By Night in Chile

Description

This highly imaginative novella is a masterpiece of its type and one of the finest early works by legendary Chilean writer, Roberto Bolano. During the course of a single night, Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest, who is a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a mediocre poet, relives some of the crucial events of his life. He believes he is dying and in his feverish delirium various characters, both real and imaginary, appear to him as icy monsters, as if in sequences from a horror film. Thus we are given glimpses of the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German writer Ernst Junger, General Pinochet, whom Father Lacroix instructs in Marxist doctrine, as well as various members of the Chilean intelligentsia whose lives, during a period of political turbulence, have touched upon his. By the author of 2666.

Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile in 1953 and died in Catalonia in 2003. He was widely regarded as the essential Latin American writer of our age. He was best known for his novels (including The Savage Detectives, which won a number of prestigious literary awards, Nocturno de Chile, translated as By Night in Chile, and 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award) and his short stories, Last Evenings on Earth.

One of the greats of late 20th- and early 21st-century fiction * Guardian * The Chilean is being canonised by critics as the first great writer of this century * Financial Times * One of the most respected and influential writers of [his] generation... At once funny and vaguely, pervasively, frightening * The Nation * The most important writer to emerge from Latin America since Garcia Marquez * San Francisco Chronicle * Bolano is the brightest literary star in the current Latin American panorama * El Pais *