Distant Star

The star of Roberto Bolano'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 Bolano's darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolano'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 Bolano.

Author: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 12/17/2004
Pages: 150
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.44lbs
Size: 8.02h x 5.29w x 0.51d
ISBN: 9780811215862


Review Citation(s):
New York Times 03/27/2005 pg. 23
New Yorker (The) 02/14/2005 pg. 252
Chronicle of Higher Education 12/12/2008 pg. 20

About the Author
Bolaño, Roberto: - Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolano (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.Andrews, Chris: - The poet CHRIS ANDREWS teaches at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, where he is a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre. He has translated books by Roberto Bolano and César Aira for New Directions. He has won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize for his poetry and the Valle-Inclan Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for his translations.