Does he live up to his hype? Shortly after we posted our discussion on Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in The Magazine, he came to the peak of his fame as a posthumous superstar. Now, I’m not saying we’re responsible for this—God knows the writer had some itty bitty part in creating his own name—but I am saying, and I believe it constitutes a serious contribution to this discussion, is: if we hadn’t contracted David Orr, Marcela Valdes and Carmine Starnino to comment on Robero Bolaño to then I certainly wouldn’t be able to link to this page here.

After publishing a poetry collection, Reinventing Love, in 1976, Bolaño left for Europe. The idea, he told an interviewer years later, was “to live outside literature. In Mexico I lived a very literary life. I was surrounded by writers and moved in a world where everyone was either a writer or an artist.” In Spain, “I had some writer friends, but gradually I made other sorts of friends. I did all sorts of jobs, of course … And I thought it was wonderful.” He spent time in Barcelona, enjoying the reverberations of the “great sexual explosion” that followed Franco’s death, and travelled the continent doing menial work: washing dishes, picking grapes, being night-watchman at a campground. A co-written novel appeared in 1984. Otherwise, he fell off the literary map, publishing little and toughing out a “vagabond” life that’s now at the heart of his legend. English-speaking journalists have often attributed his quasi-marginal existence to heroin addiction on the strength of his mention of methadone treatment in a magazine piece called “Beach”. Bolaño knew a lot about drink and drugs, but his widow, his estate and his friend Enrique Vila-Matas have dismissed the junkie story as an “absurd biographical error”.

Even so, he was not in good health by the time he acquired a fixed address, a Spanish wife and a couple of infant children. Fatherhood made him start writing prose seriously in an effort to support his family, and after learning in the early 90s that he had a problem with his liver, he holed up in his home on the Costa Brava and started turning out books at an extraordinary rate. In 1995, a novel he’d submitted caught the eye of Jorge Herralde, the founder of Anagrama, Spain’s leading publishing house. Three years later, Bolaño was famous. (In the US and UK, similarly, his writing has made its way from small imprints to heavyweight corporate publishing outfits.) He had eight novels and three story collections in print when the wait for a liver transplant finally killed him, and was known to have been working on a colossal magnum opus, 2666, for years. In lectures, articles and interviews, he had also laid out his combative views on the state of world literature, saving his most withering lines for García Márquez’s imitators, who’d filled the 80s, he said, with “a magical realism written for the consumption of zombies”.