By Night in Chile

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.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Style is Content in 'By Night in Chile', 2008-12-17
'By Night in Chile' provides a mass of chaotic detail held together by supposedly saying something about the essence of Opus Dei. This is an Opus Dei without all those Catholic trappings though. There are a few mentions of popes etc. but as an analysis of a Catholic organization 'By Night in Chile' fails to make the grade. One can be anti-Opus Dei but this book provides no points for that case. The digressive style of 'By Night in Chile' is lot like the most digressive style of Henry James but taken two steps further. Style here is all and style here presents a chaos which supposedly uncovers a secret organization. Perhaps so but that organization isn't Opus Dei, an organization which I hold no brief for.


2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

A Ramble with Roberto, 2008-11-19
The New Your Times Book Review has said nice things about Bolano's two newest novels, but I decided to step back and start with an earlier novella, By Night in Chile. I was disappointed. The narrative rambles among various conversations about literature and cultural history with nothing much at stake for the characters. It is oddly without plot.

Moreover, Bolano formats his story into only two paragraphs, the last one consisting of only a seven word sentence at the end, on page 130. All dialogue is embedded in the one paragraph without quotation marks. Paragraph breaks and quotation marks are courtesies to the reader, and departures from these conventions should be artistically justified. In this book, the departures are merely rude.

Bolano's great theme, according to The New York Times, is the sorry state of literature in his native land. I wonder if I'm the only reader to think that By Night in Chile is part of the problem.


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

small poems within larger stories, 2008-05-07
What I have come to appreciate reading Bolaño's book is the fact that he takes you on several small journeys getting you from plot-point to plot-point. You almost don't realize that he is doing it until you finish one of these tangents and get led carefully back to the main storyline. That Bolaño trusts his talents enough to introduce characters that are only there to make a single point, that they exist in the novel just to die or to cease to exist just so some small nuance of Chile, the Church or his personal imagination can be revealed is truly something. For instance, a "Guatemalan Painter" is introduced and given depth and perspective before being assigned his lonely fate which is to fade away to nothingness despite having great talent just so that the author can depict the grim experiences of displaced foreigners and to introduce Don Salvador Reyes to Ernst Jünger. He introduces Salvador Reyes and rounds him out as a character, portrays him as a man of principles and position, an erudite pillar of society. The meeting of the three men only accomplishes one single thing, a book translated in French is passed from Reyes to Jünger providing the context for the only mention in the history of World War II of a Chilean ever taking part in the greatest conflict known to man. As if to say, one of us took part in this great endeavor, and although nothing of the man exists or of the painter who made possible the acquaintance with the German officer and writer, Ernst Jünger who documents the existence of our participant, but one of us was there and here is the proof and displaced and erased we may be in this gigantic, Western history, at least ONE of us was there. One Chilean. One man. One proof. And without further explanation, the whole tale falls under the title "Landscape: Mexico City an hour before dawn". It is a poem, not a story.

Bolaño does this to you again and again with such a light touch in these side-stories hidden among what is actually happening. And if you focus too closely on what is more obviously happening to Urrutia Lacroix as he becomes party to Mr. Fear and Mr. Hate, to the falconers and their destruction of spirit, to the Marxists he teaches and disowns, to the suppressed homosexuality of Farewell and the more literary circles, to the duality of his roles as liberal writer and conservative critic, and the old man denouncing and finally ceasing to renounce his wizened youth only at the end, etc...if you look at only these more blatant metaphors you will miss the really fine morsels hidden in the tedious little filler pages, poetry masquerading as fluff, revelation in the side-notes.




5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

First time Bolano reader left disappointed., 2008-01-06
I had heard so many positive things about Roberto Bolano that I decided to give this short read a go as my first entry into his work. Unfortunately, this work never captivated me with its meandering writing. I felt the first half of the book was too slow and took too long to get into the story. The story never really found its rhythm until Fr. Urrutia returned from his trip to Europe and was enlisted to help Pinochet and his cadre of leaders better understand Marxism. Given all the favorable feedback Bolano receives, I'll give him another try even though this work left me extremely disappointed.


2 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

Everyone loves this book and raves about it., 2007-12-13
Everyone raves about this book, but it's awful. The prose is stilted, unimaginative, cliche-ridden, and self-indulgent. It could have been 1/3 as long (and it's short) and would have been twice as good.

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