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Distant Star (Paperback)

4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product Details

Paperback: 149 pages
Publisher: New Directions; New edition edition
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0811215865
ISBN-13: 978-0811215862
Product Dimensions: 20.1 x 13.2 x 1.3 cm
Shipping Weight: 182 g

Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #349,900 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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4.0 out of 5 stars Portrait of the artist as a young killer, May 8 2009

By	ES (Ottawa, ON) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Distant Star (Paperback)

Bola�o's crisp novella tells the story of the mysterious Carlos Wieder, a charmingly amoral would-be poet who finds his artistic destiny as a military murderer in Pinochet's Chile. It's at once a detective story (with a nod to Les Mis�rables as well), and an illustration of what happens to artists in interesting times. This might be postulated as Yeats' Law of Civil Vacuum: that's when the worst are full of passionate intensity, and the best lack all conviction. The best, in this case, means a group of earnest young leftist poets who thought they knew Carlos (although his name was different then), and find themselves either among his victims or fleeing the country.

The novella is based on a short story that formed the capstone of Nazi Literature in the Americas. Here the plot, which covered 20 pages in the original, has hardly expanded. Instead bits of colour are developed into their own sub-stories (including a locked-room mystery), and secondary characters, most of them poets who left Chile during the Pinochet years, are added: at a guess, to represent what happened to the non-murderous artists of those times. If the additions don't move the plot along, they have their own colour: as in the story of Petra, the armless gay poet/street artist who becomes the mascot of the Barcelona Paralympic games.

That's a typical example of Bola�o's throw-away inventiveness: always grounded in convincing detail. The same can be said of the book's central metaphor, the poet-killer's uniting third trade: he's a skywriter who releases enigmatic, sinister phrases against the clouds, flying what one visionary character insists is a Messerschmitt. It's almost too far-fetched to be allowed; but Bola�o, who has his protagonist's audacity and then some, brings it off.

Bola�o's prose recalls Julio Cort�zar's in its use of slang, its rhythmic ease, and its combination of virtuosity and accessibility (if he were a jazz musician he'd be Dizzy Gillespie). It's here ably translated by Chris Andrews.

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