PositiveThe New YorkerThe novel, which has been given a bracingly idiomatic translation by Natasha Wimmer, is a teeming, Manhattan Transfer-like collage ... Not since Rimbaud has the world of verse seemed so criminally seductive ... Bolaño captures the outlaw spirit that pervades every avant-garde movement ... Bolaño called The Savage Detectives a \'love letter\' to his generation, but it feels more like a lament, a chronicle of dissipated potential. The novel’s fetishization of lost youth verges on romanticism ... It’s a style worthy of its own name: visceral modernism.
