, but neither would have pursued further testimonies after early February. As they get older they become émigrés in Europe, mainly in Paris and Barcelona, but also in Germany, Israel and Africa. "About Arturo Belano," he says, "I know nothing." Ladies and Gentlemen, you want to know what Visceral Realism is? A painter, interviewed in Mexico City in 1981, says that Belano and Lima weren't revolutionaries: "They weren't writers. His mind’s eye had to fill in the gaps in his image – serendipitous disjointedness a la Picasso. In this quasi-autobiographical story, a group of intense young poets, men and women, knock around in mid-1970’s Mexico City. No effusive dissertations conveying the message “I totally bought into the hype and splooged fifty times over this book like Ron Jeremy catching his reflection in the pupils of a malnourished Cuban trollop.” I see no substantial body of scholarship agglutinating on the first two review pages alone. I give up!!! The locale shifts from Japan and the USA to South and Central America. The least we can do is point it out and follow it b. I hate the description for this novel. The Savage Detectives Quotes Showing 1-30 of 128 “There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.” ― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives The search for a missing poet is the nominal subject of the late (1953-2003) expatriate Chilean author's blazingly original 1998 masterpiece.This almost aggressively literary novel, which won major ... Read full review Search and read the savage detectives opinions or describe your own experience. The New York Times, James Wood ( full review ). " This novel has caused me great distress (not so much reading, but trying to figure out just how many of those little stars to dish out). You’ve been warned. Again, Bolaño skirts danger and then gleefully accelerates away from it. The Savage Detectives is an oral novel, broken up into a brilliant opening diary about sexual and poetic initiation, and then accounts by fellow travellers who bump into the pair. So in a way when we talk about a shared appreciation of Bolaño’s writing, it may be the case that we are all talking about different things. I think the nearest parallel with art would be a Jackson Pollack painting with sudden shifts of direction and emphasis, let alone colour. The Savage Detectives alone should grant him immortality. "It's incredible how much free time Mexicans have," one character claims. Even the chronology is circular – the narrative starts in the 1970s, advances to the late 1990s, then returns to the 1970s. Who could this other ‘detective’ be? The guttural (bass) at play with the high-soaring (the stellar Mitchell vocal & lyric). There are people, after all, who hate coconut custard. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. [Who was with Amadeo Salvatierra in Venezuela? Belano moves to Barcelona, and works as a dishwasher in a restaurant. Truly, it is as if he is there but at the same time isn't there. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. Welcome back. Roberto Bolano extracts every delicious dribble of substance from the lives of his characters. In 1999, Bolaño won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes as a ""work so rich and dazzling that it will surely draw readers and scholars for ages"". . Unless Salvatierra was being interviewed in Jan '76 and describing something that happened earlier? The New York Times, James Wood (full review). All well and good. He meekly shakes the hand of the Nobel laureate — who has never heard of him, of course — and disappears. Take a little theory, take a little text, stir them together, you get speculation. The two men do eventually find a single poem by Cesárea Tinajero, published in a one-off magazine, and it's not even a poem but a hieroglyph. Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, whose work we never see, drove off in 1975 in search of a poet whose own work was never published! Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. I see no particular swelling of interest in this lowly text on Goodreads. Everybody wins. What became of all that ambition? The Savage Detectives Summary. Perhaps once we get a little older we insist we're not picky, and maintain it is just simple common sense that we could not under any circumstances possibly fall in love with someone who uses emoticons, smokes clove cigarettes, dislikes children, has a barcode tattoo, or watches too much television.... We will fall in love with a person who's got great taste in literature, who has beautiful arm muscles, who also can't dance, who's memorized. You can feel it; it will own you. The life of Bolaño and Belano so closely intertwined, most of us will never know where one varies from the other; a double-helix, the germ cell of a Legend. Instead it becomes a Latin American odyssey – unique, rich, rewarding, exhilarating, picaresque, disconnected, frustrating and everything else in between. We know their careers were not hoaxes (some of the witnesses speak of reading poems by the young men); but were they dreams? Page by page, the novel begins to darken. He uses a variety of story telling techniques to craft a novel that is anything but ordinary. And what makes him/her ‘savage’? The Savage Detectives’ first section gives us access to the diary of 17 year-old Juan García Madero. Toward that end I focus on a single aspect of the novel. That long sentence is a poem, really, proceeding by foliation; in fact the entire novella is a poem of a kind. I will consider this as read since the 300 pages or so that I read felt like 3 books. In this quasi-autobiographical story, a group of intense young poets, men and women, knock around in mid-1970’s Mexico City. "The Savage Detectives" was published in 1998, but its heart belongs to the Mexico City of the mid-1970s, when Bolaño was an avant-garde poet bristling with mad agendas. A Mexican academic, interviewed late in the novel, says that hardly anyone remembers the visceral realists anymore. Creating a legend. The visceral realists conduct "purges," steal books (I particularly liked the sound of the Rebbeca Nodier Bookstore, whose owner is conveniently blind), write and read and have sex and attitudinize. Unlike the Salvatierra testimony and others from January ‘76, the entry from Andrés Ramirez (Barcelona, Dec. ’88) is clearly addressed to Belano; while the interviewer’s questions are omitted, the responses are to Belano (“I was destined to be a failure, Belano, take my word for it.” “I know you’ve been in similar situations, Belano, so I won’t go on too long.”) Nor will I, but hold that thought. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It is a Doorstopper novel made almost exclusively on Alternate Character Interpretation, Offscreen Moment of Awesome, Big-Lipped Alligator Moment and oddly enough, Reality Ensues.The book is divided on three parts. I do not have much time to read/day and I prefer to read something I enjoy. Curiously, "The Savage Detectives" is both melancholy and fortifying; and it is both narrowly about poetry and broadly about the difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth. Browse The Guardian Bookshop for a big selection of Modern & contemporary fiction books and the latest book reviews Buy The Savage Detectives 9780330509527 by Roberto Bolano for onl Can we? Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Bolaño's book throws down a great, clunking, formal gauntlet to his readers' conventional expectations. The first part was, strangely, both very gripping and incredibly boring. Following the story of two poets, founders of a mocked and destroyed poetic movement, as they scour Mexico,… I see no particular swelling of interest in this lowly text on Goodreads. THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES User Review - Kirkus. I started keeping running summaries of the entries in section two (The Savage Detectives), and something interesting became apparent, actually unapparent, that created dissonance—which led me to a single conclusion: this is a book about Legend Making. On their searches for something else? The wandering here is more exciting than any final destination. If it gets more people reading Bolaño, sure, but these days that's the end all excuse for literature in a capitalist society. In one episode, Father Urrutia is sent to Europe, by Opus Dei agents, to report on the preservation of the churches there. Meanwhile, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano have become peculiarly obsessed with a poet from the 1920s named Cesárea Tinajero, a surrealist and modernist who belonged to the forerunners of the later visceral realists. This review, such as it is, might be considered spoilerish, actually, it’s a lotta spoilerish, it’s presented in a rambling, perhaps, incoherent manner, and it is tentatively offered. Create the Bolaño/Belano Legend? Picador £16.99, 577 pages. A rave rating based on 11 book reviews for The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, Trans. The Savage Detectives is less about narrative and more about literature itself. Lima is living in Paris for a while, desperately poor. . Returning to Chile in 1973 to help with the socialist revolution as he saw it, he was caught in the Pinochet coup and briefly arrested. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. His atmospheres are solidly imagined, but the tone is breezy and colloquial and amazingly unliterary — Gide's novel about writers, "The Counterfeiters," comes to mind, or better, a kind of Latinized Stendhal, whose characters just happen to be writers (Bolaño often warmly invoked Stendhal). Since there are so many fantastic reviews of The Savage Detectives, I thought I would offer a slightly different approach as per below. He went back to Mexico, where he published two books of verse, and then began a long period of displacement and travel and drug-taking and odd jobs in France and Spain. Hold that thought. Okay. In the first review, from 2008, I suggested that the book was technically impressive but ultimately “unmoving.”. Or: "Then I read William Burroughs until dawn." In the second drawing, the line is wavy, undulating like a choppy sea, but the little boatlike square is gamely floating in the wave. The quest narrative continues with a new backdrop. No effusive dissertations conveying the message “I totally bought into the hype and splooged fifty times over this book like Ron Jeremy catching his reflection in the pupils of a malnourished Cuban trollop.” I see no substantial body of scholarship ag. One of his friends, a gay poet, grandly and absurdly classifies all literature as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual: "Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn't say so." Life is a heaven's kitchen, with everything simultaneously on the boil. Borges and Pynchon for those who don't need that sort of nonsense? The Savage Detectives: A Novel Reviews National Bestseller In this dazzling novel, the book that established his international reputation, Roberto Bolaño tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes--the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself--on a tragicomic quest through a darkening, entropic universe: our own. I have found in my experience, and from reading the reviews of others, that having enjoyed one Bolaño novel is no guarantee that you will enjoy the next. (In Spain, amusingly, the falcons are too old or docile for killing, and the priests have none of the dangerous elegance of their French or Italian counterparts.) I couldn't understanding the point of the pretense of the poetry. (José Saramago wrote an entire novel, and a great one too, "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis," with one of Pessoa's authorial stand-ins, Ricardo Reis, as its protagonist. "We poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness," are Wordsworth's famous lines, precious to a generation of American poets like Lowell and Schwartz and Berryman, whose lives ended in suicide or bouts of insanity. In the first review, from 2008, I suggested that the book was technically impressive but ultimately "unmoving." Literature in Spanish and Portuguese, from Fernando Pessoa to Javier Cercas, from Cortázar to Borges, seems especially infatuated with alter egos. Oops. The terror of the MacGuffin always hangs over Bolaño's work. 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