Looking back after finishing it I'm surprised it only took me ~3 weeks to get through - the book's meandering nature, combined with the fact that I spent so much time steeping in it, obsessing about it, thinking about it, talking about it, meant that my perception of that time stretched until it felt like I had been reading it for much longer.
It is fantastic, my favorite Bolaño yet and a book that deserves a spot as one of my all-time favorites. It's a funny, sad, rambling, discursive odyssey of exile following two Latin American poets (one of whom is the author's fictionalized alter ego), the leaders of a literary movement known as "visceral realism", as they wander through continents, failed relationships, broken dreams and the wreckage of poetry and youthful ambition. In a key structural choice, we see these poets and their odyssey exclusively through the eyes of other characters, largely people encountered on their travels, turning them into enigmas that reflect the lives of the exiles and wanderers around them. The Savage Detectives thus becomes something akin to a novel in the form of a short story collection, building a rich tapestry out of snapshots of various lives that still manages to be satisfying and thematically coherent as a novel. In many ways it feels like he's taken his short fiction and their thematic preoccupations and blown them out into a 648 page epic, making it a fascinating companion to a collection like Last Evenings on Earth.
Usually when I approach the end of a book, especially a really long book, even a book I really love, I've already started to get excited about what I'm going to read next. That didn't happen with The Savage Detectives - as I hit the book's final section I started to get sad about not being able to read The Savage Detectives anymore, and in fact, the book's discursive nature and the non-linear structural elements made me want to go back immediately and read it again, and revisit the whole work in light of the book's ending.
Anyways this was already happening before I started this book but I'm now officially all-in on Roberto Bolaño. He is easily one of my favorite writers and I can't wait to read more of his work and eventually grapple with the massive 2666, although I am forcing myself to wait for now, as hard as that is.