And Wimmer's translation of 2666 has been greeted still more feverishly. Like the poet who makes it big in Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, he 'appeared in Time without insult and in Newsweek with praise'. Natasha Wimmer's English rendering of The Savage Detectives, the novel that made him famous in the Spanish-speaking world, won more acclaim that year than any translated work of fiction since America's discovery of WG Sebald.

By 2007, though, Bolaño had become, in the words of the writer Francisco Goldman, 'New York literary fashion's writer of the moment'. His work was praised by Susan Sontag not long before her death, but no one expected it to notch up large American sales. When he died, aged 50, in 2003, Bolaño - a Chilean partly brought up in Mexico who settled in Spain in the 80s - had had one book translated into English. Much the same could be said of Bolaño himself, which, sadly, wouldn't be all that surprising were it not for the scale and swiftness of his conquest of the US. One region, however, continues to ignore him: 'In the British Isles, it must be said, Archimboldi remained a decidedly marginal writer.' His renown even spreads to the United States, a country that is famously resistant to translated fiction, but which, Bolaño says, 'likes vanished writers (vanished writers or millionaire writers) or the legend of vanished writers'. A rumour that the enigmatic Prussian might be in line for the Nobel prize puts his books on the bestseller lists in France and Italy. Not much is known about Archimboldi, whose improbable name is thought to be a pseudonym, but during the 1990s (in Bolaño's telling) critical enthusiasm for his dark, difficult novels - one of which is 'about seaweed' - starts to find him a readership outside his native country.

O ne of the many plot lines in Roberto Bolaño's posthumously published novel 2666 concerns a secretive German writer named Benno von Archimboldi.

2666 by roberto bolaño