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Introduction

By Night in Chile is a novella by the Chilean author Robert Bolaño. It was published in Spanish in 2000, and in an English translation by Chris Andrews in 2003.

It takes the form a deathbed confession by a Chilean Jesuit priest, Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix. This resembles a rant, and is recorded as a single very long paragraph. Urrutia, who is also a failed poet and a successful literary critic, is "representative of an intellectual class that the author depicts as alternately tugging its leash and licking it."^[1]

At a key moment in his career, Father Urrutia is approached by two representatives of Opus Dei, who tell him he has been selected to visit Europe in order to study the preservation of old churches. When Urrutia arrives in Europe, he learns that the chief threat to European cathedrals is posed by pigeon droppings. The local clerics have devised an ingenious solution to the problem: they have become falconers. Everywhere he goes, Urrutia observes the priests' hawks killing the pigeons. His unwillingness to protest against this somewhat shocking method of architectural preservation gives his employers reason to believe that he will be usefully complicit in the violent methods of the repressive Pinochet regime back home in Chile.

The novella, a satire, marks the beginning of its author's criticism of artists who retreat into art, using aestheticism as a way of blocking out the harsh realities of existence. According to Ben Richards, writing in The Guardian, "Bolaño uses this to illustrate the supine nature of the Chilean literary establishment under the dictatorship."^[2]