Entering the desert: the utopian journey in The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño

Abstract

This article aims to investigate possible meanings of the desert in the novel The Savage Detectives (1998) by Roberto Bolaño. Starting from a look directed at the exegesis of the desert as both a natural landscape and a rhetorical image, we seek to understand the latent role that this space has in the utopian journey undertaken by Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano in search of the poet Cesárea Tinajero. From this, it is possible to assess a critique of modernity in Bolaño's work based on a representation of the paradoxical Latin American cultural scenario.

Keywords:
Roberto Bolaño; The Savage Detectives; desert; utopia