What is this cobblers? You almost don't realize that he is doing it until you finish one of these tangents and get led carefully back to the main storyline. At Farewell's estate he encounters the critic's close friend Pablo Neruda and later begins to publish literary criticism and poetry. Hovered between three and four stars but the super-bold/perfect last line thoroughly cocked it up to four, plus I'll need to read it again in a single sitting (or two) instead of several. 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.". That Bolaño trusts his talents enough to introduce characters that are only there to make a single point, that they exist in the novel just to die or to cease to exist just so some small nuance of Chile, the Church or his personal imagination can be revealed is truly something. Consisting of just one, 118-page paragraph--seriously!--the narrator's rant exposes the underbelly of Chilean society--notably the toxic marriage between church and state. James Wood from The New York Times said By Night in Chile was “still his greatest work”[1], 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. Bolano was saying "I write to remember the past stories, laugh at them or turn them into the different stories, inventing the new end". SHUT. I’ll single out one particular section as being my personal favorite: there is a very long sentence that runs from page 81 - 82 (in this edition, the New Directions paperback) in which the entire chunk of history from Allende’s election through Pinochet’s coup occurs in the background while the narrator keeps to himself and rereads basically the entirety of Classical Greek literature. 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. There are a number of darkened hallways, closed doors, and isolated hilltops in the book. Max Khalil By Night in Chile December 6, 2020 By Night In Chile by Roberto Bolaño Avalos, A book published in 2000 that was written by the Chilean writer and poet, born in Santiago, the capital of the country on April 28 th, 1953 and died in Barcelona, Spain, on July 15, 2003. 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. December 1st 2005 By Night in Chile quantity. As 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. This wild, eerily compact novel—Roberto Bolano's first work available in … Father Urrutia, on the verge of death, understands and admits the bad he … the stream of consciousness vacillates between various moods and anecdotes—it is indeed very similar to the transcendental musings of Auxilio Lacouture atop her fortress of the UNAM in “Amulet”, a novel that is far superior, w-a-a-a-y more magical, than this one. “As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavour except the struggle to survive.”, Emily St. John Mandel's Latest Is a Modern Morality Test. Quick, beautiful read that I'd highly encourage anyone to try and finish in one sitting. UP. It is a book that contains just two paragraphs and the second paragraph is just. 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