There are a pair of immediate observations concerning By Night in Chile. The first involvees its lyrical quality; this is more a cycle of poems than mere standard novella. Episodes unfold and the focus clips along back to the Narrator, who isn't as unreliable as I first guessed. The second acute sense from the book is one of dread. There are a number of darkened hallways, closed doors, and isolated hilltops in the book. One gathers gradually that it isn't sage to look around too closely.

Confining itself to the Gothic whsiper, By Night in Chile does echo in one trope. There's certainly depth and poetic violence; what I think seperates Bolano is the imaginary bibliography; that Borgesian codex of spectral works which exist in world just so close yet distant from our own dusty trevails.

This narrative style was just not for me. Also there is not a single paragraph break in this. I found it tedious.

Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix is not a likeable fellow, I tried, I tried all the way through the book to warm to him, I just couldn’t manage to do it, not even though he was a man of the cloth, not even though he was in his respectable old age.

I’m not sure exactly what it is that I didn’t like about Lacroix, As he recounts his life, trying to put to rest the wound opened by the wizened youth, who, buzzes around his recollection like a mosquito, you never see him but he’s always there, and he’s just as annoying. After joining the seminary and proclaiming his ambition to be a literary critic, Lacroix falls under the wing of Farewell, the most prominent critic in Chile at the time.
The anecdotes flow in clear detail, revealing a pretentiousness and arrogance that the wizened youth appears to have popped.
There is, as usual, a wave of literary references, the love of the mediocre poet, the kind most beloved of Bolano. And I have to say, it is to Bolano’s credit that he has crafted a character so well in Lacroix, that I read on past my dislike, past the buzzing in my head from the continued, flitting presence of the wizened youth, to enjoy the prose, that rolled on like a giant river, sometimes choppy, but mostly smooth and endless.

After his sojourn to Europe, Lacroix returns to Chile in time to see Allende elected. He buries himself in his reading, and the Presidents brief and bright reign is reduced to a page and half of events, puncturing the Greek Classics that Lacroix devours, until he revels in the peace following the coup d’etat and Allende’s suicide. After reading The Savage Detectives and Last Evenings on Earth, it was strange reading a book where a character is not in exile. While Lacroix still feels terror when his teaching assignment comes up, in the end he believes himself intellectual, and does manage to put that above politics, the last anecdote regarding Maria Canales, seems to offer him some salvation, although seemingly little hope. In fact, the novel, aside from the alternative view of what happened in Chile seems to lament the death of literature during the turbulent years, when it was pushed to the extremes, to the exiles, except for those few, such as Lacroix, who dreamed and dared a little to keep it alive.

While I can’t say I enjoyed By Night in Chile, it was fascinating to read and absorb, a prickly novel that is saved by Bolano’s smooth prose.
(blog review here)

Very well written, but I didn't get the concept for the first third of the book. The stream of consciousness style, coupled with the multiple references to Chilean literature, history and politics made it a little difficult for me. But, once I accepted the idea of no plot and one very loooong paragraph, I just settled in to enjoy the writing.

this was a little stuffy to begin with, but met my expectations by framing some of Chile's troubled times from an elitist literate perspective.