By Night in Chile
Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix is dying.
A priest, a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a poet, in his feverish delirium the crucial events of his past swell around him.
From glimpses of the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German writer Ernst Junger and his one-time student, General Pinochet, to nightmarish flashes of falcons and falconers, the Chilean landscape and faces of those now dead, reality and imagination crowd and clamber in pursuit of the ‘wizened youth’ who still haunts Father Lacroix all these years later.
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS
‘The wit, the horror, the ambition, the strangeness; Roberto Bolaño’s work is a sprawling labyrinth of surprise, bold invention, and images that will live with you forever’ Chris Power
‘Few are the writers who have mastered the alchemy of turning the trivial into the sublime, the everyday into adventure. Bolaño is among the best at this diabolical skill’ Georgi Gospodinov, author of Time Shelter
Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealism poetry movement. Described by the New York Times as ‘the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation’, he was the author of over twenty works, including The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998, and 2666, which posthumously won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty, just as his writing found global recognition.
Chris Andrews (Translator)
Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He teaches in the department of French, Italian and Spanish Studies of the University of Melbourne. His translation of Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star in 2005 won the prestigious Valle-Inclán Prize.