Night Thoughts of Priests: Robert Bolaño's Novel about the Chilean Dictatorship

When the choice of  a new Pope from Argentina was announced a couple of weeks ago, I immediately thought of By Night in Chile by Robert Bolaño, a great book about the intrigues and moral dilemmas of politics and religion.

 The pretext is  the death-bed thoughts of a dying Chilean priest, who was deeply involved in the Latin American literary scene. There is much about poetry and indeed the teaser to a review in The Guardian says it is a “wonderful and beautifully written analysis of Chilean literary life.” But it is also—and far more importantly to my mind—a meditation on intellectual and spiritual responsibility.

Bolaño died at 50 in 2003, after a short and intense writing career: in the last ten years of his life he turned out more than a half dozen books. He ran afoul of the Pinochet dictatorship when he returned to his native Chile just before the overthrow of Salvador Allende. After a short imprisonment he spent a good part of his life abroad, reading widely and becoming a cult hero in literary circles. But this short novel, elegantly translated by Chris Andrews, is so much bigger than a “literary” work that even those who bristle when critics talk of style will profit from reading it.

The only other writer I can think who has combined political conscience, story telling ability and superb writing is Colm Toíbin in his novel of the Spanish Civil War and the Irish Troubles, The South, and in The Story of the Night, set in the Argentina of the Falklands War and the explosion of the AIDS epidemic. Bolaño had a reputation of reading absolutely everything so it’s probable he read the latter book. Indeed the similarity of Bolaño’s title to Toibin’s suggests this. But Bolaño is an original. 10 on 10, in my book.

As for the new Pope Francis, the Pope's supporters insist  that the charges he was complicit in the crimes of the dictatorship in the 1970s are false.  But doubts remain.

Whatever the truth, as my grandmother used to say, remember you have to go to bed with yourself every night and if you want to sleep it helps to have a clear conscience.  The narrator of Bolaño's novel certainly doesn't have one.

BTW, that's St. Francis of Assisi, St. Andrew and the Archangel Michael in a painting by Adriaen Isenbrandt. Not sure how they all got to the Crucifixion, but that's imagination (or religious experience) for you.