Entering the desert: The utopic journey in "The Savage Detectives" by Roberto Bolaño

Abstract

This article aims to investigate possible meanings for the desert in the novel “The Savage Detectives” (1998) by Roberto Bolaño. Starting from a look directed at the exegesis of the desert as a natural landscape and a rhetorical image at the same time, 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.