Those without Spanish have had to rely on the loyal intermittence of translation, beginning with "By Night in Chile" (2003), two more short novels - "Distant Star" (2004) and "Amulet" (2007) - and a book of stories, "Last Evenings on Earth" (2006), all translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions. Until recently there was even something a little Masonic about the way Bolaño's name was passed along between readers in this country I owe my awareness of him to a friend who excitedly lent me a now never-to-be-returned copy of Bolaño's extraordinary novella "By Night in Chile." This wonderfully strange Chilean imaginer, at once a grounded realist and a lyricist of the speculative, who died in 2003 at the age of 50, has been acknowledged for a few years now in the Spanish-speaking world as one of the greatest and most influential modern writers.
Over the last few years, Roberto Bolaño's reputation, in English at least, has been spreading in a quiet contagion the loud arrival of a long novel, "The Savage Detectives," will ensure that few are now untouched.
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