Distant Star

By Roberto Bolaño

Book Overview

" One] of his best." --Daniel Zalewski, The New Yorker

"A masterpiece." --Los Angeles Times

The year is 1971, or perhaps 1972, in Salvador Allende's Chile. Arturo B. is just one of a motley crew of young bohemians attending Juan Stein's poetry workshop at the University of Concepci n when a mysterious newcomer by the name of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle arrives. Though Alberto's taciturn manner, patrician airs, and cold, distant poetry confound the group, he catches the attention of Veronica and Angelica Garmendia, the twin stars of the workshop. When Chile's government is toppled and replaced by a brutal military dictatorship, many of the young poets--among them, the Garmendia sisters--disappear, and Arturo is horrified to learn that Alberto, now revealed to be Carlos Wieder, an air force pilot and a darling of the new regime, may have something to do with it. Wieder's great ambition is to revolutionize Chilean poetry--to mythologize the new order in a spectacle of verse--and he takes to performing his poems in the skies above the Andes, using the sky as his paper and an old Nazi aircraft as his pen. But when Wieder takes his radical art a step too far, he, too, disappears without a trace. Decades later, Arturo, living in exile in Europe, and still preoccupied by the fates of his old classmates, is presented with an opportunity to track Wieder down--a journey that will lead him to one last encounter with the violence of their generation. A detective novel, a horror story, and a tragicomedy of global proportions, Roberto Bola o's Distant Star is a haunting tale about the grotesque collisions of high art and politics, of idealism and brutality, and of hopes and reality.

With a new introduction by Ben Lerner.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1250352193
• ISBN13: 9781250352194
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Metáfora fracturada de una Vida y de una Dictadura

Primero decir que no tiene mucho sentido estar comparando siempre toda obra de Bolaño con "Los Detectives Salvajes" y "2666". Esas son sus obras maestras, pero no por eso sus obras "menores" son menos relevantes. En "Estrella Distante", una novela corta pero intensa, Bolaño traza la Dictadura de Pinochet en Chile a través de los ojos algunos poetas. Es una historia fracturada (tanto temporal como narrativamente) en donde mucho se deja al lector para descubrir entre lineas. El narrador y su amigo poeta se enredan con la historia del protagonista, el poeta/piloto que simboliza lo ambiguo de un régimen brutal donde todos los derechos humanos fueron violados. Es también el símbolo del exilio y muchos otros aspectos sutiles de la vida de seres humanos comunes bajo la opresión militar. La prosa de Bolaño es impecable, aunque en este libro los Chilenismos abundan más que en sus otras novelas. Un libro muy recomendado para los interesados en profundizar en la obra del escritor. Es a la vez una de las metáforas mas "bellas" (si se puede usar esa palabra) de la ambigüedad del mal y del desafío al poder cuasi-absoluto.

Viva Bolano!

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 all of Roberto Bolano's crazy little diversions in Distant Star, just as I did when reading The Savage Detectives: each and every one of his windings along and around and thru the twisted and amusing side-paths 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 Poetry of Fascism

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.

Poignant, poetic, unanswerable

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.

Theater of Cruelty

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.