Over the last few years, Roberto Bolaño's reputation, in English at least,
has been spreading in a quiet contagion;
the loud arrival of a long novel, "The
Savage Detectives," will ensure that few are now untouched. Until recently there
was even something a little Masonic about the way Bolaño's name was passed along
between readers in this country; I owe my awareness of him to a friend who
excitedly lent me a now never-to-be-returned copy of Bolaño's extraordinary
novella "By Night in Chile." This wonderfully strange Chilean imaginer, at once
a grounded realist and a lyricist of the speculative, who died in 2003 at the
age of 50, has been acknowledged for a few years now in the Spanish-speaking
world as one of the greatest and most influential modern writers. Those without
Spanish have had to rely on the loyal intermittence of translation, beginning
with "By Night in Chile" (2003), two more short novels — "Distant Star" (2004)
and "Amulet" (2007) — and a book of stories, "Last Evenings on Earth" (2006),
all translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions.The best way to offer a sense of this writer might be to take a scene, and a
sentence, from "By Night in Chile," still his greatest work. The book is
narrated by Father Urrutia, a dying priest and conservative literary critic, a
member of Opus Dei, who comes to emblematize, by the novella's end, the silent
complicity of the Chilean literary establishment with the
murderous Pinochet
regime. In one episode, Father Urrutia is sent to Europe, by Opus Dei agents, to
report on the preservation of the
churches there.
This is where Bolaño's imagination suddenly expands into a magical diorama.
Father Urrutia discovers that the chief threat to the churches comes from pigeon
excrement, and that all over Europe churches have been using falcons to kill the
pests. In Turin, Father Angelo has a fearsome falcon called Othello; in
Strasbourg, Father Joseph has one named Xenophon; in Avignon, the murderous
falcon is named Ta Gueule, and the narrator watches it in action.GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS FROM THE LINK BELOW.