Cover: Open Library

Los detectives salvajessecond-hand

4.3 · 8 ratings on Open Library · 77 want to read it

Published by Penguin Bolsillo · Biography and literary studies · ISBN 9788466337113

from€14.81cover price €14.96

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At the end of 1975, in Mexico City, Juan García Madero, a 17-year-old law student, starts a diary about joining a group of young poets, the visceral realists, led by Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. The two are looking for Cesárea Tinajero, a Mexican poet from the 1920s whom nobody knows anything about. The middle section of the novel changes form: dozens of characters tell what they knew of the two poets over twenty years and across several countries.

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Reading guide

About 15 hours of reading · Who it's for · Why people still read it · If you like it, read next
Who it's for
For patient readers who enjoy long novels with an unconventional structure, literary life and wandering journeys. It helps to know that the book pays tribute to infrarealism, the poetry group Bolaño founded in Mexico, and that Belano is his alter ego.
Why people still read it
It received the Herralde prize (1998) and the Rómulo Gallegos (1999), exists in a number of translations, and Babelia listed it among the best books in Spanish of its quarter century. The 2007 English translation was named among the year's best novels by several US newspapers.

Written with the help of AI from todostuslibros and Wikipedia, without giving away the ending, and reviewed by a person.

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