Every great artistic clique has its in-house tribute pieces, and the theme of the artist shouting out to his fellow scene rats & the people who came of age with him dates back to antiquity. “The Savage Detectives” had a chance to be one of the very best, with Roberto Bolaño’s prodigious talent and a rich scene of great writers and poets, many of whom are virtually unknown to non-Spanish speakers.

I was only able to recognize only a few of the people in the book, though it was clear he’d often merely moved a couple of letters around in each person’s name (he himself becomes “Arturo Belano”), and some of the sections seem to have been cribbed cleanly from his notes on meeting his fellow authors (the segment on meeting Reinaldo Arenas, for example, reads like he’d gleaned some info from reading “Before Night Falls” instead of actually spending any quality time with him).

It reads as if he had died before he had the chance to finish it; there are excellent passages all the way through, but only the beginning and end parts have been collected into a running narrative, and the middle 300 pages of the book is told in fragments of varying quality. While this is a perfectly fine way to go about a cast-of-thousands everyone-gets-a-mention epic like this one (Julio Cortázar’s “Hopscotch” is one of the most amazing novels I’ve ever read, and it’s written in a similar Rashomon-Pulp-Fiction-puzzle style to this), many of the segments could have used one more edit. The plot, about a band of poets searching for the poet Cesárea Tinajero, the principal and lost poet of their “Visceral Realist” movement, is barely hinted at in the first act, though by the third act it’s all anyone cares about. Honestly, this book could have lost 50 of its 650 pages, and it would have been even more of a sprawling, comprehensive masterpiece than it already is.

Don’t let me scare you away from “The Savage Detectives”; it’s an amazing achievement as-is, the beginning and ending sections are compelling, suspenseful and joyous, it sets up Bolaño’s other, actual masterpiece, “2666,” very well, and Natasha Wimmer’s translation reads cleanly and evenly. Just understand there’s going to be a wall you’ll have to punch through to get to the thankfully satisfying ending. Hit it at a gallop, and you should be fine.