Una imprescindible y escalofriante novela donde el talento del autor de 2666 y Los detectives salvajes brilla en todo su esplendor.

Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, sacerdote y critico literario, miembro del Opus Dei y poeta mediocre, convencido de que esta a punto de morir, revisa en una sola noche de fiebre alta los momentos y personajes mas importantes de su vida.

Pero a medida que la noche avanza su fiebre va remitiendo y el delirio se atenua con la aparicion de los monstruos de su pasado. Asi van desfilando por el libro una serie de personajes pintados con el surrealismo tipico de Bolano: los ambiguos Oido y Odeim; un pintor guatemalteco que se deja morir de inanicion en el Paris de 1943; Farewell, el pope de la critica literaria chilena; Maria Canales, una mujer misteriosa en cuya casona de las afueras se reune lo mas granado de la literatura; y el general Pinochet, a quien Urrutia Lacroix dio clases de marxismo.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

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.