From dessert to The Savage Detectives: diaries, travels and feminicides in a century of artist novels

Abstract

This article summarizes the link between Bolaño’s Savage Detectives (1998) and the tradition
of the Spanish American Artist Novel. It explores how, for more than a century, this subgenre
of the novel has been used to construct different types of artistic subjectivity, and how the
motifs of traveling and femicide were crucial in that construction. Our purpose is to show how
Roberto Bolaño reappropriates these two motifs and generates a completely different kind of
artistic subjectivity(ies), which opposes both the tradition he is subverting and the postmodern
aesthetic expectations of the novel at the moment it was published.