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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.

Bragi Ólafsson’s The Pets (2001) is the second release from Open Letter Books (Dubravka Ugrešić’s Nobody’s Home was the first) and their first piece of fiction. While it’s the first significant English translation for Ólafsson, he has been busying himself with poems, plays, short stories and novels since 1986, not to mention his stint as bass player for Icelandic band, The Sugarcubes, fronted by Björk.

At the beginning of The Pets, Emil Halldorsson, who has recently come into some money, returns home from a brief trip to London to stock up on CDs and duty free, to find his neighbour informing him that a man had visited earlier, saying he would return later. This sets up the opening chapters where we alternate between the story of Emil’s flight, and all the interesting characters one meets - and sometimes would rather not - in such circumstances, and the journey of this mysterious visitor, and the scrapes he gets into, as he prepares to visit Emil.

The mysterious visitor is Havard Knutsson, an old acquaintance (sort of) of Emil’s from many years before, when both were housesitting in London. When the knock comes at the door, Emil has just put some coffee on and is typing an email to his partner. Rather than answer the door, Emil peers out the window and is shocked to recognise Havard, who he believed was safely locked away in a Swedish institution. Not wanting to confront him, Emil’s reaction sets up the remainder of the novel:

I get down on my knees without even thinking, poke my head under the bed, and pull out a box of toys that belong to my son Halldor. I then lie down on the soft carpet, squeeze my body in under the bed, and pull the sheet down to the floor - to hide myself from the doorless entrance to the bedroom and from the window that faces the dim back garden.

Not one to be dissuaded by an unanswered door, Havard peers through the window, sees the coffee on, and breaks into Emil’s house, and turns it off. The signs are that Emil must have nipped out and can’t be long in coming back, so he decides to wait for him. As time drags by, Havard settles more into the house, playing Emil’s CDs, answering his telephone, and inviting his friends and some others from the opening chapters round for a party.

I suddenly realize very clearly the ridiculous position I am in and carry on thinking about the problems that one creates for oneself by getting to know various people. One shouldn’t let others into one’s life.

Being under the bed, with only a limited view of what’s going on in his, Emil’s narrative focuses more on the other senses. He overhears conversations and takes in smells, guessing at what’s happening or what people are talking about. Stuck in  such a position, Emil finds himself recalling the aforementioned time in London.

I had always known that Havard and I would never become very good friends but during the days we spent in London an unbridgeable rift had developed between us. I was the healthy one, the one who had interests and wanted to be constructive, even if just in terms of building a collection of CDs or books; Havard, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be interested in anything, unless it was forbidden or contained the highest percentage of alcohol.

The titular pets are crucial to the London backstory, a disastrous time that saw them meet their maker in comically inventive ways, with a little help from Havard. The lack of action in preventing such incidents mirror Emil’s current situation, revealing as he does a huge character flaw:

Why on earth don’t I do something? What is wrong with me? What reason do I have for lying here under my own bed while these two men…behave as if they are at home here; it seems as though they are at home, in my very own flat. The only reason I don’t do anything is because it is too late.

Emil’s lack of action, never being assertive, finds himself allowing others to take advantage of him. Never able to put his foot down, events transpire, and he’s left picking up the pieces in the aftermath.

While the opening chapters are necessary in setting up Havard’s bizarre party, there’s the sense that their sequence is drawn out. At one point Havard visits an old friend who later turns up at Emil’s, a thread that soon fizzles out with little contribution to the main story. That aside, the novel is a quite an enjoyable read once the main premise comes around and we are reduced to the narrow narrative from under Emil’s bed.

There’s nothing flashy in Ólafsson’s prose, his style straightforwardly recounting events and highlighting thoughts. Where he excels is in his comic setup. Most of the seeds introduced come together in this darkly comic novel to a snappy and funny conclusion, but, let it linger, and the underlying tragedy soon reveals itself.