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: 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. This is where Bolaño's imagination suddenly expands into a magical diorama. In one episode, Father Urrutia is sent to Europe, by Opus Dei agents, to report on the preservation of the churches there. 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.

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.

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. 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. 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.

By night in chile by roberto bolaño