Poets and Gangsters: Discovering Roberto Bolano

VPM | By Mandalit del Barco

Published April 28, 2007 at 7:45 PM EDT

Updated July 7, 2023

The Savage Detectives is Roberto Bolano's fictionalized account of his own life as a young writer in Mexico City. — *The Savage Detectives* is Roberto Bolano's fictionalized account of his own life as a young writer in Mexico City.

It’s a novel that’s been compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Nobel prize-winning work.

But it took the New York publishing world nearly a decade to discover the late Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives, a book that was already well-known in Spanish-speaking literary circles.

The Savage Detectives tells the story of Mexico City poets from an underground literary movement who set off on a quest. It’s Bolano’s fictionalized account of his own life as a young writer and ringleader of the 1970s “infrarealism” movement in Mexico City. The infrarealists were known for disrupting poetry readings and publicly despising revered writers such as Octavio Paz.

While their movement faded into obscurity, Bolano became a sensation. When Los Detectivos Salvajes – The Savage Detectives – was published nearly 10 years ago, Bolano was quickly hailed as the most important Latin American writer since Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Barbara Epler, the editor of New York publishing house New Directions, has published English translations of three of Bolano’s novellas and a collection of short stories.

“There’s just nobody else like him,” she says. “He’s the most exciting new writer that I think has been found in America in the last decade.”

After his death in 2003, Bolano’s family approached Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publishers about releasing the English translation of The Savage Detectives. Though it’s always risky to publish an author in translation that few people recognize– and to launch a large marketing campaign for the book – editor Lorin Stein says he was lucky to get The Savage Detectives.

“If you get a book like this, you make a very big deal of it,” Stein says. “You have no choice. It comes around once every gazillion years.”

Next year, the publishing house plans to release the English translation of 2666, which is considered Bolano’s masterpiece. The novel is based on the true story of hundreds of women who’ve been murdered in Mexico’s Cuidad Juarez. Bolano finished writing it a month before he died.

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Mandalit del Barco

As an arts correspondent based at NPR West, Mandalit del Barco reports and produces stories about film, television, music, visual arts, dance and other topics. Over the years, she has also covered everything from street gangs to Hollywood, police and prisons, marijuana, immigration, race relations, natural disasters, Latino arts and urban street culture (including hip hop dance, music, and art). Every year, she covers the Oscars and the Grammy awards for NPR, as well as the Sundance Film Festival and other events. Her news reports, feature stories and photos, filed from Los Angeles and abroad, can be heard on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, Alt.latino, and npr.org.

del Barco's reporting has taken her throughout the United States, including Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco and Miami. Reporting further afield as well, del Barco traveled to Haiti to report on the aftermath of the devastating earthquake. She has chronicled street gangs exported from the U.S. to El Salvador and Honduras, and in Mexico, she reported about immigrant smugglers, musicians, filmmakers and artists. In Argentina, del Barco profiled tango legend Carlos Gardel, and in the Philippines, she reported a feature on balikbayan boxes. From China, del Barco contributed to NPR's coverage of the United Nations' Women's Conference. She also spent a year in her birthplace, Peru, working on a documentary and teaching radio journalism as a Fulbright Fellow and on a fellowship with the Knight International Center For Journalists.

In addition to reporting daily stories, del Barco produced half-hour radio documentaries about gangs in Central America, Latino hip hop, L.A. Homegirls, artist Frida Kahlo, New York's Palladium ballroom and Puerto Rican "Casitas."

Before moving to Los Angeles, del Barco was a reporter for NPR Member station WNYC in New York City. She started her radio career on the production staff of NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday with Scott Simon. However her first taste for radio came as a teenager, when she and her brother won an award for an NPR children's radio contest.

del Barco's reporting experience extends into newspaper and magazines. She served on the staffs of The Miami Herald and The Village Voice, and has done freelance reporting. She has written articles for Latina magazine and reported for the weekly radio show Latino USA.

Stories written by del Barco have appeared in several books including Las Christmas: Favorite Latino Authors Share their Holiday Memories (Vintage Books) and Las Mamis: Favorite Latino Authors Remember their Mothers (Vintage Books). del Barco contributed to an anthology on rap music and hip hop culture in the book, Droppin' Science (Temple University Press).

Peruvian writer Julio Villanueva Chang profiled del Barco's life and career for the book Se Habla Espanol: Voces Latinas en USA (Alfaguara Press).

She mentors young journalists through NPR's "Next Generation", Global Girl, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and on her own, throughout the U.S. and Latin America.

A fourth generation journalist, del Barco was born in Lima, Peru, to a Peruvian father and Mexican-American mother. She grew up in Baldwin, Kansas, and in Oakland, California, and has lived in Manhattan, Madrid, Miami, Lima and Los Angeles. She began her journalism career as a reporter, columnist and editor for the Daily Californian while studying anthropology and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned a Master's degree in journalism from Columbia University with her thesis, "Breakdancers: Who are they, and why are they spinning on their heads?"

For those who are curious where her name comes from, "Mandalit" is the name of a woman in a song from Carmina Burana, a musical work from the 13th century put to music in the 20th century by composer Carl Orff.

See stories by Mandalit del Barco