By Night In Chile
Encyclopedia
By Night in Chile, written by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos was a Chilean novelist and poet. In 1999 he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes , and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes...

, was first published in 2000. Chris Andrews' English translation, which appeared in 2003 under New Directions, was also the first of Bolaño's novels to be published in English. This short novel has since received critical renown across the world.

Plot summary

The novel is narrated entirely in the first person by the sick and aging Father Urrutia. Taking place over the course of a single evening, and written mostly in a single paragraph, the book is the macabre, feverish monologue of a flawed man and a failed priest. Persistently hallucinatory and defensive, the story ranges from Opus Dei
Opus Dei
Opus Dei, formally known as The Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei , is an organization of the Catholic Church that teaches that everyone is called to holiness and that ordinary life is a path to sanctity. The majority of its membership are lay people, with secular priests under the...

 to falconry
Falconry
Falconry is "the taking of wild quarry in its natural state and habitat by means of a trained raptor". There are two traditional terms used to describe a person involved in falconry: a falconer flies a falcon; an austringer flies a hawk or an eagle...

 to private lessons on Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

 for Pinochet and his generals directed at the unspecified reproaches of "the wizened youth."

The novel begins with the lines "I am dying now, but I still have many things to say", and proceeds to describe, after a brief mention of joining the priesthood, how Father Urrutia entered the Chilean literary world under the wing of a famous, albeit fictitious, tacitly homosexual literary critic by the name of Farewell. At Farewell's estate he encounters the critic's close friend Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda....

 and later begins to publish literary criticism and poetry.

Not surprisingly, Urrutia's criticism is met with more applaud than his poetry (written under a pen-name) and there is little if any mention of Urrutia attending to matters of the church until two individuals from a shipping company (likely undercover government operatives) send him on a trip through Europe, where he meets priest after priest engaged in falconry
Falconry
Falconry is "the taking of wild quarry in its natural state and habitat by means of a trained raptor". There are two traditional terms used to describe a person involved in falconry: a falconer flies a falcon; an austringer flies a hawk or an eagle...

, where we see his one act of rebellion, when he releases a caged falcon after the priest that owned him died.

The novel is also deeply political though not always overtly, and Father Urrutia seems to stand as a kind of pitiable villain for the author himself. Urrutia is chosen to teach Augusto Pinochet
Augusto Pinochet
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, more commonly known as Augusto Pinochet , was a Chilean army general and dictator who assumed power in a coup d'état on 11 September 1973...

 and his top generals about Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

 after the coup and death of President Allende
Allende
Allende is a Spanish word of Latin origin meaning "beyond" or "besides". It is also a Basque surname.Allende may refer to:People*Salvador Allende, former President of Chile...

. Bolaño was well known for his brazenly radical left-wing politics and was briefly jailed by Pinochet for dissent on returning to Chile in 1973, "To help build the revolution."

Indeed, the wizened youth who Urrutia is forever lashing against and defending himself from, seems to be yet another trace of Roberto Bolaño inscribing himself into his stories, while also serving as a younger Urrutia who has not compromised himself as the current narrator himself has, suggesting that Urrutia has understood since his first words to the reader that he is compromised. By the end of the novel, Urrutia seems to be making a last apology directed to himself, understanding that the reason by which he has led his life is flawed.

Unlike other fantastical deathbed rants such as William Gaddis
William Gaddis
William Thomas Gaddis, Jr. was an American novelist. He wrote five novels, two of which won National Book Awards and one of which, The Recognitions , was chosen as one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005...

's Agapē Agape
Agape Agape
Agapē Agape is a novel by William Gaddis. Published posthumously in 2002 by Viking with an afterword by Joseph Tabbi, Agapē Agape was Gaddis' fifth and final novel...

the writing style is remarkably accessible despite itself and the story of his life intact as it is woven into Chile's political history despite progressively more delirious and compromised powers of recollection. Francisco Goldman
Francisco Goldman
Francisco Goldman is an American novelist, journalist, and Allen K. Smith Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, Trinity College. He is workshop director at , the journalism school for Latin-America created by Gabriel García Márquez...

 describes it as "Sublime lunacy, Goya darkness, poignant wizardly writing--the elegantly streaming consciousness of Bolaño's dying literary priest merges one Chilean's personal memories with Chilean literature and history, and ends up confronting us with devastating questions that anyone, anywhere, might, should, be asking of themselves 'right now.'"

The novella, a satire
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...

, marks the beginning of its author's criticism of artists who retreat into art, using aestheticism as a way of blocking out the harsh realities of existence. According to Ben Richards, writing in The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

, "Bolaño uses this to illustrate the supine nature of the Chilean literary establishment under the dictatorship."

External links

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