By Night in Chile

Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix is dying. A priest, a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a poet, in his feverish delirium the crucial events of his past swell around him. From glimpses of the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German writer Ernst Junger and his one-time student, General Pinochet, to nightmarish flashes of falcons and falconers, the Chilean landscape and faces of those now dead, reality and imagination crowd and clamber in pursuit of the ‘wizened youth’ who still haunts Father Lacroix all these years later. TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS ‘The wit, the horror, the ambition, the strangeness; Roberto Bolaño’s work is a sprawling labyrinth of surprise, bold invention, and images that will live with you forever’ Chris Power ‘Few are the writers who have mastered the alchemy of turning the trivial into the sublime, the everyday into adventure. Bolaño is among the best at this diabolical skill’ Georgi Gospodinov, author of Time Shelter

Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix is dying. A priest, a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a poet, in his feverish delirium the crucial events of his past swell around him. From glimpses of the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German writer Ernst Junger and his one-time student, General Pinochet, to nightmarish flashes of falcons and falconers, the Chilean landscape and faces of those now dead, reality and imagination crowd and clamber in pursuit of the ‘wizened youth’ who still haunts Father Lacroix all these years later. TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS ‘The wit, the horror, the ambition, the strangeness; Roberto Bolaño’s work is a sprawling labyrinth of surprise, bold invention, and images that will live with you forever’ Chris Power ‘Few are the writers who have mastered the alchemy of turning the trivial into the sublime, the everyday into adventure. Bolaño is among the best at this diabolical skill’ Georgi Gospodinov, author of Time Shelter

"Extraordinary . . . [ Bola?o's] greatest work." --James Wood, The New York Times The book that catapulted Roberto Bola?o into international literary stardom, By Night in Chile is the final testimony of Sebasti?n Urrutia Lacroix--Chilean priest and member of Opus Dei, eminent literary critic and failed poet--as he is haunted by a shadowy figure from his past. In Urrutia's feverish last hours, a deluge of memories pours from him: of hobnobbing with Santiago's most unctuous literati; of undertaking a mission to save Europe's decaying cathedrals from existential threat by pigeon excrement; of retreating into Greco-Roman poetry during the darkest chapter of modern Chilean history; of tutoring Augusto Pinochet in Marxist theory, so that the General may better understand his enemies. Throughout he insists, with fracturing conviction, that he was always on the right side of history. A novel about high art and fascism, silence and complicity, and, ultimately, the weight of damnation, Roberto Bola?o's By Night in Chile is a deep-cutting satire and a work of devastating moral insight.

"Extraordinary . . . [ Bola?o's] greatest work." --James Wood, The New York Times The book that catapulted Roberto Bola?o into international literary stardom, By Night in Chile is the final testimony of Sebasti?n Urrutia Lacroix--Chilean priest and member of Opus Dei, eminent literary critic and failed poet--as he is haunted by a shadowy figure from his past. In Urrutia's feverish last hours, a deluge of memories pours from him: of hobnobbing with Santiago's most unctuous literati; of undertaking a mission to save Europe's decaying cathedrals from existential threat by pigeon excrement; of retreating into Greco-Roman poetry during the darkest chapter of modern Chilean history; of tutoring Augusto Pinochet in Marxist theory, so that the General may better understand his enemies. Throughout he insists, with fracturing conviction, that he was always on the right side of history. A novel about high art and fascism, silence and complicity, and, ultimately, the weight of damnation, Roberto Bola?o's By Night in Chile is a deep-cutting satire and a work of devastating moral insight.