By Night in Chile

Rating:
Summary: Hallucinatory, Surreal and Satiric
Review: BY NIGHT IN CHILE is a wonderful book and it's a shame there aren't more reviews of it here.

BY NIGHT IN CHILE is one long monologue given in a single night by Father Sebastian Urrutia who believes he's dying. Father Urrutia is a member of Opus Dei, a failed poet, a marvelous literary critic and a man tortured by a vision of a "wizened youth."

The book opens with Urrutia listening to Pablo Neruda recite poetry at a country estate. Urrutia then makes his way across Europe in an effort to save the continent's churches from pigeon droppings (these scenes are marvelous). On his return to Chile, Urrutia becomes a stellar figure in Allende's Popular Unity government and later teaches Marxist doctrine to Pinochet.

The last section of the novel, however, might be the very best and it's certainly the most chilling. This section involves a woman named Maria Canales who is definitely based on Mariana Callejas. Bolano uses Canales to satirize the Chilean literary scene under Pinochet. While Canales hosts literary "receptions" in her living room, her basement is being used as a torture chamber.

If you decide to read BY NIGHT IN CHILE, don't expect to find some sort of "fluffy" story a la Isabel Allende. Bolano was a much better and more insightful writer that that. And this is real literary fiction, not simply "a good story."

Although BY NIGHT IN CHILE isn't going to appeal to most readers, it is definitely one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. The prose is perfect and is, at times, very lyrical and hallucinatory. At other times, it's crackling with satirical wit. Bolano really managed to dissect literature in this book, especially Chilean literature.

Bolano wrote many novels and books of poetry, but sadly, BY NIGHT IN CHILE in the only one of his works to be translated into English. If you can read Spanish and you love highly intelligent, highly literary novels, I would suggest trying to track down the Spanish language versions of Bolano's other books.

Sadly, Roberto Bolano died in 2003 and his loss was greatly felt in Latin America and in Europe. Hopefully, Chris Andrews will translate more of Bolano's work into English and this writer, who was so tremendously talented, will become better known in the US.

BY NIGHT IN CHILE is a book not to be missed.

Rating:
Summary: Great for Chilean Literature Enthusiasts
Review: I think I would have appreciated this book more if I was more into Chilean literature. Some characters, like Pablo Neruda, I could recognize right away, but most were unknown to me. Still I could follow the story, but I might not have understood all the nuances. If you aren't informed about Chile and have the will to look stuff up, this book could be a good starting point about Chile without being deliberate like a travel guide.

The novel also captures other aspects of Chilean history and society, such as the time leading up to Allende's downfall and Pinochet's dictatorship, the role of the Church in the mid- to late-twentieth century, the importance of politics, and other topics.

The voice and tone of the novel is unique. It flows as one stream of consciousness without paragraphs or chapters, and with many run-on sentences. At times the reader forgets that the page is the medium through which the voice is communicating, because it almost comes as direct as someone speaking. However, the narration is lacking for passion, which perfectly reflects Fr. Urrutia's low energy and apprehensiveness towards his vocation, but the book is not for those seeking an exciting narrative.

Rating:
Summary: A wondrous reverie - rich and strange.........
Review: Roberto Bolano, alas, died this year. BY NIGHT IN CHILE is his only work translated into English (very sensuously and beautifully by Chris Andrews) despite the fact that he wrote nine novels, short stories and poetry in Spanish. Chilean by birth, but expatriated to Barcelona and Mexico City because of political issues, Bolano is an enormously gifted, unique voice. Hopefully Chris Andrews will continue to translate his other works for us as I know the reading public will demand more Bolano after reading this short novel.

In a brief but densely packed 130 pages, Bolano takes the voice of Fr. Urrutia who on his deathbed tries to organize the chaotic thoughts that have represented his life before he enters the ultimate climax of death. We learn of his childhood as a poor boy who longed to be a poet, his conversion to the priesthood, his contribution to the literary world of not only his own poems but literary criticism or other writers, and his rather bizarre ramblings of this life adventures - his 'assignment' to unravel the workings of the Opus Dei (with an hilarious metaphor of each church throughout Europe training a falcon to destroy the pigeons in order to keep the buildings free of pigeon excrement only to realize they were destroying the universal symbol of the Holy Spirit!), his conversations with the Chilean critic Farewell, meetings with Pablo Neruda, and his assignment to teach Marxism to Pinochet and the Junta after the fall of Allende, and more. All of this glowing stream of conscience is delivered in words and phrases that stand with the finest of writers - James Joyce, ee cumings, Ezra Pound, Neruda, Marquez - but at the same time they retain flavor which makes them uniquely Chilean. "...I cannot have been properly awake, for deep in my brain I could hear the voices of popes, like the distant screeching of a flock of birds, a clear sign that part of my mind was still dreaming or obstinately refusing to emerge from the labyrinth of dreams, that parade ground where the wizened youth [himself as a child] is hiding, along with the dead poets who were living then, and who now, against the certainty of imminent oblivion, are erecting a miserable crypt in my cranial vault, building it with their names...." or: "...flocks of starlings....appeared again like a lightening bolt, ...and stooped on the huge flocks of starlings coming out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening the sky with their erratic fluttering, and after a few minutes the fluttering of the starlings was bloodied, scattered and bloodied, and afternoon on the outskirts of Avignon took on a deep red hue, like the colour of sunsets seen from an aeroplane, or the colour of dawns, when the passenger is woken gently........and lifts up the little blind and sees the horizon marked with a red line, like the planet's femoral artery, or of the planet's aorta..."

These are but too brief abstracts of Bolano's luxuriant writing ( and Andrews' equally gifted translation!) that flow unceasingly from this richly succinct masterwork. This is easily one of the more rewarding new books I have read and I could not recommend it more highly. Read it all in one sitting..and I would gently wager you will immediately re-read it.