The New York Times described him as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation"[2] and he has frequently been compared with Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar.

Instead, he and his sister spent their early years in southern and coastal Chile, attending primary school in Viña del Mar and later moving to Quilpué and Cauquenes.

[11] A key episode in Bolaño's life, mentioned in different forms in several of his works, occurred in 1973, when he left Mexico for Chile to "help build the revolution" by supporting the democratic socialist government of Salvador Allende.

[15][16] "He didn't fit into Chile, and the rejection that he experienced left him free to say whatever he wanted, which can be a good thing for a writer," commented Chilean-Argentinian novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman.

[11] On his overland return from Chile to Mexico in 1974, Bolaño allegedly passed an interlude in El Salvador, spent in the company of the poet Roque Dalton and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, though the veracity of this episode has been cast into doubt.

[11] Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, on the Costa Brava, working as a dishwasher, campground custodian, bellhop, and garbage collector.

In an interview Bolaño said that he began writing fiction because he felt responsible for the future financial well-being of his family, which he knew he could never secure from the earnings of a poet.

This was confirmed by Jorge Herralde, who explained that Bolaño "abandoned his parsimonious beatnik existence" because the birth of his son in 1990 made him "decide that he was responsible for his family's future and that it would be easier to earn a living by writing fiction."

"[28] Larry Rohter of the New York Times wrote, "Bolaño joked about the 'posthumous', saying the word 'sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, one who is undefeated,' and he would no doubt be amused to see how his stock has risen now that he is dead.

The Skating Rink (La pista de hielo in Spanish) is set in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona and is told by three male narrators while revolving around a beautiful figure-skating champion, Nuria Martí.

When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, a pompous but besotted civil servant secretly builds a skating rink in a local ruin of a mansion, using public funds.

The central section of The Savage Detectives presents a long, fragmentary series of reports about the trips and adventures of Arturo Belano, a consonantly named alter-ego of Bolaño, who also appears in other stories & novels, and Ulises Lima, between 1976 and 1996.

These trips and adventures, narrated by 52 characters, take them from Mexico City to Israel, Paris, Barcelona, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vienna and finally to Liberia during its civil war in the mid-nineties.

[34] The reports are sandwiched at the beginning and end of the novel by the story of their quest to find Cesárea Tinajero, the founder of "real visceralismo", a Mexican avant-garde literary movement of the twenties, set in late 1975 and early 1976, and narrated by the aspiring 17-year-old poet García Madero, who tells us first about the poetic and social scene around the new "visceral realists" and later closes the novel with his account of their escape from Mexico City to the state of Sonora.

Amulet (Amuleto in Spanish) focuses on the Uruguayan poet Auxilio Lacouture, who also appears in The Savage Detectives as a minor character trapped in a bathroom at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City for two weeks while the army storms the school.

At a crucial point in his career, Father Urrutia is approached by two agents of Opus Dei, who inform him that he has been chosen to visit Europe to study the preservation of old churches – the perfect job for a cleric with artistic sensitivities.

Chillingly, the Jesuit's failure to protest against this bloody means of architectural preservation signals to his employers that he will serve as a passive accomplice to the predatory and brutal methods of the Pinochet regime.

This is the beginning of Bolano's indictment of "l'homme intellectuel" ("intellectual man") who retreats into art, using aestheticism as a cloak and shield while the world lies around him, nauseatingly unchanged, perennially unjust and cruel.

It is important to note that this book was originally going to be called Tormenta de Mierda (Shit Storm in English) but was convinced by Jorge Herralde and Juan Villoro to change the name.

It contains a loose narrative structured less around a story arc and more around motifs, reappearing characters and anecdotes, many of which went on to become common material for Bolaño: crimes and campgrounds, drifters and poetry, sex and love, corrupt cops and misfits.

Focused on the mostly unsolved and still ongoing serial murders of the fictional Santa Teresa (based on Ciudad Juárez), 2666 depicts the horror of the 20th century through a wide cast of characters, including police officers, journalists, criminals, and four academics on a quest to find the secretive, Pynchonesque German writer Benno von Archimboldi—who also resembles Bolaño himself.

The novel is seen by many as an ur-text to The Savage Detectives, "populated with precursory character sketches and situations" and centering on the activities of young poets and writers living in Mexico City.

[40] Last Evenings on Earth (From Llamadas telefónicas and Putas Asesinas in Spanish) is a collection of fourteen short stories narrated by a host of different voices primarily in the first person.

In his fiction, the characters are often novelists or poets, some of them aspiring and others famous, and writers appear ubiquitous in Bolaño's world, variously cast as heroes, villains, detectives, and iconoclasts.

As Jonathan Lethem has commented, "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.

In his novel "The Savage Detectives," two avid young Latino poets never lose faith in their rarefied art no matter the vicissitudes of life, age and politics.

But what can it mean, he asks us and himself, in his dark, extraordinary, stinging novella "By Night in Chile," that the intellectual elite can write poetry, paint and discuss the finer points of avant-garde theater as the junta tortures people in basements?

—Stacey D'Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review, 24 February 2008[46] Nazism and fascism is a recurring theme across Bolaño's work, most notably in Nazi Literature in the Americas and The Third Reich.

Bolaño's first American publisher, Barbara Epler of New Directions, read a galley proof of By Night in Chile and decided to acquire it, along with Distant Star and Last Evenings on Earth, all translated by Chris Andrews.

By Night in Chile came out in 2003 and was highly praised by Susan Sontag; at the same time, Bolaño's work also began appearing in various magazines, which gained him broader recognition among English readers.