by night in chile [w. roberto bolaño]

A priest begins to speak. His tone of voice is far from confident. His words seems circular, they roll round on themselves. He claims to be dying, and speaking in order to validate himself in the face of criticisms from a never-named 'wizened youth'. As the words pour out in a stream of unparagraphed sentences, anecdotes take shape - of a meeting with Neruda; of teaching Pinochet about Marxism; of a trip to Europe where every church has its own falcon for killing pigeons. The stories bleed into one another. The priest rambles. He doesn't really make his points. He talks for 130 pages, then he runs out of breath.

This is the third Bolaño novel I've read this year, following The Savage Detectives and Amulet. I've also garnered some kind of a handle on the Bolaño myth, which is destined to grow. Not as a result of his shorter works, but the great sweep and narrative verve of The Savage Detectives, and perhaps 2666, though that has yet to be published in English.

The story goes that around the age of 40, Bolaño decided he was going to make a living from writing novels. He submitted his work for prizes, re-submitting the same peice many times, winning many times. If this is the case, and even if it isn't, the pattern of his work seems apparent. Around the two larger novels he generated several shorter ones, written in short bursts. Amulet takes a character from Detectives, the self-proclaimed Uruguayan mother of Mexican poetry, and spins a yarn from her extract in the larger novel. By Night in Chile introduces the paranoid priest, Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, and gives him a platform to validate or damn himself, depending on your political perspective.

By Night in Chile allows Bolaño to deal with various shibboleths of his native land. In additions to Neruda and Pinochet's appearance, as book features the wife of a CIA torturer and representatives of Opus Dei. Bolaño's descriptions of the priest's Marxism lessons for the Chilean junta is an understated, savage critique. Sebastian lists the classes he gives one by one, along with the generals' attendance levels and their intellectual responses. Without in any way highlighting his role in the story, Bolaño sticks the knife into Pinochet, damning him through the priest's mouth. Bolaño spent almost all of his adult life in exile. This is politically charged writing, but the skill of it is that it's done in a way so melifluous and underhand that for a while you barely register that the pen is indeed proving to be mightier than the sword.

There's something of Bernhard in the priest's long monologue. Laced with wit and humour, it is also, significantly, poetic. Bolaño apparently resented having to make his living writing novels, never having been acclaimed for his poetry. The way in which stories come in and out of focus, governed by the implacable rhythm of Urratia's mental cogitations, gives it the feel of an extended piece of narrative verse. Perhaps By Night in Chile connects to Bolaño's longer work in much the same way that a poem, created in an abridged period of time, connects to the lengthy process of a long novel. It is a text that could be re-read and mined for the nuggets that nestle in the garrulous priest's prose.