Customer Reviews

Distant Star

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Like a lot of people in the English speaking (or reading, rather) world, I cannot seem to get enough Roberto Bolano. Would that I had discovered his writing at least prior to his death. There is reason to be optimistic in any event as there is still a substantial body of his work that has yet to be translated.



Concerning the matter at hand, Distant Star has once again proved to me that there are a seeming unlimited number of things that Bolano can say using the same basic elements. Like most of his other prose works, Distant Star features exiled Chilean and Latin American poets and writers struggling in the wake of Augusto Pinochet's coup to stay alive and stay relevant. Bolano mixes the story up in this case with the addition of the autodidact Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, nee Carlos Wieder. Unlike most of the other members of the narrator's poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle does not find himself in personal danger with the overthrow of Allende's government. In fact, the newly ensconced military junta headed by General Pinochet provides the perfect stage for the flowering of Ruiz-Tagle's new poetic movement. This is fascist poetry at its height, a poetry of actions, glorification of violence, and a reassertion of ancient religious mythology through skywriting. Ruiz-Tagle takes the lessons of the junta's techniques to a level with which the military government itself is uncomfortable.



What follows is a sort of literary/political detective story with the narrator tasked--somewhat unwillingly--to find the now legendary Ruiz-Tagle. Sorting through reams of literary and poetic journals, apocryphal sightings, and even pornographic films in order to determine his location. Throughout, Bolano takes the time to meditate on many of the issues that make his work so vital: exile, violence, poetry and the all too human quest for immortality. Oh, and I must not forget to take the opportunity of singling out Chris Andrews for the extraordinary job he has done in translating Bolano's poetry for English language readers.



Honestly, if you have not read Bolano yet, I cannot urge you strongly enough to do so. Distant Star is as good a place to start as any. From here, you have Chris Andrews's translations of By Night in Chile, Amulet and Bolano's short story collection, Last Evenings on Earth.

... at the memory of the Pinochet murder-regime in Chile --with its Christian sadism and its Chicago capitalism, installed by the CIA -- then Roberto Bolaño is the author you need to read, and this short novel, "Distant Star", is a good place to start. It's not a pleasant afternoon's sort of book, though, as I must warn you, nor is it easy to digest unless you start with some knowledge of Latin American literature.

There are hideous acts of violence that occur in this book, but they are subdued by distance and by indirect narration; since a good part of Bolaño's moral stance toward Pinochetism is based on revulsion from sadistic violence, it's very proper that the violence he recounts should NOT be vivid and thrilling. There are also passages of revolting scatology - near the end, when the narrator traces his political nemesis, Carlos Wieder, though a school of writers who claim that they can only 'create' the new literature by literally defecating and urinating on the classics. My stomach churned at this chapter, but Bolaño had to make his point.

Carlos Wieder is a spy planted among the young intellectuals and poets of Chile, in fact an air force officer, a stunt pilot who writes his "poems' in the sky over Chile once the Pinochet coup is successful. His first sky-poems are in Latin, the opening text of Genesis. Soon enough he begins to sky-write in Spanish: "Death Is Responsibility", "Death is Cleansing", "Death is Chile". Meanwhile he's the leader of a right-wing death squad that rapes and murders the women poets with whom Wieder had consorted under a false name. His 'artistic' aspirations lead him to photograph his victims pornographically, and his ego betrays him into organizing an exhibit of these photos as evidence of the 'new poetics' he champions. And that, dear reader, is as much of the plot of this novel as I intend to share.

The atrocities of Pinochet's Chileño-fascism are not the whole theme of "Distant Star." It is also a pain-ridden exploration of the nature of poetry and literature in Chile and in modern times at large. The portions of the book that anatomize writers "we" have never heard of, whole schools of literature "we" have never encountered, WILL confuse, defuse, or bemuse most Anglophone readers. One gets the impression, and I think it's a valid one, that 'revolutionary' idealism and poetry are inseparable. In Bolaño's Chile, there's a poet behind every banner or placard.

The obvious comparison is between Bolaño and the Argentine Julio Cortázar. Based on "Distant Star', the only Bolaño I've read, the two share many preoccupations but Cortázar is the more masterful stylist and the deeper thinker. Bolaño is more immediate, more sensual, and at times more lurid. I'd place him on a spectrum of "metaphysical violence" about half way from Cortázar to the Mexican Carlos Fuentes. Whatever you find in Bolaño, it won't be "magic realism" or any form of melodrama. Rather, he offers a gritty integrity and indifference to mere entertainment that few English writers would dare to publish.

The novel opens in 1973, just before President Allende is overthrown by Augusto Pinochet. In Concepción, a group of left-leaning idealists discuss Pablo Neruda and Che Guevera. Members of this group include both the novel's unnamed narrator and the enigmatic Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, a little known poet who is attractive to women and viewed with suspicion by men. After the coup, Ruiz-Tagle is revealed as a Pinochet supporter. He has German heritage, and his name is Carlos Weider. He is also a murderer who eliminates opponents of the junta.

Weider is the central character in this novel, but the unnamed narrator and other characters demonstrate a complex interplay between politics, history and literature. The brutal events depicted underscore both the cruelty of the regime and the ambivalence of literature.

`The increasingly distant stars.'

This is a novel that can be read in one sitting, as I did, but I do not believe that it can be fully absorbed in one reading. I am not looking forward to re-reading it, but I think I will need to. I became engrossed in some of the stark contrasts in imagery which pervade the novel. Weider skywriting in his old Messerschmitt over Concepción seems particularly appropriate: whether the words he chose were timeless, the delivery guaranteed their ephemerality. Contrast this, though, with the scatological references as the new literature is created. Not subtle, but very effective.

This is my least favorite of the three Roberto Bolaño novels I've read so far, but I'm hooked.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Some may write better, but nobody and I mean nobody digresses as well, or in quite the same fashion, as does Roberto Bolano. Okay, okay, there is, of course, Cervantes in his Don Quixote, but I think you get my point. I absolutely loved Roberto Bolano's crazy little diversions in Distant Star, just as I did when reading The Savage Detectives. I enjoyed each and every one of his meanderings along, around and thru the twisted and amusing side-paths that were just waiting to be discovered in this humorous yet vaguely disturbing effort. While The Savage Detectives, in comparison, can be viewed as a Road Trip of discovery, along white lines similar to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, or, perhaps more accurately, a circuitous voyage homeward akin to Homer's The Odyssey, this novella offers up something decidedly more airy, lighter, yet heavier and darker than either earth or water, fuzzier, and therefore much harder to grasp. I won't divulge any of the details concerning this excellent story, but Distant Star, as it turns out, is a short, memorable flight through the bright lining of a black cloud, the sense of which will linger long after Roberto Bolano's brilliant skywriting fades. Reach for it. It's worth the trip.

Additional works by Roberto Bolano:

By Night in Chile

Last Evenings on Earth

Nazi Literature in the Americas

Amulet

The Savage Detectives: A Novel

The Romantic Dogs

2666: A Novel

The narrator, as a young man, attended poetry workshops led by two different instructors. After the Pinochet regime took power there were abrupt changes for the narrator and the people he met in the workshops.

Through the narrator's story there is a portrait of how the coup changed lives. After a stint in prison, the self-exiled narrator moved about Europe working in menial jobs. He got snatches of information about the whereabouts and activities of others in the workshops. Some of the students were disappeared. Instructors and some students went into exile. A college bound friend of the narrator worked in a shoe store. There is a right leaning opportunist, possibly an informer before the coup, enabled in his sadism by the new regime, who becomes a celebrity.

A formerly honored detective, who is also in exile, has a reason (not clearly defined) to find the rightist sadist of the workshop. This provides some, but incomplete, closure for the narrator.

Through the story there is a discussion of poetry and schools of thought on its creation. One school, a biting satire on hyper-masculine and adrenalin charged approaches to writing, is linked to the rightist informer.

This intriguing story has a very sad message about a generation of Chileans. You can read it in a single sitting. As with any good piece of literature, you will spend a larger amount of time thinking about its ramifications.

Roberto Bolaño's writing can be incredibly affecting. The first section of The Savage Detectives, focusing on the lives of young poets and their interaction in poetry workshops, is absolutely brilliant. There's some of that in Distant Star, but when the story veers away from poetry workshops and addresses the antics of Chilean poet Alberto Ruiz-Tagle (also known as Carlos Wieder) and his macabre, death-obsessed sense of art, I found myself engaging in a futile search for the point Bolaño was trying to make. Something about the complicity of art in the brutality of the Pinochet government? Something about the relationship between art and violence?

Whatever his point may have been, and however captivating (at times) his prose became, the novel held my interest but failed to move me. I'd give it 3 1/2 stars, edging a bit toward 4, but I would urge readers to check out The Savage Detectives for a glimpse of Bolaño at his best.

It's a good book but not a perfect one. Sometimes it's confused and the life of Wieder (the main character of the story) is not well defined.