The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer
(Picador, £16.99)
The death of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño in 2003 was not premature in the way rock-star deaths are premature, but for those familiar with his life and work, it was tragic. Born in Santiago in 1953, Bolaño moved to Mexico in 1968 with his parents, and was soon moving in Trotskyite poet-revolutionary circles. Returning to Santiago in the summer of 1973, Bolaño witnessed the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet on 11th September, and ended up in prison. He managed to escape by sheer luck—one of the guards recognised him as a childhood friend—and fled from his homeland, first to Mexico, later to Spain.
From the 1970s to the early 1990s, Bolaño wrote poetry and was extremely poor. In 1993 he published his first novel, La Pista del Hielo (The Ice Rink), and in 1998 his fourth, Los Detectives Salvajes (The Savage Detectives), which won him the prestigious Herralde and Rómulo Gallegos prizes and has now finally been translated into English. His death, by liver failure in a hospital in Blanes near Barcelona, came at the height of his career, as he was finishing off his 1,100-page magnum opus 2666.
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