… The Savage Detectives,” Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s greatest novel, is a kaleidoscopic fictional autobiography—a treatise on youth, love, literature and death—whose frame is the journal of the Mexican poet Juan García Madero. Madero is the disciple, devotee and faithful hanger-on of two older poets, Arturo Belano (Bolaño’s alter ego throughout his fiction) and Ulises Lima, who follows the pair through the Sonora Desert in flight from a violent pimp and his henchmen. The intervening chapters of the novel’s larger arc outline the movements of Belano and Lima from Mexico to Europe to Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa across three decades, through the testimony of friends, lovers, acquaintances and total strangers. But by the book’s end, the two have parted ways with Madero and the last pages belong, fittingly, to him. “Someday the police will catch Belano and Lima, but they’ll never find us,” his girlfriend Lupe assures him. “Oh, Lupe, how I love you, but how wrong you are,” he replies in his jo …
