By Night in Chile

Critical reception

Susan Sontag declared that “By Night in Chile is the real thing, and the rarest: a contemporary novel destined to have a permanent place in world literature." James Wood from The New York Times said By Night in Chile was “still his greatest work”.[1]

Ben Richards, writing in The Guardian, said "this is a wonderful and beautifully written book by a writer who has an enviable control over every beat, every change of tempo, every image. The prose is constantly exciting and challenging - at times lyrical and allusive, at others filled with a biting wit (Bolaño has dissected the Chilean literary tradition with such gleeful eloquence that the novel may not win him many dinner invitations back in the country of his birth)."[2]

The Millions wrote "Bolaño’s novella is a psychological portrait of complicity, and the ways in which we rationalize our complicity."[3]


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