From the introduction to a new edition of By Night in Chile, a novella by Roberto Bolaño that was published in 2000 by Editorial Anagrama. The book was translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews and reissued in September by Picador.
Youth, whatever else it may be, is always a search for liberation from the restrictions foisted on us by the past. Yet there are only so many ways of trying to throw off the shackles, and most are given up by adulthood. Most, but not all, that is, because certain forms of youthful rebellion can endure, and those who discover an early freedom through the offerings of literature tend to get hooked and become writers who go on looking for the sentence or phrase that will spring open like a lock and deliver a rush of freedom or a stomach-lurching view of infinity. And though unlike other, more sordid, addictions, literature can salvage, through its constant renewal of life—its bestowal of many more lives than one—it also can return the writer, again and again, to that original state of restless, agitated searching.
It was in such a state that, in December 2003, I first bought a copy of Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. I’d become stuck in my own writing, which often happens between novels. The most I could do was read, and yet nothing was right, because the thing I was searching for wasn’t a good story, or characters, or a well-turned sentence; it was language alchemized into a freedom explosive enough to blast a hole in the walls around me, creating not just a means of escape, but a vitality passed on to the reader, too.
Immediately, I was swept into the book’s raging current that begins—and, for some 130 pages, sustains—the final testimony of Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a failed Chilean poet and conservative Jesuit priest who became a famous literary critic, a member of Opus Dei, and finally a silent bedfellow of Pinochet’s murderous regime. “I am dying now, but I still have many things to say,” he begins.
I used to be at peace with myself. Quiet and at peace. But it all blew up unexpectedly. That wizened youth is to blame. I was at peace. I am no longer at peace. There are a couple of points that have to be cleared up. So, propped up on one elbow, I will lift my noble, trembling head, and rummage through my memories to turn up the deeds that shall vindicate me and belie the slanderous rumors the wizened youth spread in a single storm-lit night to sully my name.
What enthralled me was the fever pitch and propulsive rhythm of the language, its staccato that alternates with winding, virtuosic passages, like Schumann mixed with a house beat. Its musicality felt entirely intuitive, as in the prose of Thomas Bernhard, so that the internal clockwork of the language spontaneously seemed to conjure meaning rather than the other way around. The further I read, the more supple Bolaño’s prose became, supported by a playful intelligence that could spin on a dime from nightmare to absurd laughter, from the monstrous to a sudden limning of the soul. Beyond that, there was Bolaño’s gift for associations so strange, then so strangely inevitable, that in their flash of illumination the reader could believe herself to have seen the world’s hidden order come to light: a father’s shadow slips down the corridors of the house as if it were “an eel in an inadequate container”; from the window of an airplane at dawn the horizon is “marked with a red line, like the planet’s femoral artery, or the planet’s aorta, gradually swelling”; automatic doors open “suddenly, for no logical reason, as if they had a presentiment of God’s presence.”
In the twenty-one years since its English-language publication, much has been written about how By Night in Chile grapples with the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government in 1973 and exposes the complicity of the Catholic Church and the literary establishment in the heinous crimes of Augusto Pinochet. But with the flood into English of Bolaño’s many other books, readers also became acquainted with what emerged as one of his most abiding subjects: the twinned souls of poetry and youth, their wildest and grandest measures, their beautiful gestures and often tragic failures to survive with age.
This was particularly true of The Savage Detectives, the autobiographical epic that shot Bolaño to fame in Latin America in 1998, which chronicles the lives of two young self-proclaimed avant-garde poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (the author’s punk kamikaze of an alter ego), and their search for Cesárea Tinajero, the poet and founder of the movement “visceral realism,” from which they claim inheritance. While the first and last sections of the novel consist of another young poet’s diary, written in a breezy first person, the middle four-hundred-plus pages unfold from the perspectives of individuals who compose an eccentric and international chorus, offering their impressions of the young Lima and Belano from the vantages of different points in time, often cutting them down to size. Perhaps they weren’t really poets at all, or not very good ones; perhaps they were just petty criminals or drug dealers. An acquaintance of Lima’s from Tel Aviv claims that the importance of the poets’ lives never had anything to do with visceral realism: “It has to do with life, with what we lose without knowing it, and what we can regain.” Quoting this line in his review of the novel, James Wood asked, plaintively, “Can we?” At an earlier point, another poet, old and failed, seems to provide an answer: “What a shame that time passes, don’t you think? What a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.”
By Night in Chile was written while Bolaño was waiting for a liver transplant he would die before receiving. Every sentence is perfect. Perfect composure resting atop a volcano. I’ve often taught By Night in Chile to my writing students and watched their expressions shift from excitement to awe to disquiet as they try to work out how to stay afloat in the flood of words, and consider the implications of Bolaño’s sui generis, unremitting gift on the question of their own. It isn’t just Urrutia, but also Bolaño, and even language itself, that all seem to be in a race against death. Could my students possess, be possessed by, such momentum in their own writing? They have yet to experience much of what they will eventually lose through the hemorrhaging effect of time. And yet, for all its vitality, isn’t a break into freedom—whether youthful rebellion, or artistic innovation, or its many other possible forms—always also an escape from death? From an impasse that threatens to close us down, shut us in, keep us below, in a place of anxiety, claustrophobia, failure, and regret? From believing that what we have lost cannot be reinvented or regained?
