By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolaño (2000)

Marvelous. A playful and morbid treatise on how political, religious, and literary institutions corrupt and compromise the individual. The passages where the protagonist is summoned to lead Pinochet and his generals in a seminar on Marxism are sublime.

This is my second Bolaño. I'm starting with the early small ones before getting to the later big ones everyone professes to love. So far I'm delighted; he reminds me by turns of many of my favorites like Sebald and Bernhard, but is utterly distinctive.