Five years after Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s death in 2003, at the age of 50, critics, writers and readers agree that he is the most important author to have emerged in Latin America since the golden age of the 1960s, when Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortázar took the world by storm.
Bolaño is a primary influence for the new generation of French, Russian and American writers as well. Symptomatic of Bolaño’s quick canonization is the fact that The Savage Detectives is one of the only Latin American novels cited by James Wood, the prestigious New Yorker critic, in his recent How Fiction Works. The fact that Bolaño, rather than a writer like García Márquez, is in Wood’s book shows how quickly the Chilean writer’s stature is growing.
It would be surprising if 2666, Bolaño’s posthumous novel…
