By Night in Chile

A deathbed confession revolving around Opus Dei and Pinochet By Night in Chile pours out the self-justifying dark memories of the Jesuit priest Father Urrutia. As through a crack in the wall By Night in Chiles single night-long rant provides a terrifying clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of Church and State in Chile. This wild eerily compact novelRoberto Bolanos first work available in Englishrecounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and a conservative literary critic a sort of lap dog to the rich and powerful cultural elite in whose villas he encounters Pablo Neruda and Ernst Junger. Father Urrutia is offered a tour of Europe by agents of Opus Dei (to study "the disintegration of the churches " a journey into realms of the surreal); and ensnared by this plum he is next assignedafter the destruction of Allendethe secret never-to-be-disclosed job of teaching Pinochet at night all about Marxism so the junta generals can know their enemy. Soon searingly his memories go from bad to worse. Heart-stopping and hypnotic By Night in Chile marks the American debut of an astonishing writer.