more on Roberto Bolano & The Savage Detectives--

"Madero’s narration comes in the form of clipped, kinetic diary entries: “Depressed all day, but writing and reading like a steam engine”; “I’m reading the dead Mexican poets, my future colleagues.” Not since Rimbaud has the world of verse seemed so criminally seductive. Madero’s entrance into the poetry underground resembles the heady initiation of Ray Liotta’s fledgling mobster in “GoodFellas.” The visceral realists not only shoplift (Madero boasts that, in his “tenement room, a little library has already begun to grow from my thefts and visits to bookstores”); they fund a magazine, Lee Harvey Oswald, by trafficking in Acapulco Gold marijuana. Yet the purpose of this illicit activity couldn’t be purer. “We were all in complete agreement that Mexican poetry must be transformed,” Madero proclaims..."