A Writer Crosses Over

-- Opening lines from

"The Savage Detectives"

The tale of how "The Savage Detectives" came to be published in the United States is a story about the difficulties inherent in literary migration between cultures. It is about the commercial food chain in which small publishers' successful initiatives get followed up by larger houses. It is about how Latin American writing has evolved beyond the boom sparked by Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" four decades ago.

But most of all, it is the story of an extraordinary writing life. Bolaño, whose work has been widely celebrated abroad since "Los Detectives Salvajes" was published in Spain in 1998, remains so obscure here that Farrar, Straus felt the need to commission the book's translator, Natasha Wimmer, to research and write a lengthy biographical essay to introduce him.

Wimmer herself had never heard of the author before Farrar, Straus asked her to look at the book. "I was completely blown away by it," she says. "I thought it was the best thing I had read in any language in years."

Bolaño, she learned, was born in Santiago in 1953, the son of a truck-driving, amateur-boxing father and a mother who taught math and statistics in the smaller Chilean towns where they mostly lived. When he was 15, he moved with his family to Mexico City, where he soon, as Wimmer sums it up, "dropped out of school to devote himself to reading and writing and adolescent rebellion."

She begins her essay with a scene in which "a 23-year-old with wild hair and aviator glasses" reads a manifesto in a bookstore called Librería Gandhi that "urged his fellow poets to give up everything for literature, to follow the example of Rimbaud and hit the road." This was Bolaño in 1976, helping launch a movement known as "infrarealism," whose adherents -- in Wimmer's words -- were supposed to "abandon the coffeehouse and take the part of . . . the lonely, the unnoticed and despised."

In "The Savage Detectives," which is heavily autobiographical, infrarealism becomes "visceral realism" and Roberto Bolaño becomes "Arturo Belano." In real life, as Wimmer notes, the writer lived by his principles for many years, "drifting from one menial day job to another and writing by night."

Much of this drifting took place in Europe, for which Bolaño left Mexico in 1977. Returning to Chile was not an option. He'd gone home four years earlier, arriving a few months before Gen. Augusto Pinochet launched his 1973 coup against socialist President Salvador Allende. Bolaño had thrown in his lot with pro-Allende forces -- though his contributions were modest, to put it mildly. He was arrested and briefly imprisoned, escaping only through the fortuitous intervention of a couple of former schoolmates turned prison guards.

Eventually settling in Barcelona, he worked as, among other things, a longshoreman, a dishwasher, a garbageman and (his favorite job) a night watchman for a campground near the city. Poor, sick and at one time addicted to heroin, he continued to write poetry and scorn the literary establishment. Finally, marriage and the birth of a son (in 1990; a daughter followed) persuaded him to start writing prose fiction -- a form he had always considered inferior, but one that might actually produce income.