Most of the reviews focus on how this unpublished early novel prepare us for Bolano’s masterpieces 20 years later. (And there is much crossover). Yet, I chose to try read this as if I was encountering a new writer publishing his first novel. Taken in this light - Spirit of SF is exactly what you want out first novel - daring, imaginative, exhilarating and bit of a mess. The novel centers around 3 alternating sections. The Spirit of Science Fiction centers on two literarily ambitious young men, twenty-one-year-old Remo and seventeen-year-old Jan, arriving and settling in Mexico City and, in their different ways, beginning to try to find their way, in writing and life. Chapters alternate between the epistolary -- Jan's letters to science fiction authors (including Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree Jr., Fritz Leiber, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Philip José Farmer) --; ones entirely in dialogue -- a young literary prize-winner being interviewed by a journalist; Jan and Remo in conversation --; and Remo's account of life in Mexico City.  The novel has some fantastic scenes. The letters to SF writers, did or not. Jan’s desk made out of science fiction books, the mystery of the expanding number of literary journals, Remo’s motorcycle. The writing is pure Bolano - energetic purpulsave poetic and visceral. It’s a love letter to the letters and writing. The power of youth unattached. The Spirit of Science Fiction is a novel about the making of writers -- of Remo and Jan, still fumbling about, and of course also of Bolaño himself, with so much of himself in these characters. He has a self-aware Remo nicely sum up how this path he found himself on worked out, as it did for Bolaño: 

Up until then, I had been an onlooker in Mexico City, a fairly pretentious recent arrival and clumsy twenty-one-year-old poet. The city, I mean, took no notice of me, and my dreams never escaped the confines of pedantry and deadly artifice. (Oh, if nothing had happened or at least if Jan and José Arco had kept their mouths shut, instead of being where I am now, I'd be in the Paradise of Latin American Men of Letters -- in other words, teaching at an American university or at worst correcting galleys at a second rate publishing house, peaceful haven, infinite promise.) 

The novel also has a darker side. Jan and Remo, from Chile, are never fully accepted. And the older writer (Jan? Bolano himself?) is pretentious and lost. This isn’t a masterpiece. But it is one hell of a start - and if it came out today it would be praised for it’s inventiveness. 

My first Bolaño, and quite a start! I’m enraptured by his text, by his meandering thoughts and images. I really fell in love with this book, and I’m excited to read more of his!