Chad W. Post, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 2004
Acerbic, subtle, hallucinatory, and moving...an interesting depiction of Chile's literati and...an indictment of their insular nature.
Susan Sontag
A wonderful and beautifully written book by a writer who has an enviable control over every beat. (The Manchester Guardian)
El Pais
Bolaño [is] the brightest literary star in the current Latin American panorama.
Vanguardia
A true masterpiece.
Susan Sontag
A contemporary novel destined to have a permanent place in world literature.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, Marc Cooper, 14 December 2003
Mordant, haunting and sometimes elegaic...takes the reader hurtling into the darkest psychological folds of one man and one country.
New York Times, Richard Eder, 16 January 2004
Haunting and mordant...written with unsettling art...the most damning sentence...has the pallor and stillness of a shroud.
New York Times Book Review, Mark Kamine, 11 January 2004
Postwar Chilean politics and literature infuse this densely learned, richly evocative novel....reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald.
Kirkus Reviews, 1 November 2003
One of the great Latin American novels, in an exemplary translation. Not to be missed.
Francisco Goldman, New York Times Magazine, 2 November 2003
[Bolano writes] with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow and an extreme and subversive personal vision.
Book Description
A deathbed confession revolving around Opus Dei and Pinochet, By Night in Chile pours out the self-justifying dark memories of the Jesuit priest Father Urrutia. As through a crack in the wall, By Night in Chile's single night-long rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of Church and State in Chile. This wild, eerily compact novel—Roberto Bolaño's first work available in English—recounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet, but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and a conservative literary critic, a sort of lap dog to the rich and powerful cultural elite, in whose villas he encounters Pablo Neruda and Ernst Jünger. Father Urrutia is offered a tour of Europe by agents of Opus Dei (to study "the disintegration of the churches," a journey into realms of the surreal); and ensnared by this plum, he is next assigned—after the destruction of Allende—the secret, never-to-be-disclosed job of teaching Pinochet, at night, all about Marxism, so the junta generals can know their enemy. Soon, searingly, his memories go from bad to worse. Heart-stopping and hypnotic, By Night in Chile marks the American debut of an astonishing writer.
By Night in Chile FROM THE PUBLISHER
During the course of a single night, Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest who is a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a mediocre poet, relives some of the crucial events of his life. He believes he is dying, and in his feverish delirium various characters, both real and imaginary, appear to him as icy monsters, as if in sequences from a horror film. Among them are the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German novelist Ernst Junger, and General Augusto Pinochet - whom Father Lacroix instructs in Marxist doctrine - as well as various members of the Chilean intelligentsia whose lives, during a period of political turbulence, have touched his own.
FROM THE CRITICS
The New York Times
Postwar Chilean politics and literature infuse this densely learned, richly evocative novel. In Chris Andrews's lucid translation, Bolano's febrile narrative tack and occasional surreal touches bring to mind the classics of Latin American magic realism; his cerebral protagonist and nonfiction borrowings are reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard and W. G. Sebald.
— Mark Kamine
Kirkus Reviews
Moral weakness and political collusion are the subtly developed themes of this terse 2000 novel, a first US publication for the late, great Chilean author (1953-2003). It consists of a nightlong deathbed monologue, presented in a single run-on paragraph, as spoken by Sebastiﾽn Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean Jesuit priest also well known as a poet and literary critic. Father Lacroix's hurtling memories begin with a lengthy account of his weekend visit, as a young seminarian, to the estate of eminent (and probably homosexual) critic Gonzalez Lamarca, a.k.a. "Farewell"-where the hopeful cleric is privileged to glimpse native poet Pablo Neruda "reciting verses to the moon," and even converse with the great man. Subsequent memories describe Lacroix's acquaintance with novelist-diplomat Don Salvador Reyes, himself a friend of German novelist (and WWII Wehrmacht officer) Ernst Juenger, Lacroix's history of publications and of travels under the auspices of the Catholic charitable works program Opus Dei-all shadowed by an unidentified "wizened youth" who seems to be the priest's sworn adversary and nemesis. We then learn of Lacroix's employment by sinister entrepreneurs Raef and Etah (whose surnames, reversed, spell "Fear" and "Hate")-first to "write a report on the preservation of [European] churches," then to instruct revolutionary General Augusto Pinochet and members of his junta in the principles of Marxism (a stunningly detailed sequence). Finally, Lacroix recalls soirﾽes at the lavish home of novelist-socialite Maria Canales, whose American husband lends his basement for the imprisonment and torture of "subversives." This unusual fiction builds a devastating indictment of aesthetic withdrawalfrom moral responsibility out of Lacroix's increasingly despairing reminiscences, which deftly incorporate references to the biblical Judas Tree (where Christ's betrayer hanged himself) and the quisling-like poet-"patriot" Sordello, a victim of Dante's Inferno. And, in the chilling conclusion, we learn the identity of the "wizened youth." One of the great Latin American novels, in an exemplary translation. Not to be missed.
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