The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

Brilliant even in translation, Bolano's tale of wandering delinquent Mexican and Chilean poets is  life-based writing The two lead actors in the drama are Arturo a 'more extrovert version of Roberto'and his mate Ulisses. It's nonstop, wide canvas, multiple narrative. Women sometimes take the stage,  suffer worse consequences from their rambling life and some emerge alive.

The road ahead, the  hasty vivid glance behind...

Jack Kerouac the famous-man French-Canadian road tripper.always had 'memere', his loved and loving mother Gabrielle L'Evesque Kerouc to go home to after his road trips. Half the time Arturo doesn't know where Mum is or if she is Ok, When General Pinochet was in power many Chileans tended to move around.

The tale begins 1975. Juan, a 17 year old orphan whose uncle makes him study law not poetry opens the show. The lad drops out of uni within weeks because of his exciting discoveries - a poetry group on campus, a blow job in a cafe, new friends who fund two issues of their poetry mag by selling weed, nicked poetry books, a nicked car - ADVENTURE!

It's an era of poetry wars, the 'visceral realists' versus the respected 'old guards' of poetry Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz. Arturo and Ulisses and their merry gang are disruptive show offs barging in and interrupting readings of the 'great and the good'. Yeh man, how dare the old and famous think their stuff's worth listening to?

It's a  gritty visceral life, Our 70's Don Quixotes take 'off the books' jobs in Europe as they don't have work-permits. They scrape by on street trading,cleaning, fruitpicking.They live in grot-hole bedsits in Paris and Barcelona where friends climb the rickety stairs to borrow help and steal from one other.

Arturo gets a responsible albeit poorly paid  job as the nightwatchman on a holiday campsite. He lives on the premises.There is an incident with a knife;

How's this for a bizarre Middle East travelling show?.Ulisses, Arturo's deep quiet buddy who always wades straight  in to the heart of the action, hitches to Israel. He then gets thrown in jail for being an on the road  dodgy scruff..His cellmate is an insane fascist Austrian who has stumbled upon a secret nuclear reactor in the Negev desert in 1980. All this occurs six years before Mordechai Vanunu physicist and ex-employee  gets imprisoned on longterm house arrest for blowing the whistle on the place. 

This was the episode that made me believe the lot. Weird and impossible to invent.

Bolano is one of the many reasons I move my 61 year old a**e and write.He was born in 1953, three years before me. He died in Spain at the age of 50.

Young Juan reappears for the book's shock climax finale. Where is he now? I would love to meet him.