Translated into English for the first time, the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño's prize-winning book portrays a lost generation. It opens in Mexico City in 1975 with the diary of Juan García Madero, a 17-year-old devotee of the "visceral-realist" movement championed by fictional poets Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima.

The visceral realists spend their time reading, stealing and destroying books – and posturing outrageously: according to a gay friend of Juan's, "novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual".

Juan's own writing is self-regarding, exuberant, naïve and charged with possibilities. The diary ends when Juan, Belano, Lima and a runaway prostitute set out on a road trip to trace the last recorded journey of a 1920s poet.

Bolaño's intense monologues fragment into a series of interviews with just about anyone who came into contact with Lima and Belano between 1976 and 1996.

What became of them? The two poets flicker distractedly out of people's lives and testimonies, although the interviews suggest that things weren't good.

By turns dispirited and heartening, The Savage Detectives is about what happens to great expectations when the world isn't interested.

Belano and Lima, reports a painter in 1981, had failed to be revolutionaries: "They weren't writers. Sometimes they wrote poetry, but I don't think they were poets either.


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