By night in Chile

Enciclopedia de la Literatura en México

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 Bolano'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 Junger. 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.

* Esta contraportada corresponde a la edición de 2003. La Enciclopedia de la literatura en México no se hace responsable de los contenidos y puntos de vista vertidos en ella.

Enciclopedia de la Literatura en México

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