The narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and often unlucky) quests, speaking in the first person as if giving a deposition—like witnesses to a crime.

Seventeen-year-old Arturo Belano spends his days in Mexico City browsing bookstores and watching movies.

[3] The narrator returns from Mexico to Chile in 1973 "to help build socialism;" he is arrested during a road check and imprisoned for being a "Mexican terrorist" but released a few days later thanks to a pair of former classmates who had become police detectives.

Francine Prose, reviewing the collection in The New York Times, wrote of Bolano, "Reading Roberto Bolaño is like hearing the secret story, being shown the fabric of the particular, watching the tracks of art and life merge at the horizon and linger there like a dream from which we awake inspired to look more attentively at the world.

"[4] In The Guardian, novelist Ben Richards wrote "Bolano is both aware of and indulgent towards the futility of poetic rebellion, which is why so many of his characters carry a sense of doom with them.

"[5]Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire, recommended it as the best introduction to Bolano's work, writing "A story like 'Gomez Palacio,' in which, simultaneously, nothing much happens and everything does, presents a vision as idiosyncratic, and as existentially important, as Kafka’s.