Ezra's Bookshelf

By Night in Chile

by Roberto Bolaño · 129 pages · ~2.5 hrs

Fiction

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Roberto Bolano's compact, devastating novel takes the form of a single feverish monologue delivered by Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest, literary critic, and poet who believes he is on his deathbed. Over the course of one night, Urrutia Lacroix attempts to justify his life by recounting key episodes from Chile's turbulent twentieth century. He recalls his early literary ambitions, his recruitment by mysterious figures in Opus Dei, and a strange European journey to study church architecture that may have been something else entirely. The narrative circles around encounters with major historical and literary figures: Pablo Neruda at a literary gathering, the German writer Ernst Junger in a moment that blurs art and politics, and most disturbingly, sessions in which Urrutia Lacroix was enlisted to teach Marxist theory to General Augusto Pinochet and his junta so they could better understand and combat their enemies. Bolano uses the confession to examine how intellectuals accommodate themselves to authoritarian power, finding ways to serve dictators while maintaining the fiction of artistic purity. The prose moves in long, breathless paragraphs that mirror the narrator's desperation to construct a coherent account of his compromises before death arrives. Urrutia Lacroix is both sympathetic and damning, a man of genuine literary sensitivity who chose comfort and prestige over moral courage. The novel, originally published in Spanish in 2000 and translated into English by Chris Andrews, is one of Bolano's most concentrated works, compressing an entire national tragedy into barely a hundred pages of prose that is by turns lyrical, sardonic, and haunting.

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