A book a day: Roberto Bolaño: Nocturno de Chile

Idioma original: castellano

Year of publication: 2000

Valuation: Highly recommended

The long, sleepless and feverish night of the priest Sebastian Urrutia It is also a vindication and a penance. The priest’s vigil, in what is not clear whether it could be his last gasps, is a dense review of essential episodes of his adult life. The patient, weakened but clairvoyant, is stringing together memories from when he met the famous Farewella literary critic like himself, a party at the hacienda with Neruda in attendance, the itinerary through Europe to learn church conservation techniques, anecdotes, or old stories about the Guatemalan painter who starved himself to death in Paris, or the shoemaker who supplied the Emperor of Austria-Hungary.

Other people’s stories, some of them with a certain Borgesian tone, intersect with his own experiences, always sprinkled with disconcerting elements, very specific but clearly visible. The narrator does not interpret these moments, he simply exposes them, because his position is always passive, he is someone who attends to the situations from a kind of primordial innocence, he is surprised but does not seem to understand, he is a kind of pure soul that only sees and tells. Maybe it is the fever. He is disoriented by the peasants who seem to emerge from an unknown world to find him on his walk, he does not attribute meaning to the falconry practices to scare away the pigeons, nor does he understand the reason for the monument in which the shoemaker invests his fortune or the reason why it is abandoned and destroyed. Bolaño hopes that the reader will record all this and draw conclusions, because the little priest seems to be on the sidelines of everything. He sees it, he knows it but he does not deduce anything from it, nor does he look for it.

The same thing will happen when the coup d’état ends democracy. the distance He is right-wing, yes, from the Opus Dei, which actively collaborated with the rebels, but above all he still feels like a literary critic and a bit of a poet. He has no problem praising writers who are not in favour of the coup plotters, but he does not seem particularly intimidated, nor enthusiastic, when his contacts with the dictatorship are already direct and unquestionable. He seems to wander around in a different frequency and does not seem to be moved too much even when he learns of real facts.

It is perhaps the perfect portrait of that type of individual incapable of feeling guilt, wrapped up in his own reality, sometimes surprised by what reaches him from outside, but who considers himself an object, someone who witnesses a meteorological phenomenon that is not anyone’s responsibility, that simply happens.

Bolaño’s narrative is very convincing, it does not need narrative tricks to build a solid story that does not give you a break, with a constant rhythm and a prose as clean as it is forceful. He tells, suggests, leaves clues to be seen, explains at times, everything with a fluidity that springs forth with complete naturalness, as something that does not need to be rethought or corrected. It is a crude drawing of a difficult episode in Chilean history, but also a reflection of the country and, above all, at least that is how I see it, of a certain attitude towards life, full of nuances, that neither blames nor exonerates, the point of view of someone who stands on the sidelines and watches the course of things without even considering whether he himself has anything to do with them. A figure who vindicates himself in his dubious innocence and who finds his penance by seeing himself absorbed and centrifuged by History.

Almost all of Roberto Bolaño’s works reviewed in ULAD: here