Since his death at the age of fifty in 2003, Roberto Bolaño’s reputation has burgeoned in the Anglophone world, and with it the mythology of an author discovered too late (currently there is debate about whether he was a heroin addict). The English publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007 saw him hailed as a major novelist. The book concerns an obscure school of poets, the Visceral Realists, and was set in a down-at-heel milieu familiar to Bolaño, who became something of a wandering minstrel after briefly being incarcerated in his homeland, Chile, after General Pinochet’s coup.

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