By Night in Chile (novella)

By Night in Chile is a novella by the Chilean author Robert Bolaño.

It takes the form a deathbed rant by a Chilean Jesuit priest, Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix. Urrutia is "representative of an intellectual class that the author depicts as alternately tugging its leash and licking it."

At a key moment in his career, Father Urrutia is approached by two representatives of Opus Dei, who tell him he has been selected to visit Europe in order to study the preservation of old churches.

When Urrutia arrives in Europe, he learns that the chief threat to European cathedrals is posed by pigeon droppings. The local clerics have devised an ingenious solution to the problem: they have become falconers.

Everywhere he goes, Urrutia observes the priests' hawks kill the pigeons. His unwillingness to protest against this somewhat shocking method of architectural preservation gives his employers reason to believe that he will be usefully complicit in the violent methods of the repressive Pinochet regime back home in Chile.

The novella marks the beginning of its author's criticism of artists who retreat into art, using aestheticism as a way of blocking out the harsh realities of existence.