By Night in Chile

By Night in Chile (Spanish: Nocturno de Chile) is a novella by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, first published in 2000. It was the first of Bolaño's novels to be published in English, with Chris Andrews's English translation, which appeared in 2003 under New Directions.

Originally titled Storms of Shit (Spanish: Tormentas de mierda), friend Juan Villoro and Jorje Herralde, his editor, convinced him to change it.^[1] In the author's own words he says "By night in Chile is a metaphor of a hellish country, among other things. It's also a metaphor of a young country, a country that doesn't know whether its a country or a countryside."^[2]

The story is narrated entirely in the first person by the sick and aging Father Urrutia. Taking place over the course of a single evening, the book is the macabre, feverish monologue of a flawed man and a failed priest. Except for the final sentence, the book is written without paragraphs or line breaks. Persistently hallucinatory and defensive, the story ranges from Opus Dei to falconry to private lessons on Marxism for Pinochet and his generals directed at the unspecified reproaches of "the wizened youth."

The story 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 and later begins to publish literary criticism and poetry.

Not surprisingly, Urrutia's criticism (written under a pen-name) is met with more applause than his poetry 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.

The story 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 and his top generals about Marxism after the coup and death of President Allende. 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 story, Urrutia seems to be making a last apology directed to himself, understanding that the reason by which he has led his life is flawed.

Susan Sontag declared that “By Night in Chile is the real thing, and the rarest: a contemporary novel destined to have a permanent place in world literature." James Wood from The New York Times said By Night in Chile was “still his greatest work”.^[3]

Ben Richards, writing in The Guardian, said "this is a wonderful and beautifully written book by a writer who has an enviable control over every beat, every change of tempo, every image. The prose is constantly exciting and challenging - at times lyrical and allusive, at others filled with a biting wit (Bolaño has dissected the Chilean literary tradition with such gleeful eloquence that the novel may not win him many dinner invitations back in the country of his birth)."^[4] The novella, a satire, 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. Richards continues, "Bolaño uses this to illustrate the supine nature of the Chilean literary establishment under the dictatorship."^[4]

The Millions wrote "Bolaño’s novella is a psychological portrait of complicity, and the ways in which we rationalize our complicity."^[5]

A diferencia de otros delirios de lecho de muerte, como Agapē Agape de William Gaddis , el estilo de escritura es accesible y la historia de su vida permanece intacta, entrelazada con la historia política de Chile a pesar de una capacidad de recuerdo cada vez más delirante y comprometida. Francisco Goldman la describe como «una locura sublime, la oscuridad de Goya, una escritura magistral y conmovedora: la conciencia elegantemente fluida del sacerdote literario moribundo de Bolaño fusiona los recuerdos personales de un chileno con la literatura y la historia chilenas, y termina confrontándonos con preguntas devastadoras que cualquiera, en cualquier lugar, podría, y debería, hacerse a sí mismo "ahora mismo"». O'Bryen reconoce una fuerte capa de melancolía a lo largo de la obra. ^{[ 6 ]}

• "Un sacerdote que vivió la sombría era de Pinochet", por Richard Eder , The New York Times , 16 de enero de 2004.
• Por Chad W. Post , The Review of Contemporary Fiction , 2004