Through its fifty-plus narrators and three central characters, the aspiring 17-year-old poet and narrator Juan Garcia Madero and his two “visceral-realist” mentors, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, Bolaño’s 1998 The Savage Detectives offers both a parody of the detective novel and an endlessly deferred quest, through the figure of Cesárea Tinajero, for “true” poetry. Radically raising the stakes of Bolaño’s commitment to the development of what a pivotal passage calls “poemas-novela,” its prose-poetic strategies resembling less a novel in the traditional sense than an impossibly sustained assemblage of loosely linked prose poems on an “epic,” in Bakhtin’s sense “novelistic” scale, it challenges the emphasis of the detective novel, and of the novel generally, on a certain violence of narrative emplotment, the monetized violence of narrative drive, of linear narrative, as plot itself. Complicit as Bolaño knows himself to be with the detective genre’s commercial appeal, he understands the legacies of Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, of detective fiction and the prose poem, as both a “savage” threat to poetry, leading to its “death” and “murder,” and as a potential convergence that makes possible, as the last name of the narrator Amadeo Salvatierra suggests, its rebirth and redemption in manifold forms.

With the publication of The Savage Detectives, and a year later his much more condensed Amulet, Bolaño turns his full attention as a novelist to poetic interpellation and apprenticeship in Mexico. Narrated by the aesthesis-aligned “mother of Mexican poetry,” “mother of all the poets,” Auxilio Lacouture, Amulet provides a complementary narrative to Distant Star’s mapping of poetic apprenticeships in Chile through the equally gendered, poiesis-aligned figure of Carlos Wieder. Returning again and again to Lacouture’s act of reading (and no longer being to read) a book of poems by the aging poet Pedro Garfias in the bathroom of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters on September 18, 1968, the date the army and riot police came to occupy UNAM, Bolaño stages a profound tension between a Marxist narrative of historical progress and a Nietzschean model of eternal return. Arcing in the end toward the mythological temporality of ancient Greece, Amulet’s Poe-inflected “horror story,” as Lacouture describes it at the outset, figures history as “another recurring and terribly Latin American nightmare,” at its most decisively utopian moment affirming, through Lacouture’s prophecies, the vision that “Poetry shall not disappear. Its non-power shall make itself visible by other means, in another form.”