His preference for literary outlaws can again be traced to his own life. His poet-protagonists tend to be impoverished outcasts, cut off from the literary mainstream often, there is little to distinguish them from criminals. Almost all Bolaño's fiction concerns itself with the lives of writers, especially poets. The first is the milieu its characters inhabit. Two things in particular mark The Savage Detectives as Bolaño's work. Its roots are autobiographical: Bolaño lived in Mexico during this period (his family moved there when he was 15) and was the founder of a short-lived "punk-surrealist" movement called infrarrealismo. The Savage Detectives tells the story of a fictional poetic movement called visceral realism, founded in Mexico City in the mid-1970s. But it was only two years ago, with the translation of his dauntingly bulky novel The Savage Detectives, that Bolaño's true significance began to be appreciated.
Translations of his novels and short stories began appearing shortly after his death, and gradually a buzz grew up around the Chilean author. His reputation among English-speakers has, inevitably, been slower in the ascent. W hen Roberto Bolaño died five years ago at the age of 50, he was already a major star in the Spanish-speaking literary firmament, widely seen as the most important Latin-American writer since Gabriel García Márquez.
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