PositiveThe IndependentBolaño has a perfect ear for the Mexicans, Argentines, French and Spaniards who tell us about their brief encounters with the two poets. It\'s as if he has tape-recorded them. The translator heroically follows. We do not enter their minds; all is hearsay ... This novel is an elegy for a generation of Latin American would-be poets fed on extremists like Rimbaud and Marx ... Bolaño can be savagely comic as he mocks his generation, yet equally tender in his piecing together of broken lives.
