Wild Detectives

A map of disappearance. What begins as a literary adventure in 1970s Mexico turns into an odyssey through America and Europe. 

The protagonists, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, alter egos of the author himself and his friend Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, live on the margins, hostages of poetry and time. They search for a lost poet, Cesárea Tinajero, but what they are really pursuing is the very idea of poetry, that useless void.

Made of voices, diaries, fragments, and contradictory testimonies, Bolaño rewrites the myth of the cursed poet and has fun with it. Youth as an incurable disease, and literature as a kind of religion without salvation. A beauty that tastes like a hangover.

Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003), a wandering Chilean, lived what he wrote. Exiled, marginal, obsessive, he died young and left a work that burns in the hands of whoever reads it. Between Mexico, Catalonia, and the endless night of Latin American poetry, he built a mythology of his own where failure is the only victory.