Willing Outcast

Indeed, Cervantes's masterpiece serves Bolaño as pretext and subtext. The entire book is episodic, alternating between discussions of literature, misadventures and stories within stories. Middle-class angst is ubiquitous. Sex is performed -- and depicted -- prodigally. The scenes of García Madero's initiations into a world of frenzied hedonism are the best of their kind I've read. There's a hilarious episode in which the visceral realists attempt to kidnap Paz, who is accurately portrayed as stiff and formal.

The cumulative effect of these satirical episodes is astonishing. Everyone in them is looking to understand what motivates Belano and Lima, but fails to do so. It's a Rashomon-like quest, in which truth is evasive, ultimately unattainable. That, indeed, is the tone of the entire novel. As Belano and Lima try to find Tinajero, we readers try to understand them as characters. Yet Bolaño doesn't want us to. He fills them with contradictions, including disappointment when they finally find Tinajero.What matters isn't the solution to the puzzle but the effort of assembling its pieces.

One piece comes early in the novel's second part, when a mythical female, Auxilio Lacouture (Bolaño's names are at once trite and magical), makes an appearance. She's a Uruguayan who moved to Mexico in the '60s, became involved in the student uprising of 1968, and who presents herself, irreverently, as the "Mother of Mexican Poetry." This section takes up fewer than a dozen pages, but after The Savage Detectives first came out in Spanish, Bolaño expanded the material into a rather plotless and meandering novella, Amulet, which was first published in 1999 and has now been gorgeously rendered into English by Chris Andrews.

By far the most hallucinatory element in The Savage Detectives (and in 2666) is its bizarre, exquisite prose. Having spent years studying linguistic varieties across the Americas, I've never come across a chameleon talent like Bolaño's. He writes in a Mexican Spanish with an Iberian twist but an impostor's accent. How ironic that the best Mexican novel of the last 50 years should have been written by a Chilean.

Bolaño started writing at the age of 18. He was an unredeemed smoker, ate poorly and slept irregular hours. Literature for him was a mania, if not also a form of martyrdom. His last decade of life was remarkably prolific. Starting in 1993, he published almost a book a year, sometimes more. His early fiction dealt with topics such as the death of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo in Paris and the excesses of fascism in Chile. He rewrote a story by Borges and imagined an encyclopedia of Nazi authors in Latin America. He refused stipends from the literary establishment, submitting his manuscripts to contests in order to get the little money he needed to go on.

In his late teens, he made an irrevocable decision: never to enter a classroom again. After that, everything he learned came via reading. Indeed, I'm convinced that Bolaño worked his deepest revolution as a reader: He chose his own predecessors, rejected bestsellers, enjoyed carving out a career against the wishes of the literary status quo.

Isn't it ironic then that the escritor maldito, the accursed writer, the ultimate pariah, is now being firmly positioned in the spotlight? Of course, it was inevitable. Too many mediocre books are being published, and a courageous voice, angry and heretical, remains rare. What distinguishes a genius isn't intelligence -- there's plenty of that around; nor is it the degrees one receives from distinguished schools. It isn't even the polish of one's style. The classics are often imperfect, and The Savage Detectives, though inexhaustible, is messy and perhaps overly ambitious. Only one thing matters: Bolaño had the courage to look at the world anew. ·

Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His new book, "On Love," will be published in the fall.