Persistently hallucinatory and defensive, the story ranges from Opus Dei to falconry to private lessons on Marxism for Pinochet and his generals directed at the unspecified reproaches of "the wizened youth."

Unlike other fantastical deathbed rants such as William Gaddis's Agapē Agape the writing style is remarkably accessible despite itself and the story of his life intact as it is woven into Chile's political history despite progressively more delirious and compromised powers of recollection.

The novella, a satire, 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.

Susan Sontag declared that “By Night in Chile is the real thing, and the rarest: a contemporary novel destined to have a permanent place in world literature."

The prose is constantly exciting and challenging - at times lyrical and allusive, at others filled with a biting wit (Bolaño has dissected the Chilean literary tradition with such gleeful eloquence that the novel may not win him many dinner invitations back in the country of his birth).