Trained as a lawyer, he gained notice in the 1990s with his first publications and participation in the pronouncement of the "Crack Manifesto" with several other young writers to protest the state of Mexican literature and promote their own work.

During this time, in 1994, he was in Oaxaca, when a state government official there was assassinated, giving him the idea for a later novel called La paz de los sepulcros.

[2] He served as a jury member for the Guadalajara International Book Fair, which awarded this institution's prize to Bryce Enchenique, later accused of plagiarism.

[10][4] On August 7, 1996, Volpi, along with Eloy Urroz, Ignacio Padilla, Ricardo Chávez Castaneda and Pedro Angel Palau, all Mexican authors under the age of thirty, met at the Centro Cultural San Angel to read their "Crack Manifesto", which expressed frustration with the socio-political system with apocalyptic themes associated with the end of the millennium.

[6][4] These "crack novels" brought immediate notoriety to Volpi and the others, but the Mexican cultural press reviewed the phenomenon with little consensus as to its place.

[13][5] Volpi's most successful novel is En busca de Klingsor, which itself has been translated into nineteen languages, breaking sales records in Europe and has been read over German radio.

[6][21] However, they also appeal to readers interested in ethical questions, as well as complex systems of interrelations, making them similar to the "novelas totalizantes" of the 1960s.

[6][1] He is the only major writer of this kind of novel in Spanish and has been "accused" of not being Latin American enough for his distinctive style and subject matter.

[5] His first notable work were the "novelas de crack" publishing in the 1990s in which he rejected the then dominant "literature light" and focused less on the language and more on the actions of the characters.

In A pesar del oscuro silencio, the main character is researching the tragic life of Jorge Cuesta, a Mexican vanguard poet and essayist of the 1920s and 1930s.

Similarly, the protagonist in Tribuna del escandolo also engages in biographical research, but in this case to solve a double murder.

In El temperamento melancolico, Volpi psychologically analyzes the idea of human temperament, exploring group dynamics and the effects of individual actions.

[21] Volpi's best known work, En busca de Klingsor, is the first of a trilogy that not only traces the development of scientific knowledge of the latter 20th century, but also aligns it to the political and social thought of the same era.

He begins in the first book with relatively theory and quantum mechanics questioning much of how we see existence, (developed inside the search for Hitler's chief scientific advisor just after World War II),[6][5] It is followed by El fin de la locura set from the May 1968 demonstrations in Paris to the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

[5] For Volpi, the novel is a vehicle for knowledge about identity in action, placing readers in a position to observe the how human behavior works.

However, knowledge in Volpi's novels is a search rather than explaining what is already known and it is never complete, generally related to the concept of identity and human behavior.