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By night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño
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By night in Chile (2000)

by Roberto Bolaño

Other authors: See the other authors section.

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6743813,072 (3.81)45
  1. 10
    The Fall by Albert Camus (Queenofcups)
    Queenofcups: A similar treatment of the evolution of a consciousness, in a different time and place.
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English (33)  Italian (2)  Swedish (1)  German (1)  Norwegian (1)  All languages (38)
Showing 1-5 of 33 (next | show all)
Un texto muy denso, casi un poema en prosa, pero es fascinante. Tiene aspectos puramente chilenos que no entendí muy bien (unas notas a pie ayudarían a veces), pero de todos modos el uso de lenguaje de Bolaño y los eventos surrealisticos merece la pena leer. ( )
  MichaelDC | Apr 3, 2013 |
I read a fair amount of Spanish and Latin American literature, both popular(like Perez-Reverte or Ruiz Zafon) and classical. "By Night in Chile" was my first exposure to Bolano. The novel's structure was stream of conscience, one long unbroken paragraph carrying the reader forward 130 pages: a man on his death bed reflecting on his life, called to task by his "wizened youth." That life included the Pinochet years in Chile. Bolano's fame is growing, with such adjectives as "brilliant" being tossed about. I suspect that I need to read him in Spanish, although this translation seemed particularly strong. Overall, the novel was well paced and revealing. Sebastian's life story stayed with me hauntingly. ( )
  JayLehnertz | Mar 31, 2013 |
In this slim book, Bolaño manages to attack everything from the literati to religion, from politics to dissident desires, from memory and its unreliability to flat-out fabrications and historical inconsistencies.

The narrative voice here is really the technical vehicle that navigates the reader, and it's at this that Bolaño succeeds in such a wonderfully brilliant and uncharted way. While at times reminiscent of Dostoevsky's Underground Man or Camus's Clamence, or perhaps the comparison is solely rooted in the motif of confession, Bolaño's Urrutia is a literary, religious, political, and existential crisis all his own. ( )
  proustitute | Mar 31, 2013 |
O primeiro livro que li de Bolaño, e foi uma boa escolha, Bolaño é sempre fascinante quando é apocalíptico.
Nesse livro ele pergunta o valor de uma obra literária na vida prática, no Chile noturno da ditadura de Pinochet. O protagonista, Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, sacerdote da Opus Dei, poeta medíocre, relembra sua vida em um momento de febre, e pensa nas aulas de marxismo que deu ao próprio ditador.
( )
  JuliaBoechat | Mar 30, 2013 |
In Bolaño's stream of consciousness narrative, he presents the deathbed confessions of Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a Jesuit in Chile who also wrote as a literary critic and a poet. Through a spellbinding combination of feverish memories and anecdotes, dreams and nightmares recalled, and desperate justifications of past actions and inaction, Father Sebastián leads the reader through an evocative and disturbing picture of life and art in Pinochet's Chile. I found the novel mesmerizing. In one long paragraph, Bolaño moves deftly through Father Sebastián's life, using the priest's fears about his own choices and actions as a means to point an accusing finger at the Chilean literati, at modern society in Europe and the Americas, at all of us. ( )
  KrisR | Mar 30, 2013 |
Showing 1-5 of 33 (next | show all)
Det finns överhuvudtaget mycket symbolik och allegori i denna korta roman. Men bilderna är så verkningsfulla och melankoliskt sköna att de inte alls tynger prosan så som symboler ofta brukar göra.
added by Jannes | editDagens Nyheter, Jonas Thente (Jan 26, 2009)
 

» Add other authors (16 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Roberto Bolañoprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Andrews, ChrisTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
"Ta av er peruken." - Chesterton
"Take off your wig"
Dedication
For Carolina López and Lautaro Bolaño
First words
I am dying now, but I still have many things to say.
Quotations
....my cassock flapping in the wind, my cassock like a shadow, my black flag, my prim and proper music, clean, dark cloth, a well in which the sins of Chile sank without a trace
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0811215474, Paperback)

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.

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 English—recounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet, but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and a conservative literary critic, a sort of lap dog to the rich and powerful cultural elite, in whose villas he encounters Pablo Neruda and Ernst Junger. 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. Soon, searingly, his memories go from bad to worse. Heart-stopping and hypnotic, By Night in Chile marks the American debut of an astonishing writer.

(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 03 Jan 2013 12:05:41 -0500)

(see all 2 descriptions)

Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, suffering from a fever and fearing that he is dying, recalls the most important events in his life, from Paris in 1943 to Chile under General Pinochet.

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