He pops up in various guises, principally as the Chilean Arturo Belano, so it is worth pausing to consider his biography.

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.īolano is not reticent about mixing his life story - or at least a mythologised version of it - with his work. These include descriptions of their behaviour on their return from the desert and the various roads of madness and ruin that they travel. 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. 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). This section ends abruptly with the poets, in the company of a whore fleeing her pimp, commandeering a car and heading for the desert. 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.

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 poet's troubled odyssey is the dominant theme of both Last Evenings and Bolano's novel The Savage Detectives (both brilliantly translated). but that way lie ruin, madness and death.' 'A poet can endure anything.' So begins one of the stories in Roberto Bolano's collection Last Evenings on Earth.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño