Yeah, I found it really tough to get though. So much that it too me long enough to read that I basically lost the thread. Very little of it stuck with me except the eventually numbing descriptions of many many murders. I thought the Savage Detectives was decent, at least parts of it, but it also meandered a bit. However, I was able to follow the thread a little better. I have found Bolano's short stories to be good, but not earth-shattering for me.

My understanding is that the Savage Detectives is the more renowned Bolano book though again I think there's a lot of inside baseball there that references the Latin American literary scene of the second half of the 20th century that was mostly lost on me.