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Try using the Translator for the Microsoft Edge extension instead. Poets, pimps and prostitutes. The poet's troubled odyssey is the dominant theme of both Last Evenings and Bolano's novel The Savage Detectives (both brilliantly translated). The latter begins in the 1970s in Mexico City, where two poets - Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima - are leading a literary movement called visceral realism. The first part of the novel is told in diary form by one of their young disciples - a puzzling figure not remembered by others in the movement - who interrupts observations on Belano and Lima to recount his early sexual encounters. This section ends abruptly with the poets, in the company of a whore fleeing her pimp, commandeering a car and heading for the desert. Their quest is to find a lost poet from an earlier literary movement, the wonderfully named "stridentists" (lost, missing, exiled and orphaned poets are - along with prostitutes - a key motif in Bolano's work). It is a shaggy dog story, but is the dog chasing its nose or its tail? The second part of the novel gives a dazzlingly different perspective (or multiple perspectives) on Belano and Lima by introducing a series of diverse witness testimonies from those who encounter them. These include descriptions of their behaviour on their return from the desert and the various roads of madness and ruin that they travel. In the final phase, we return to the first youthful narrator, who gives an account of the dramatic events during the quest for the lost poet. Bolano is not reticent about mixing his life story - or at least a mythologised version of it - with his work. He pops up in various guises, principally as the Chilean Arturo Belano, so it is worth pausing to consider his biography. Bolano left Chile when young to live in Mexico, returning briefly to his home country just before the Pinochet coup; he was briefly detained but then reverted to a nomadic, bohemian, heroin-fuelled existence as a vagabond poet before settling in Spain. He turned to prose to pay the rent, and there were times in reading The Savage Detectives when I wondered if it represented Bolano's revenge on the novel for this enforced career choice. Exercised by the "who's-the-daddy?" bickering that is a lamentable aspect of Latin American literature, he was not short of acerbic opinions on his peers. He was scornful of Isabel Allende, whose healthy sales figures and ability to smile on her book jackets have irritated more than a couple of his male contemporaries too. At times the obsession with the role of enfant provocateur , which surfaces repeatedly in Bolano's fiction, becomes tiresome. In the short story "Dance Card", he assumes the mantle of literary drama queen to demand rhetorically: "Do we have to come back to Neruda as we do to the cross, on bleeding knees, with punctured lungs and eyes full of tears?" And it is difficult to resist a shrug. Well, not if you don't want to, Roberto. It is also easy to become exasperated with the poets depicted in Bolano's work, who are of a particular type that treads dangerously close to cliche. They are itinerant, they steal books, they walk the city at night, they read in the shower, they screw and scowl and drink and brawl and pick up scabies from cheap dives. We rarely get any insight into what they actually write or think about poetry, beyond their railings against predictable enemies such as Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda. This is accompanied by endless dropping of literary names, usually of French surrealists. And because Bolano identifies himself so clearly with them, one's exasperation extends sometimes to the author. He has described The Savage Detectives as a "love-letter to his generation". Fair enough, but it's a partly imagined generation that does not seem very broadly conceived; the uncharitable might describe the novel more as a love-letter to Roberto Bolano. All of this is redeemed, however, by the fact that Bolano writes with such elegance, verve and style and is so immensely readable. Much of my frustration arose when I was thinking or talking about the two books (a good sign in itself), but I read them in great gulps. He also undercuts the obvious accusation of literary solipsism with sly humour, self-mockery and a wicked eye for pomposity. At one point in the novel, Lima joins a solidarity delegation of Mexican poets to Nicaragua, and Bolano gleefully sends up the often absurd nature of these occasions. He is extremely clever at switching mood and tone, so that even the comedy is interspersed with hints of catastrophe and loss. Bolano is both aware of and indulgent towards the futility of poetic rebellion, which is why so many of his characters carry a sense of doom with them. But he also succeeds in injecting his lost and wandering poets with nobility and pathos. Truth arrives in many vehicles; through nonsense, through endurance, through literary preening. It is the dance of literature and life in which Bolano participated so fully until his own untimely death four years ago. The most important test that Bolano triumphantly sails through as a writer is that he makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world. His vision can be disturbing and dark but it is not cold: humour and compassion are never far away. Nowhere more so than in this elegy from the brilliantly disturbing story "Mauricio 'The Eye' Silva". "That night when he went back to his hotel, he wept for his dead children and all the other castrated boys, for his own lost youth, for those who were young no longer and those who died young, for those who fought for Salvador Allende and those who were too scared to fight." It is a shame that Bolano has no more evenings on earth - his unique voice asserting the importance and exuberance of literature is one that will be sorely missed. · Ben Richards's novel The Mermaid and the Drunks (Phoenix) is set in Chile. To order Last Evenings on Earth for pounds 14.99 or The Savage Detectives for pounds 17.99, both with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. Reviewed by Ted Gioia. Before his death in 2003, Roberto Bolaño was little known in the United States. Perhaps everything else makes its way easily across the Mexican border – people, drugs, manufactured goods, killer bees - but the border patrol doesn’t require a big fence to stop literary works at the Rio Grande. Indifferent publishers and a shortage of good translations are sufficient obstacles. Even Bolaño’s translator Natasha Wimmer admits that she had not heard much about the author before encountering The Savage Detectives . But the tables have turned for Bolaño, who is enjoying aposthumous boom of dramatic proportions. Just six weeks before his death, at age fifty from a liver disorder, he was hailed as the most influential novelist of his generation by a group of his peers at a conference in Seville. Around the time of the book's publication in the US, the Colombian magazine Semana ranked The Savage Detectives third on its list of the greatest novels in Spanish of the past 25 years. And Bolaño’s last work, an 1,100-page novel entitled 2666 – soon to be published in English – ranked fourth.