Books like By Night in Chile
By Night in Chile and António Lobo Antunes’s The Land at the End of the World turn confession into a fever: the longer their speakers talk, the less innocence they retain.
If you liked By Night in Chile, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with By Night in Chile, and we tell you exactly what.
A psychiatrist addresses a woman in a Lisbon bar, circling back obsessively to his service in Portugal’s brutal colonial war in Angola. Like Father Urrutia, he uses eloquence partly to testify and partly to hide; his glittering metaphors keep revealing what his self-pity would rather obscure.
Lobo Antunes’s sentences are denser and more sensuous than Bolaño’s, but they exert the same claustrophobic pressure: private vanity, national myth and institutional violence become impossible to separate. This early masterpiece established him as one of Portugal’s essential postwar novelists. Readers haunted by Bolaño’s final pages should experience its equally merciless examination of what a cultivated man permits himself not to know.
At an “artistic dinner” in Vienna, the narrator sits in a wing chair and silently annihilates the assembled cultural elite. Every pose, betrayal and careerist compromise is worried at until comedy becomes indictment. Anyone who relished Bolaño’s treatment of poets, critics and salon intellectuals will recognize the peculiar pleasure of watching cultural prestige stripped of its moral alibis.
Yet Bernhard’s narrator is no impartial scourge: his hatred binds him to the people he condemns. The repetition is musical, cumulative and savagely funny, producing a monologue that seems capable of consuming its speaker. The novel was briefly seized in Austria after a defamation suit—an apt episode for a book whose satire feels dangerously personal. Few novels make literary society look so ridiculous, or so damning.
Francis Mirković, a former intelligence operative, travels by train from Milan to Rome carrying a dossier and reviewing a life entangled with the wars of the Mediterranean. Most of the novel unfolds in one immense sentence, but this is no sterile stunt: its onward rush captures a mind unable to stop converting atrocity into history, quotation, anecdote and excuse.
Where Bolaño compresses complicity into a single night, Énard stretches it across borders and centuries. Both novels distrust cultivated men who imagine that knowledge places them above violence; both show erudition becoming either witness or camouflage. Winner of the Prix du Livre Inter and widely regarded as Énard’s breakthrough, Zone has the scale of an epic and the intimacy of an interrogation. Submit to its current and ordinary historical fiction may afterward feel morally and formally tame.