The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

This bad boy is the story of a Mexican literary movement, the Visceral Realists, told in two parts. Bolano is sort of a cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Which is to say, good. It's the kind of story that makes me feel restless and lonely.

The first part is the journal of the poet Juan Garcia Madero. He spends a lot of time in bars and the beds of various young ladies. He's this slacker student living off of someone else's money, and like so many Thompson characters lives in a desperate, hungry way.

Then there's this middle part that I read rather absentmindedly, which is terrible I know, which is kind of a retrospective of the movement told by a bunch of different people and not as interesting and the Garcia Madero storyline.

Then, back to him and some other poets, although they hardly ever write, and they go off to escape Lupe's pimp and also to find Cesarea Tinajero, who is sort of the founder of the movement. They find her, but the pimp finds them, and there's a shootout, and Garcia Madero separates from his friends and his diary becomes just a list of towns.

Honestly, this is a horrible description. It's a really big book, epic, so I've left out tons. But I loved it. So there.