Distant Star - Softcover

Bolano, Roberto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1843430940 ISBN 13: 9781843430940

Publisher: The Harvill Press, 2004

Synopsis

An unnamed narrator attempts to piece together the life and works of an enigmatic would-be poet turned military assassin during Pinochet's regime in Chile. In the early 1970s Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was a little-known poet living in southern Chile. After the military coup of 1973 that brought in the dictatorship of General Pinochet, he embarked upon a new career that involved him in committing murder and other brutalities, and subsequently led to his emergence as a lieutenant in the Chilean air force under his actual name, Carlos Wieder. Some time later the narrator, now held in a prison camp, looks up and sees a World War II airplane writing the first words of the Book of Genesis in smoke in the sky. The aviator is none other Carlos Wieder, launching his own version of the New Chilean Poetry...Roberto Bolano's novel is a chilling investigation of the fascist mentality and the limits of evil, as seen in its effects on a literary sensibility, as well as a gripping intellectual thriller. It shows a great writer at the height of his powers.

About this title

Review:

"A true masterpiece that will remain one of the key readings of contemporary literature."

In the end, Distant Star offers a composite picture of a nation turned upside down, allowing Bolano to ask what the function of art is in such context.Bolano's literature is about silences and absences, about reevaluating national memory. As today's Chile moves to distance itself from the atrocities of the military period, it is forced to confront the ghosts of its past. In Bolano's able hands, those treacherous ghosts have universal value. "

The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world.--Susan Sontag

Bolano's spare prose lends his narrator's account a chilly precision.

From the Publisher:

One of the key novels by the outstandingly talented Chilean author of By Night in Chile, who died tragically young earlier this year.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Harvill Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1843430940
• ISBN 13: 9781843430940
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160