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Distant Star [Paperback]

Roberto Bolano (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars `He flew in a light plane and he flew alone.' July 1 2010
By J. Cameron-Smith TOP 50 REVIEWER
Format:Paperback
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
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Amazon.com: 4.1 out of 5 stars  19 reviews
41 of 43 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Theater of Cruelty Mar 14 2005
By frumiousb - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
28 of 29 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent novel and translation July 28 2005
By M. J. Smith - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Poignant, poetic, unanswerable Aug 28 2005
By James Clark - Published on Amazon.com
Format: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.
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