I second rereading the two big works though OP, and if you’re craving more Savage Detectives you can check out The Spirit of Science Fiction, which is basically an early unpublished draft of what that novel would become. Heart-stopping and hypnotic, By Night in Chile marked the American debut of an astonishing writer. I looove By Night in Chile and think it has some of Bolaño’s most captivating writing. Soon, searingly, his memories go from bad to worse. He has been acclaimed by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times), and as the real thing and the rarest (Susan Sontag). 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. Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. This wild, eerily compact novel-Roberto Bolaño'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 conservative literary critic, a sort of lapdog to the rich and powerful cultural elite, in whose villas he encounters Pablo Neruda and Ernst Jünger. A deathbed confession revolving around Opus Dei and Pinochet, By Night in Chile pours out the self-justifying dark memories of the Jesuit priest Father Urrutia.Īs 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.

By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño