This work claims that Roberto Bolaño s The savage detectives features the problem of time in three major procedures. The time of return, the time of polyphony and the time of construction. Ever since Gyorg Lukács notorious remark, according to which, given the separation between meaning and life, one could almost state that the entire inner action of the novel is nothing but a struggle against the power of time, unveiling it as a constitutive principle of form, the matter has become mandatory for the debate over the form of the novel. Split into three chapters, the intermediate one consisting in a set of interviews collected over two decades (1976-96) and the remaining two Juan García Madero s diary, which portrays the last months of 1975 as well as the early months of the following year, Roberto Bolaño s book takes shape not only through the similarities and dissimilarities between the stories but also due to the original and rather complex experiences of time elicited by them, subject of our study, which, therefore, aims at a philosophical approach - through names such as Lukács, Adorno and Rancière - of Bolaño s The savage detectives.