Distant Star [Paperback]

Roberto Bolano (Author), Chris Andrews (Translator)

Book Description

Series: New Directions Paperbook | Publication Date: December 2004

A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship.

The star of Roberto Bolaño's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions.

For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime. The narrator, unable to stop himself, tries to track Ruiz-Tagle down, and sees signs of his activity over and over again. A corrosive, mocking humor sparkles within Bolaño's darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolaño's world there's a big graveyard and there's a big graveyard laugh. (He once described his novel By Night in Chile as "a tale of terror, a situation comedy, and a combination pastoral-gothic novel.")

Many Chilean authors have written about the "bloody events of the early Pinochet years, the abductions and murders," Richard Eder commented in the The New York Times: "None has done it in so dark and glittering a fashion as Roberto Bolaño."

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

"The melancholy folklore of exile" pervades this novel, which describes the divergent paths of three young Chilean poets around the time of Pinochet's coup. At university, the unnamed narrator and his friend are fascinated by a mysterious new member of their poetry workshop. Alberto Ruiz-Tagle is "serious, well mannered, a clear thinker," but his poems seem false, as if his true work were yet to be revealed. It becomes apparent that this is literally the case when Allende's government falls: as an Air Force officer for the new regime, he becomes famous for writing nationalist slogans in the sky. (The left-wing narrator, now in jail, reads them from his prison yard.) Bolano's spare prose lends his narrator's account a chilly precision—as if the detachment of his former classmate had become his country's, and his own.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Review

Another gripping novel, concerns a fascist poet-pilot in Pinochet's reign. (The Nation, Forrest Gander)

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Product Details

• Paperback: 150 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (December 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811215865
• ISBN-13: 978-0811215862
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #49,251 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #40 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Latin American

More About the Author

Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed "by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times)," and as "the real thing and the rarest" (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50. Chris Andrews has won the TLS Valle Inclán Prize and the PEN Translation Prize for his Bolaño translations.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Theater of Cruelty, March 14, 2005

By 

frumiousb "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Distant Star (Paperback)

Distant Star is one of the best books that I have read recently, and one that I highly recommend.

The realism in this book is not magical so much as it is fractured. In the world of Distant Star, poetry is powerless and power is used to write lines in both blood and the clouds. It holds a faceted lens to the atrocities of the Pinochet years. At the same time, it muses on a world where the people need ever-increasing atrocities to make art that can have any meaning at all. It asks important questions (makes important statements?) about collaboration, poetic form, reception and artistic impact.

The Andrews translation felt smooth and pleasant to read. I wish very much that my Spanish were up to reading the original to compare, but it is not. In any case, I did not feel the translation as a barrier or as too much of an artifact.

Recommended for Borges fans, people with a taste for Chilean history or literature, or general readers with a taste for finely written novels. I will be reading more Bolaño in the near future.

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent novel and translation, July 28, 2005

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Distant Star (Paperback)

I chose this book because I had enjoyed Bolano's By Night in Chile. I was not disappointed - this is another excellent book on liturature and politics in the years surround Pinochet.

Distant Star has the tone of a well told autobiography - the reader has to remind themself that this is fiction, compelling fiction that requires response. The narrator of the story is not omniscient - rather after presenting an event, the narrator calls the veracity of the event into question. In this way, the author provides a continuous narrative as experienced/pieced together by the narrator. This reflects the way we fill in the gaps in real life and adds to the reader's sense of the reality of the story.

The story includes three themes regarding the literary scene - the unreliability of literary criticism, the self-conscious choice of literary heroes by young poets, and the relationship between poetics and politics. These are much the same as the themes in By Night in Chile. The story follows a poet (leftist)following a fellow poet (rightist) over twenty some years - both literary and politically. The leftist goes into exile; the rightest, after engaging in brutal executions, also, ends up in exile. In a wonderfully ambiguous climax, their paths cross again. As in real life, not all questions are answered, not all threads pulled together.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poignant, poetic, unanswerable, August 28, 2005

By 

James Clark (Haverhill, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Distant Star (Paperback)

This is an almost perfect short novel. For this American reader, it was an eye-opening introduction to the nightmarish world of the early Pinochet years, and yet it bears kinship to other novels about political alienation, like Koestler's Darkness At Noon. But it's not a typical denunciatory polemic (although Pinochet makes an easy target)--it examines the complex relationships (potential and actual) between poetry and politics, and in the end makes one wonder whether poets can be culpable for political outcomes by virtue of their supposedly greater access to truth. This is a compelling novel and makes one yearn for more Bolano to appear in English.