The role of the poet-detective and the reader as an active part in the reading of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives

Abstract

If there is one writer who has marked an entire generation in the Spanish language in recent decades, it is undoubtedly Roberto Bolaño. A Chilean who lived in Mexico and died in Spain, this author's work is capable of enthusing and hypnotizing with a style of its own from which it is difficult to distance oneself. As we will analyze in the present article, the use of the poet-detective figure, mainly embodied in his alter ego Arturo Belano, was a resource widely used by the author to achieve this, so that today, almost twenty years after his death, his readers continue to act as detectives through his work.