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 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.
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Community Reviews
As far I can tell, the surface of this story of a jerky priest who has literary interest and regrets his complicity with the Pinochet regime at the end of his life. Overall, it seems a condemnation of intellectuals who just go along with repressive regimes even if they are opposed to them. This also appears to be written in a way in which only an intellectual could stomach reading so... maybe Bolaño didn't want to openly critique intellectualism, perhaps because it is not the problem on its own.
