"The Savage Detectives"

Despite all the acclaim and the sheer amount of admiration I had for 2666, I wasn't impressed with The Savage Detectives. It certainly lived up to its name, at least in terms of shaping-while-uncovering the dark underbelly of a Latin American avant garde poetry movement, but the disjointed storyline and near-constant first-person perspectives just didn't do it for me. I can see how this mode of story-telling was perhaps necessary for constructing such a dark narrative--laying down the mundane and raunchy daily lives of these "poets" was meant more to define them as people with murky goals; a simple glimpsing over their daily acts may have invited too much interpretation, and thus, not the "visceral realism" that Bolano was trying to get across--and the lineage towards 2666 as an integration of this mode with a thousand other possibilities was crystal clear. If I'm seeing this growth correctly (and I think I am) then The Savage Detectives is more stepping stone than masterwork.