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There is a sense of history from the opening pages of Kressmann Taylor’s Address Unknown (1938), mixing the echoes of the Great War, still vivid in its characters’ memories (”Fourteen years since the war! Did you mark the date? What a long way we have traveled, as peoples, from that bitterness!”), with their deeper personal connection. Told in letters between Jewish American, Eisenstein, and his business partner, the German Schulse, this (very) short novel spans fifteen months in the early 1930s during the Nazi machine’s rise to power.

In the first few exchanges the friends are genial, talking shop, Germany (”the breadth of intellectual freedom, the discussions, the music, the light-hearted comradeship”), and mentioning Griselle, Eistenstein’s headstrong sister and former fling of Schulse, who is traveling Europe as an actress. Liberal politics abound, then darkness descends as Eisenstein asks  (”Who is this Adolf Hitler who seems rising toward power in Germany?”)

What is initially frightening about Address Unknown is how Schulse, privileged in Germany following his economic success in America (”we employ now ten servants for the same wages of our two in the San Francisco home”) makes the rapid volte-face from declaring Hindenburg “a fine liberal whom I much admire” to a scathing attack on liberalism:

A liberal is a man who does not believe in doing anything. He is a talker about the rights of man, but just a talker. He likes to make a big noise about freedom of speech, and what is freedom of speech? Just the chance to sit firmly on the backside and say that whatever is being done by the active men is wrong. What is so futile as the liberal? I know him well because I have been one. He condemns the passive government because it makes no change. But let a powerful man arise, let an active man start to make a change, then where is your liberal? He is against it. To the liberal any change is the wrong one.

The powerful man that arises needs no introduction, and it’s not so much Hitler who features in the novel but the poison that his Fascist tenets instills in a man’s mind. From an early observational capacity Schulse describes him (”the man is like an electric shock, strong as only a great orator and a zealot can be”) but it’s soon obvious that any impartiality is slain by the sword of oratory:

As for the sterm measures that so distress you, I myself did not like them at first, but I have come to see their painful necessity. The Jewish race is a sore spot to any nation that harbors it. I have never hated the individual Jew — yourself I have always cherished as a friend, but you will know that I speak in all honesty when I say I have loved you, not because of your race but in spite of it.

Although the change in relations between the two men seems rapid, with the letters following each other as the pagination insists, its the long gaps between these in the story’s time, often months, that add to the book’s power. We are left to wonder what has been happening in these unwritten periods. How has Schulse allowed himself to secede and convince himself of the efficacy of Hitler’s regime? Have Eisenstein’s nights been sleepless as he anticipates the next reply? And what of their common bond, Griselle, travelling between Vienna and Berlin, especially when her brother notes about the letter he has sent her?

…it has been returned to me, the envelope unopened, marked only address unknown, (Adressant Unbekannt). What a darkness those words carry! How can she be unknown? It is surely a message she has come to harm.

Into its minimal pages Address Unknown packs an incredible wealth of content, describing through one man Germany’s “hysteria of deliverance” under the auspices of a doer —

The whole tide of a people’s life changes in a minute because the man of action has come. And I join him. […] I am a man because I act. Before that I am just a voice. I do not question the ends of our action. It is not necessary. I know it is good because it is so vital. Men are not drawn into bad things with so much joy and eagerness.

— and showing how words are just as much a weapon as armaments, perhaps even more so with their power to control people that will readily renounce who they truly are to follow a crazed destiny they would otherwise never consider. When Schulse talks of German destiny —

If I could show you, if I could make you see — the rebirth of this new Germany under our Gentle Leader! Not for always can the world grind a great people down in subjugation. In defeat for fourteen years we bowed our heads. We ate the bitter bread of shame and drank the thin gruel of poverty. But now we are free men. We rise in our might and hold our heads up before the nations. We purge our bloodstream of its baser elements. We go singing through our valleys with strong muscles tingling for a new work — and from the mountains ring the voices of Wodan and Thor, the old, strong gods of the German race.

— the words of the Nazi doctrine are evident, for this is a man who has lived comfortably in the United States, and never suffered the hardship of post-war Germany.

If the compact nature of Address Unknown is powerful itself for Schulse’s journey, Taylor strengthens it further by working the idea of words’ power to a wonderful twist that plays on the paranoid, censorious nature of the regime it successfully lambasts. Taylor could not have known what horrors were yet to come from Nazi aggression, but in this tale she rallies against its rise, and the results, when they arrive, are both satisfying, abrupt, and apt.

It’s unfortunate that Roberto Bolaño isn’t around to see his star in the ascendency in the English speaking world, following on from the acclaim given to recent translations, The Savage Detectives and 2666. The English translations began in 2003, the year of his death, with Chris Andrews’ translation of By Night In Chile (2000). And the translations are set to continue with more books - novels, short stories, and essays - scheduled to appear in the next year. What makes the volume of work surprising is that Bolaño turned to fiction late in his life, before passing away at fifty.

By Night In Chile is the feverish confession of Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest, literary critic, and poet with a shady past. Believing himself to be dying, he sets out one night to recall the major events of his life, relentlessly delivering his story as a lengthy rant wrapped up in a single paragraph. A paragraph that runs for a 130 pages. A contender, perhaps, for the longest known ‘famous last words’.

Father Urrutia begins his confession:

One has to be responsible, as I have always said. One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one’s silences. I am responsible in every way. My silences are immaculate. Let me make that clear.

With all his talk of taking responsibility and mention of silences, we are immediately alerted that we are in conversation with an unreliable narrator and that we are going to have to tread carefully as he “rummage[s] through [his] memories to turn up the deeds that shall vindicate [him]”. Quite what those deeds are maintain interest as the narrative takes us on a dizzying journey from receiving God’s call at age thirteen through the political turmoil that affected Chile in the 1970s.

The moments recalled are extremely vivid. We spend some time with Farewell, “Chile’s greatest literary critic”, as Urrutia learns his craft and comes into contact with some figures of Chilean letters, such as Salvador Reyes and Pablo Neruda. There’s an extended piece where Opus Dei sends him to Europe to report back on the methods used to preserve dilapidated churches and finds pigeons are at the heart of the problem. The solution appears to be falconry, with many of the Old World priests adept in the art, an art which presages the impending Pinochet regime. Its delivery comes as a prose poem that, as befits Father Urrutia’s lyrical and feverish mind, lingers long and indecisive on details in a stream of consciousness, such as this example from a visit to Avignon:

Ta Gueule appeared again like a lightning bolt, or the abstract idea of a lightning bolt, and stooped on the huge flocks of starlings coming out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening the sky with their erratic fluttering, and after a few minutes the fluttering of the starlings was bloodied, scattered and bloodied, and afternoon on the outskirts of Avignon took on a deep red hue, like the colour of sunsets seen from an aeroplane, or the colour of dawns, when the passenger is woken gently by the engines whistling in his ears and lifts up the little blind and sees the horizon marked with a red line, like the planet’s femoral artery, or the planet’s aorta, gradually swelling, and I saw that swelling blood vessel in the sky over Avignon, the blood-stained flight of the starlings, Ta Gueule splashing colour like an abstract expressionist painter, ah, the peace, the harmony of nature, nowhere as evident or as unequivocal as in Avignon, and then Fr Fabrice whistled and we waited for an indefinable time, measured only by thebeating of our hearts, until our quivering warrior came to rest upon his arm.

Long sentences like this are par for the course in By Night In Chile, but are not the only means of expression. Bolaño changes the style throughout, throwing in patches of terse sentences to juxtapose the longer, recanting conversations (”And Farewell said:….And I:…”) without getting annoying, and hitting the reader with a salvo of Urrutia’s rhetorical questions. The book may be a single paragraph, but its patchwork of styles keep it engaging throughout.

Bolaño’s focus for the novel is the literary intelligentsia of Chile, as epitomised by Father Urrutia. When drafted to lecture the newly formed junta on Marxism, so that they may know their enemies better:

Was it all right? Did they learn anything? Did I teach them anything? Did I do what I had to do? Did I do what I ought to have done? Is Marxism a kind of humanism? Or a diabolical theory? If I told my literary friends what I had done, would they approve? Would some condemn my actions out of hand? Would some understand and forgive me? Is it always possible for a man to know what is good and what is bad? […] Then, before I knew it, I was asleep.

With misplaced concern - look how long his questions keep him awake! - Urrutia’s path to self-denial continues as he seeks to prove he has done nothing wrong, all the while haunted by his conscience which he fears because it tries to make him address the truth. His self-assuredness of innocence does create doubt and he constantly seeks assurance:

Farewell, I whispered. Did I do the right thing or not? And since there was no reply, I repeated the question: Did I do my duty, or did I go beyond it? And Farewell replied with another question: Was it a necessary or an unnecessary course of action? Necessary, necessary, necessary, I said.

The scorn for the literary class of Chile comes in their inactivity under Pinochet’s regime. All around them people were being tortured and killed and the writers did nothing. They never rebelled. What should have been happening by night in Chile didn’t happen.

We were bored. We read and we got bored. We intellectuals. Because you can’t read all day and all night. You can’t write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style, and back then, as now, Chilean artists and writers need to gather and talk, ideally in a pleasant setting where they could find intelligent company. Apart from the inescapable fact that many of the old crowd had left the country for reasons that were often more personal than political, the main difficulty was the curfew. Where could the artists and intellectuals meet if everywhere was shut after ten at night, for, as everyone knows, night is the most propitious time for getting together and enjoying a little unbuttoned conversation with one’s peers. Artists and writers. Strange times.

While By Night In Chile is a powerful rant by Urrutia about defending his complicity in what transpired amongst Chilean writers, Bolaño’s subtext is a condemnation of such actions. During one crucial incident the priest notes that “all horrors are dulled by routine”. That may well be true, but the engaging way Bolaño maintains the narrative ensures that the horrors of silence are in no way, as the priest begins his account, immaculate.

Gabriel García Márquez is one of those authors who I seem to acquire the titles of without actually reading them, partly because I found his most recent release, Memories Of My Melancholy Whores, despite its brevity, to be a rather dull and unmemorable read. Last year, however, I enjoyed his early non-fiction piece The Story Of A Shipwrecked Sailor enough not to write him off.  

So, feeling that I should at least make a dent in my Márquez collection, I scanned my shelves, passing over his longer novels - and better known - novels, eventually plumping for brevity once more and read No One Writes To The Colonel (1961), which, at sixty-nine pages, could really have been bundled with some other short stories, if only to justify its £7.99 price tag. In the US, at least, it was released as the lead in a short story collection.

In a small town in Colombia the titular colonel and his asthmatic wife are living day to day as best they can, selling off their possessions and whatever else they can in order to buy food and medicine. Every week the colonel heads to the post office in the hope that there will be a letter for him, bringing the pension that he is owed. But he’s been waiting for over a decade and no letter has ever arrived, or looks likely to, but he stumbles on with optimism:

The following Friday he went down to the launches again. And, as on every Friday, he returned home without the longed-for letter. ‘We’ve waited long enough,’ his wife told him that night. ‘One must have the patience of an ox, as you do, to wait for a letter for fifteen years.’ The colonel got into his hammock to read the newspapers.

‘We have to wait our turn,’ he said. ‘Our number is 1823.’

‘Since we’ve been waiting, that number has come up twice in the lottery,’ his wife replied.

Aside from the pension, what gives the colonel hope is a rooster, the last possession the couple have of their son, “shot down nine months before at the cockfights for distributing clandestine literature”. While it’s a nuisance now, being only another mouth to feed, it’s only a few months until the fighting season resumes and the colonel, his optimism never waning, expects it to turn a profit, therefore, in the short run, it’s life becomes more important than his own:

Exhausted, his bones aching from sleeplessness, he couldn’t attend to his needs and the rooster’s at the same time. In the secong half of November, he thought that the animal would die after two days without corn. Then he remembered a handful of beans which he had hung in the chimney in July. He opened the pods and put down a can of dry seeds for the rooster.

No One Writes To The Colonel follows the weeks from October to January as the drudgery of everyday life under military rule drives the characters to the brink of starvation. And even with January heralding a new year, you can be sure that things are going to go on just as they are, if not worse. But it’s the notion of hope that keeps the pages turning, wondering what will happen to the colonel (and his wife) as he sticks to his guns, rather than just sell the rooster and dine out on it, relieving the pressure of waiting for the pension.

While Márquez is better known for being at the forefront of the subgenre tagged ‘magical realism’, No One Writes To The Colonel, eschews the magical part and gets right down to the realism, tackling the effects of censorship, poverty, and hope with an undercurrent of humour. Its cast infringe a little on the realism, being grotesques, but at the same time they are everymen suffering the hardships of Colombian life under martial rule.  And if no one is writing to the colonel, at least someone’s writing about him.