Book Thoughts: By Night in Chile
After stumbling blindly through Roberto Bolano's "The Savage Detectives" I ran out and bought all the books by Bolano I could find. While I'm clearly not equipped with the literary capacity to fully grasp his works I really enjoyed something in his writing (or rather, in the translations of his writing,) and wanted to try some more.
The first thing I picked up was By Night in Chile which is a very short and initially baffling read narrated by a narcissistic priest / poet / literary critic on his deathbed. The story is delivered in a single exhausting paragraph that never lets up.
I definitely missed a lot here thematically on my initial read, but was still swept along by the braggadocios narration wherein our protagonist tells of his time drinking at the houses of wealthy artists, his rise to fame as a literary critic under a nom de plume, and his less successful but equally proud work in poetry.
After finishing the book and reading a couple short reviews to help it click, it is clear to me now that this is a story about omissions. The narrator tells a grandiose story about his life and importance and accomplishments while dancing around his guilt.
Here is our priest casually discussing how his critic mentor would touch him in sexual ways. Here he is at some infamous person's party -- oh but he never knew or talked to the host, really, who later turned out to be an undesirable; everyone was at those parties.
We know that our narrator carries this guilt within him as we see him silently question European priests sending hawks to kill pigeons and doves destroying cathedrals with their droppings -- he is a poet, he sees the irony, yet he stays quietly complicit unless given blameless and unchallenged opportunity.
Here is our well-read narrator teaching the military about communist philosophy so they could undermine their enemies. But what could he do? He had no choice in the matter.
Reviewing the story now, I see a man proud of his accomplishments but ashamed of his deeds. Too stubborn and narcissistic to admit his wrongs, but too aware of them to leave them out of his desperate autobiography. He highlights them by dancing around them -- a story full of holes, told so that the shape of those holes is (perhaps intentionally) well-defined. Admission by glaring omission.
This book has made me think hard on my own professional life, for through that lense I can see in myself a bit of the narrator. I started my career as a programmer who loved the art of the craft, and still see myself as such while simultaneously becoming "AI-enabled" senior management clad in stakeholder appeasement and proprietary licensing. "Of the people" in my mind's eye, yet attending the meetings where they decide to fire those same people. A lover of the art of computing, and in ways simultaneously a destroyer of that art through my managerial work.
I'm not at a point in my life where I can afford to drop the work, so for the foreseeable future I will be teaching priests how to best use hawks to keep their cathedrals clean -- but I think this little story has convinced me to at least have the courage to admit to the bad stuff outright when I tell my own story in a breathless rant on my own deathbed.