Una imprescindible y escalofriante novela donde el talento del autor de 2666 y Los detectives salvajes brilla en todo su esplendor.

Sebasti n Urrutia Lacroix, sacerdote y cr tico literario, miembro del Opus Dei y poeta mediocre, convencido de que est a punto de morir, revisa en una sola noche de fiebre alta los momentos y personajes m s importantes de su vida. Pero a medida que la noche avanza su fiebre va remitiendo y el delirio se aten a con la aparici n de los monstruos de su pasado. As van desfilando por el libro una serie de personajes pintados con el surrealismo t pico de Bola o: los ambiguos Oido y Odeim; un pintor guatemalteco que se deja morir de inanici n en el Par s de 1943; Farewell, el pope de la cr tica literaria chilena; Mar a Canales, una mujer misteriosa en cuya casona de las afueras se re ne lo m s granado de la literatura; y el general Pinochet, a quien Urrutia Lacroix dio clases de marxismo. ENGLISH DESCRIPTIONA deathbed confession revolving around Opus Dei and Pinochet, By Night in Chile pours out the self-justifying dark memories of the Jesuit priest Father Urrutia.

As through a crack in the wall, By Night in Chile's single night-long rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of Church and State in Chile. This wild, eerily compact novel―Roberto Bolano's first work available in English―recounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet, but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and a conservative literary critic, a sort of lap dog to the rich and powerful cultural elite, in whose villas he encounters Pablo Neruda and Ernst Junger. Father Urrutia is offered a tour of Europe by agents of Opus Dei (to study the disintegration of the churches, a journey into realms of the surreal); and ensnared by this plum, he is next assigned―after the destruction of Allende―the secret, never-to-be-disclosed job of teaching Pinochet, at night, all about Marxism, so the junta generals can know their enemy. Soon, searingly, his memories go from bad to worse. Heart-stopping and hypnotic, By Night in Chile marks the American debut of an astonishing writer.