beer good
Well-Known Member
Roberto Bolaño: By Night In Chile (Nocturno de Chile, 2000)
One of the first things, or so it's often said - for instance, by Mario Vargas Llosa in last year's Nobel Prize lecture - that happens in a dictatorship is that the artists get silenced. All those brave painters, playwrights, poets and novelists who stand up against tyranny, whose works are distributed in secret on photocopies and are sung at secret gatherings, who are more powerful than a thousand bombs, and who get thanked as liberators once democracy returns...
Except is that really what happens? By night in Chile, that long period when Pinochet's fascists ruled, everything was silent according to Bolaño. Much like 2666, By Night In Chile seems almost an accusation against literature itself and its failures. We follow our narrator as he makes his deathbed confession, how he started as a young priest turned literature critic, as he learns from both fellow critics, from Opus Dei and from the fascist junta the importance of conservation, purity, loyalty, a world in which everything always remains what it is, where nobody questions anything. He praises the silence that dictatorship brought, when he finally gets to rise to prominence as both a Marxism expert to the junta and an eloquent appraiser of classical, eternal literature - since nothing new gets written about what's happening now. Afterwards, with Pinochet gone, everyone talks about how they resisted, but our narrator, who maintains his innocence right up to the end, was there and he didn't see it. While they gathered in secret rooms and whispered of their independence, people were tortured. In silence. Literature didn't change anything (he writes in his novel).
Bolaño's roots seem less South American and more central European - there are parts of By Night In Chile where it feels like I'm reading one of the latter-day East bloc satirists, especially Hrabal comes to mind. He's both funny and desperately, bitterly furious. It's not the masterpiece that 2666 is; the characters are a little too sketchy, and there are a few ideas (for instance, naming the Opus Dei representatives Raef and Etah) that feel a bit too on the nose. But on a whole, it's a dark little bitter pill of a book, at 150 pages just thin enough to sneak in the next time we get a little too self-congratulatory about how we made the world better today.
One of the first things, or so it's often said - for instance, by Mario Vargas Llosa in last year's Nobel Prize lecture - that happens in a dictatorship is that the artists get silenced. All those brave painters, playwrights, poets and novelists who stand up against tyranny, whose works are distributed in secret on photocopies and are sung at secret gatherings, who are more powerful than a thousand bombs, and who get thanked as liberators once democracy returns...
Except is that really what happens? By night in Chile, that long period when Pinochet's fascists ruled, everything was silent according to Bolaño. Much like 2666, By Night In Chile seems almost an accusation against literature itself and its failures. We follow our narrator as he makes his deathbed confession, how he started as a young priest turned literature critic, as he learns from both fellow critics, from Opus Dei and from the fascist junta the importance of conservation, purity, loyalty, a world in which everything always remains what it is, where nobody questions anything. He praises the silence that dictatorship brought, when he finally gets to rise to prominence as both a Marxism expert to the junta and an eloquent appraiser of classical, eternal literature - since nothing new gets written about what's happening now. Afterwards, with Pinochet gone, everyone talks about how they resisted, but our narrator, who maintains his innocence right up to the end, was there and he didn't see it. While they gathered in secret rooms and whispered of their independence, people were tortured. In silence. Literature didn't change anything (he writes in his novel).
Bolaño's roots seem less South American and more central European - there are parts of By Night In Chile where it feels like I'm reading one of the latter-day East bloc satirists, especially Hrabal comes to mind. He's both funny and desperately, bitterly furious. It's not the masterpiece that 2666 is; the characters are a little too sketchy, and there are a few ideas (for instance, naming the Opus Dei representatives Raef and Etah) that feel a bit too on the nose. But on a whole, it's a dark little bitter pill of a book, at 150 pages just thin enough to sneak in the next time we get a little too self-congratulatory about how we made the world better today.
