Reading group: By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano

Clare suggested this novella narrated by Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest who has also been a literary critic and poet. It is a deathbed confession, or more accurately an attempt at self-justification, as he recounts a compromised life in which he blinded himself to political atrocities going on around him by burying himself in literature - most notably Ancient Greek literature - and finally allowing himself to be seconded in service to the fascist Pinochet regime. Like Bolano's novella Distant Star, which we also read, it is deeply concerned with the role and place of literature in society and politics. While Distant Star depicts the way that art and literature can be used by fascist regimes and can itself be fascist, By Night in Chile is concerned with how literature - even leftwing literature - can be used by individuals as a smokescreen to hide from the reality of politics.

As a young newly ordained priest and aspiring literary critic, Sebastian is taken under the wing of the famous Chilean critic with the pseudonym Farewell and introduced to the leftwing poet and socialist politician, Pablo Neruda. Farewell, however, is conservative in nature and his literary interests apolitical, a landowner who is devastated when the socialist leader Allende is elected, and pleased at the return of his land after Pinochet seizes power. The young Sebastian, also conservative in nature and unsuited to the priesthood into which he has somehow drifted, flounders amid these conflicting influences, in awe of Neruda's greatness yet repulsed by the working people he encounters on Farewell's estate. Self-centred and inward-looking, he is no less lacking in insight or intellectual independence as his reputation as a literary critic grows, and, as the tale of his complicity with the fascist regime develops, his deathbed musings become more and more disingenuously self-justifying. 'A week later we would be back there again,' he says of the literary soirees held by the wife of a man who will turn out to have been a murderous agent of the secret police, adding quickly: 'By we I mean the group. I didn't go every week. I put in an appearance ... once month. Or even less often.'

Throughout the confession he has referred to a 'wizened youth', a figure who has dogged him from a certain distance through his life, challenging and judging him, and is now here beside him, and who is clearly his conscience or the shrivelled moral potential of his own youth.

Clare said she was very glad to have suggested and read this book. She commented on the fact that it reads almost as if it's written in one sentence - a stream-of consciousness outpouring lacking in paragraphs or pauses to mark shifts between events, with nested stories and disquisitions. Both Doug and John said they found tedious these apparent diversions, with which the first half of the book is heavily weighted, and which in fact are intended either to illustrate the impotence of art and literature or to show how Sebastian is sidetracking himself from important, contemporary issues. Margaret said she was finding the same, until she went back and read again from the beginning, after which she admired the book greatly. She noted, to my agreement, that these 'diversions', while deadly serious in intent, are at times wryly funny - such as Sebastian's tour of the churches of Europe where the bishops have taken up the elite and brutal sport of falconry (symbolic of fascism), to stop the pigeons - symbolic of the Holy Spirit, and perhaps of the congregations  - from despoiling the church buildings, or this passage indicating Sebastian's retreat from the world after Allende is elected:

When I got back to my house, I went straight to my Greek classics... I started with Homer, then moved on to Thales of Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophon, Alcmaeon of Croton, Zeno of Elea (wonderful), and a pro-Allende general was killed, and Chile restored diplomatic relations with Cuba... and the national census recorded a total of 8,884,746 Chileans and the first episode of the soap opera The Right to Be Born was broadcast on television, and I read Tyrtaios of Sparta and Archilochus of Paros and Solon of Athens and Hipponax of Ephesos and Stechoros of Himnera and Sappho of Mytilene and Anakreaon of Teos and Pindar of Thebes (one of my favourites)...

I said that I had started reading the book in short bouts on train journeys, which didn't really work for a book that is basically one desperate exhalation. Initially therefore I too had had much the same reaction as John and Doug. But then I too started again and read it all in one session, and found that the book worked and, indeed in the end gripped me. Most of us felt that we would have got more out of the book had we been more familiar with the political background, and both Margeret and Doug felt excluded by not knowing the Chilean writers Sebastian refers to. I said that I felt it wasn't actually necessary to know about the poets, many of them obscure, the point being that, like the above list of Ancient Greeks, the lists of Chilean poets are part of Sebastian's smokescreen against other, pressing political issues, and indeed his own moral culpability.

Someone, perhaps Margeret, noted that there is a very old-fashioned feel to the world of the book, and it was sometimes hard to remember that it takes place in the mid-late twentieth century. I agreed, saying that I was sometimes brought up short by a contemporary reference, such as that to the soap opera above, and see this as an indication of Sebastian's atavistic retreat from the world.

Ann said that we ought to pay tribute to the translator, Chris Andrews, and we all agreed. I commented that the translation brilliantly captures the way the prose will sometimes suddenly drop in a way that seems authentic from the somewhat formal, sometimes high-faluting style of Sebastian's self-justifications to the deflating demotic of dialogue, and everyone agreed. 

Finally, someone asked, so what was the message of the book? If it was a plea for the political place of literature in society, as I suggested, there was nothing in the book to indicate that this was possible. After all, as happened in life, the leftwing poet Neruda dies, and while (in life) it is suspected that he was poisoned by the regime, both Farewell and Sebastian swallow the official line that he dies of the prostate cancer for which he was being treated. And finally, the 'wizened youth', who has always challenged Sebastian, is defeated:

The wizened youth has been quiet for a long time now. He has given up railing against me and writers generally. Is there a solution? That is how literature is made, that is how the great works of Western literature are made. You better get used to it, I tell him. The wizened youth, or what is left of him, moves his lips, pouting an inaudible no. The power of my thought has stopped him. Or maybe it was history. An individual is no match for history. The wizened youth has always been alone, and I have always been on history's side.

A depressing message, we all agreed.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here