Nine years ago publication of "The Savage Detectives" catapulted Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano into literary prominence both in Spain and Latin America.

		"THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES" By Roberto Bolano, translated by Natasha Wimmer Farrar, Straus & Giroux $27

That year Bolano also received the major Spanish language literary awards, the Herralde Prize in Barcelona, and the Romulo Gallegos Prize in Caracas.

Now, thanks to the same novel and positive reviews in major American magazines and newspapers, the late writer has become the "Latin American phenomenon" in the United States. He died in 2003 at age 50.

Some reviewers claim that since 1970, with the publication of Gabriel Garc???Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude," no other novel translated from Spanish has created such commotion in the United States.

The novel opens as the adventures of a group of young Mexican poets, known as the "visceral realists," and their leaders, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, a quixotic, challenging, provoking and errant pair who live on the fringes of society.

They're on a search for a mythical poet from the turn of the 20th century named Ces???a Tinajero, who has disappeared in the Sonora Desert. But this search is just a plot device to set the novel in motion.

The many stories in this novel span 21 years, from November 1975 to December 1996, and extend from Mexico to the Mediterranean coasts of Spain and France, going through Paris, Vienna, San Diego, Los Angeles, Rome, Tel Aviv and several African countries torn by civil wars.

The book is in three parts. The first and third ones are the diary of Juan Garc???Madero, a 19-year old poet who recounts his sexual and literary initiation, as well as his escapades with Belano and Lima in Mexico City and the desert following Ces???a Tinajero's tracks.

The second, properly called "The Savage De-tectives," fills 400 of the book's 577 pages. It's made of crisscrossing monologues by 53 characters, all of different ages, jobs and origins.

Bolano's ambition is huge; his capacity to tell stories, never-ending. The search for the poet Tinajero is marked by the most diverse adventures about:

A Mexican prostitute who flees her pimp; Lima and an Austrian neo-Nazi who spies in Israel; Belano as a war journalist in Angola, Rwanda and Liberia; a wealthy Jewish-Mexican girl forced to undergo psychiatric treatment in Los Angeles; a group of Spanish writers bragging at the book festival in Madrid; the Uruguayan poet Auxilio Lacouture, hidden for many days in a bathroom when the Mexican army occupied the university campus (this last story was later developed by the author as a short novel titled "Amulet," and published by New Directions).

What impresses us is the fine ear of Bolano, who can masterfully create so many different voices, each of them telling a story. At the same time, he conjures at given moments those adventures shared with Belano, Lima or both, so that the reader sees a wide-ranging and fascinating portrait of both characters and the times they live in.

Each story, which starts off like a digression, enriches our knowledge about the detective poets and engages the reader even more.

The novel is very autobiographical. Belano's character is based on Bolano himself and Lima's on the Mexican poet Mario Santiago (1953-98). In 1975 in Mexico City, Bolano and Santiago founded a movement called "infrarrealista." (The curious reader could consult the site -- www.infrarrealismo.com.)

Seven years ago, when I read "The Savage Detectives" for the first time, the vibrant rhythm of its prose made a deep impression on me (a rhythm very well translated into English), as did the intensity with which desperate characters living on the edge express themselves.

In spring 2001, I once mentioned this to Bolano while we dined in a restaurant in Blanes, a small town on Spain's Catalan coast where he lived his last years; but then he preferred to talk about the novel he was currently working on, his great work published posthumously, "2666." It's not yet translated into English.

This is a much more ambitious novel than "The Savage Detectives," and it confirms he is the most important writer of the Spanish language of this generation.