Comprised of a sharply focused 130 pages and written without paragraph separations, as a narration from the death bed of a Jesuit Priest named Father Urrutia, Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile has a tone of pressured urgency that makes it immediately apparent to the reader that there is something very important being told in his story. At the beginning, it is not clear what though-- you find out that Father Urrutia initially had aspirations towards becoming a poet, but after brushing elbows with some of the upper literary echelon, even meeting Pablo Neruda during a weekend at an estate of a literary mentor, he was instead destined for the established hierarchy of Chile’s intelligentsia. At the same time, he becomes further planted into the conservative powers through his being a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. And after being requested by the Opus Dei to travel to Europe and report upon the physical deterioration of the cathedrals (which turns into a surreal dream tainted with nightmarish implications of impending violence), Father Urruitia returns to Chile to find himself so entrenched within the powers of the time that he is without moral perspective, one which may have allowed him to comprehend and question the involvement he was to have with the horrors that were beginning to take place in Chile.

In 1973, the traditionally socialist government for Chile was taken over by Augusto Pinochet, a coup which was made possible through the assistance of the CIA under the Nixon administration and then upheld through the implied consent of the Catholic church, even though Pinochet was an anti-democratic dictator and ran a regime based upon a guiding policy of “political genocide“. Very quickly, massive human rights violations took place under Pinochet, including the widespread use of torture, imprisonment and the assassination of anyone who may have voiced a dissenting opinion. And because Pinochet’s party was largely Catholic, the church irresponsibly refrained from criticizing what continued to occur until 1990-- the year when democracy returned to Chile.

Because Father Urrutia clouds himself with the established religion and the prestige of being a member of the cultural elite, his actions become increasingly complicit with their actions because of his neglect and self chosen ignorance. And despite his suggestion at the beginning of the book that his story was to be a confession of sorts, a reader can’t help but conclude that this is pretext only and that Father Urrutia’s ‘confession’ is more aligned with justification and an attempt to excuse himself. He says in the first page, “I was at peace. I am no longer at peace.” but this is immediately followed by “There are a couple of points that have to be cleared up.” The boundaries begin to blur, as is the case when examining the psychologies involved with human behavior, and demonstrates another side of Bolaño which I had not realized before. One could almost follow along with Father Urruitia’s justifications, with an ease that is the frightening essence behind Bolaño’s social-political contention.

And of course, and which doesn’t really need to be said, Bolaño’s writing in impeccable, filled with further implications after reading through the book once, incorporating numerous sub-topics that allow a reader to become more personally involved with the story, while at the same time bolstering the central dynamic that was Bolaño’s impetus, or genius I should say (in the traditional sense). This is the third book of his that I’ve read and what I find so encouraging is that while they share similar qualities, which make them identifiably Bolaño, each text is still uniquely it’s own, demonstrating both the astounding depth and breadth of Bolaño’s artistic vision.