Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix is dying.
A priest, a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a poet, in his feverish delirium the crucial events of his past swell around him.
From glimpses of the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German writer Ernst Junger and his one-time student, General Pinochet, to nightmarish flashes of falcons and falconers, the Chilean landscape and faces of those now dead, reality and imagination crowd and clamber in pursuit of the ‘wizened youth’ who still haunts Father Lacroix all these years later.
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS
‘The wit, the horror, the ambition, the strangeness; Roberto Bolaño’s work is a sprawling labyrinth of surprise, bold invention, and images that will live with you forever’ Chris Power
‘Few are the writers who have mastered the alchemy of turning the trivial into the sublime, the everyday into adventure. Bolaño is among the best at this diabolical skill’ Georgi Gospodinov, author of Time Shelter
"dramatizes what is immediately familiar to people living in semi-modern societies of Asia and Latin America: the insidious links between politicians, religious figures and writers..." (Pankaj Mishra, TLS)
About the Author
Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953, but now lives in Spain. He is widely regarded as one of the foremost Latin American novelists of his generation and his work has won him numerous literary prizes.
