By Night in Chile

This is the least I’ve hated a Bolano! It’s short and snappy and the least difficult slog of his I’ve ever read.

4.25ish? Stars

Dnf I tried. I really did but maybe bolano just isn’t for me

** spoiler alert ** As time goes by, as time goes by, the whipcrack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavor except the struggle to survive. friendships that have lasted right up to the present, if only in the most colorless and polite form, because all horrors are dulled by routine.

I'll just quote a few lines from Ben Richards' Guardian review - "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). Urrutia's bizarre European odyssey to save decaying churches from pigeon shit by the judicious use of birds of prey is a dazzling piece of imagery. But the final picture of the basement of suffering beneath the dilettantes of the literary salon is the one that gives this novel real moral and intellectual bite."

The sluggish figures who lived in this country were marching steadfastly towards that grey, unfamiliar horizon where distant light, lightning and smoke loomed. What is there? We do not know.

More than any other writer I've read, Bolaño's books are interconnected without forming a series and create their own universe without betraying their (postmodern?) realism. It is clear that this is a late novel, and it tells a story that will be familiar to readers of Bolaño, a story that is triumphantly/terrifyingly amplified and nearly finished in 2666: the horror and boredom of the world, the implication of literature in participating in that horror, the confusion and powerlessness of literature as a liberating force, and the existential power and beauty of literature despite all that. We are all guilty. There is no pure space. There are no solutions. But... I read the "wizened youth" to be a semi-autobiographical character, like Arturo Bolano in The Savage Detectives.

Rereading all the Bolaño novels. This and Distant Star are the two that make the literature/evil connection most explicitly. A fine novel. A lot of writers would die happy having written something like this, but it's a relatively minor work for him. It's stylistically similar to Bernhard.

I read it in Spanish--about the only Bolaño book I could handle in the original language. (666 was a challenge in English!) I liked this book's weird, claustrophobic, bad dream atmosphere. Glad I stuck with now. And now it's time to look up all the words I didn't know.