At first glance, Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives might not seem like ideal summer reading. Clocking in at 592 pages, it's told through the voices of 52 narrators — including a female bodybuilder, a homosexual poet called Luscious Skin, and an architect in a mental institution. The novel spans more than three decades and at least four continents. One might be tempted to return to the shelf for something slimmer and less demanding. And yet, for all the fragmentary stories and overlapping narration, The Savage Detectives is a surprisingly brisk read.

The story centers around a group of revolutionary Latin American poets, who call themselves the Visceral Realists, and their enigmatic leaders, Arturo Bolaño and Ulysses Lima. The book opens and closes with excerpts from the diary of Juan García Madero, a 17 year-old law student living in Mexico City who has been recruited to join the group. The middle section is comprised of monologues transcribed by an unknown person; depending on who is speaking, Bolaño and Lima were visionaries, idiots, ghosts, drug dealers, cretins, or bums. The book is a prism into a fictional word bursting with sex, violence, poetic fervor, bitterness, nostalgia, tenderness, and idealism. The author's skill is to keep turning this prism to reveal new facets of the mystery.

Like his hero Jorge Luis Borges, Bolaño was a voracious reader of pulp fiction, and The Savage Detectives steals style and atmosphere from detective novels, westerns, and true crime. You can put it down and still feel like you're speeding along in a black Impala through the Sonora Desert, or imagine you're listening to the drunken ramblings of an aging poet. Like any good potboiler, the plot is driven by questions (Who were Bolaño and Lima? What were they looking for in the Sonora Desert? What did they find? What happened to them?), but by the novel's end you realize that the answers are beside the point — you have glimpsed a deep mystery, a chasm into which most of the characters have vanished.

-Alexander Waxman