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2666 by Roberto Bolano Picador, 898 pages, $29.99 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano Picador, 592 pages, $29.99 Reviewed by Matt Bowler.

Guess how I spent my summer – weighing in at a combined total of 1490 pages of dense, impassioned and often sesquipedalian prose from Chilean poet Roberto Bolano, I spent it in another world. A world of poets and critics, academics and bohemians. A world where literature is religion and state.

Bolano has been something of a sensation in the world of literature of late, but an uneasy one. This seems apt because, for all his Latin American credentials, his literature has a very European "theatre of unease" feel about it. He seeks, successfully, to rouse, to arouse and to incite; to satirise and to disgust.

Bolano was born in Chile in 1953 but spent much of his life in Mexico and Spain. Most of these two novels take place in Mexico, with excursions to Europe. He had a reputation for chaotic and provocative behaviour – an enfant terrible who gave no artistic quarter.

Bolano died of liver failure in 2003, leaving behind a large, unfinished manuscript with instructions for its release in five parts. It was ultimately released, to critical and popular acclaim, as the novel 2666 in 2004. An English translation followed in 2008.

It truly is a stupendous volume. There is some disconnection between the parts, a feeling of dislocation for the reader. And there is a 300-page chunk in the middle that is a gruesome and gruelling roll call of death, rape and religious defilement that hovers somewhere between bilious and boring.

There is also some seriously stunning writing. Bolano delivers prose that is extremely intelligent, blackly comic and inventive. He plays relentlessly with form and style. His theme is nothing short of literature itself. What is it? Why does it drive us so? What can it do? Where can it go?

Bolano, for his part, seems intent on pushing hard at edges. Maybe too hard for comfort at times, but you don't come away from the work imagining that the comfort of his audience is any concern of his.

The characters are writers and academics, who Bolano gently sends up at the same time as he legitimises them by giving them voice. As a reader, this absolute immersion in a literary landscape is all good voyeuristic fun.

The Savage Detectives was first published in Spanish in 1998. It feels like a younger and brasher work, yet at the same time more controlled and restrained. Although the novel is really one long adventure, the actual writing is less adventurous (at least compared with the magnum opus that is 2666). Ironically, this makes it an easier read.

Here again the protagonists are poets, on a road trip across Mexico and the world in search of an almost mythical missing poet.

Thematically, the two novels touch a lot of common ground – 2666 goes a little further and a little deeper but The Savage Detectives drives a tighter, more engaging narrative.

I have come away from the two works with an impression of Bolano as a flawed genius. Sometimes brilliant, other times wayward, often bewildering, occasionally bombastic, but unrelentingly dedicated to his art and craft, and utterly fearless in his pursuit of great literature.

• Matt Bowler is a freelance reviewer from Nelson.

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