Distant Star Paperback – December 1, 2004

An earlier, condensed version of DISTANT STAR appeared as the last story in Bolaño's "Nazi Literature in the Americas". Although I didn't particularly like "Nazi Literature", the book's last story, "The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman", captivated me. When, then, I picked up DISTANT STAR years later, I experienced a small frisson of excitement in realizing that it is a greatly expanded re-telling of "The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman", though the name of the monstrous Hoffman has been changed to Carlos Wieder.Putting aside that personal experience, and without regard to the earlier Ramírez Hoffman story, DISTANT STAR is brilliant. An anonymous first-person narrator (who almost surely is the Arturo Belano who appears as the alter-ego of Bolaño in many of his works) recounts the story of Carlos Wieder. When he met Wieder around 1972, they were fellow students in two poetry workshops in Concepción in the socialist Chile of Salvador Allende. After the coup that put General Pinochet in charge, Wieder re-appeared as a pilot in the Chilean Air Force who via skywriting created poems in the sky (the motif that informs the tremendous cover of the book). Another aspect of Wieder's performance art from that time was an exhibition of snapshots of people that he had murdered, most of them women, including two sisters who had been fellow-students in those poetry workshops.Going forward from 1974, the chief strand of DISTANT STAR traces news or rumors of Wieder over the years, including the time when he was involved in a French school of "barbaric writers", up to his quiet exile in Spain -- where, in unusual, tension-packed circumstances, the narrator sees him in a café just before Wieder's death. Two other strands track the subsequent lives of the two poets who led those workshops back in 1972. One, Juan Stein (a Jew and distant relative of the outstanding Soviet general Ivan Chernyakhovsky) went on to become a "Chilean terrorist" and global guerilla fighter for leftist causes. The other, Diego Soto, shuffled off to middle-class exile in Europe, until he was killed by some neo-Nazi youths in the train station in Perpignan, the same train station that is the setting for a famous (or infamous) painting by Salvador Dalí.The novel is mesmerizing. In it, Bolaño found his voice. (His next novel was "The Savage Detectives".) On one level, it is a re-casting of the detective story. Along the way Bolaño includes numerous references to modern poets and writers (many of them unknown to me) from Latin America, Spain, and France, and the novel thereby appears to contain literary criticism of much Latin American and surrealist literature. It also is an unsettling picture of the turbulence of Pinochet's Chile as well as the resulting Chilean diaspora. I strongly suspect, further, that it constitutes critical commentary on the anti-humanistic aspects of much performance art and avant-garde art (including that of Salvador Dalí). Finally, in my view, it is a morality tale to the effect that evil is endemic in man.

This novel is so surreal (super real) that it makes it very disturbing to read. We, North Americans tend to want stories that have a clearly happy ending. We prefer not to know about evil people, and certainly don't want to know that evil people can go on and have a great life where no one knows how evil they have been.Such is the case with Alberto Ruiz-Tagle (AKA Carlos Weider) who the narrator follows around and slowly learns that Weider did Pinochet's dirty work. He tortured many people who ended up in mass graves. The unnamed narrator becomes more and more obsessed with proving who this man is, even if only to himself. He, in fact, becomes so disturbed and paranoid with who Weider is and who he has become that he no longer trusts his best friend with the knowledge. Despite the fact that his poet friend, like he, are the opposite of Weider: they believe in justice and freedom and abhor the Right's idea that those who have their own mind, should be killed.The narrator seems to be unable to go back to being that innocent, loving poet, especially after he realizes that Weider killed the beautiful twins that had parties for the Leftist Poets.Weider (going by Ruiz-Tagle) tricked the women because he was a poet and they innately trust the poet as a person of great depth and beauty.Personally, once I knew this man could kill two such kind souls, I hated the guy so much, I wanted him to die. I hoped the narrator would kill him, but alas, he does not have a murderer's heart so instead, he becomes more and more obsessed.I almost wish I could undo what I read in this book. Sadly, many Latinos live with this knowledge everyday: Knowing a murderous torturer may be their neighbor, yet unable to do anything about it. This was a story that needed to be told.

... at the memory of the Pinochet murder-regime in Chile --with its Christian sadism and its Chicago capitalism, installed by the CIA -- then Roberto Bolaño is the author you need to read, and this short novel, "Distant Star", is a good place to start. It's not a pleasant afternoon's sort of book, though, as I must warn you, nor is it easy to digest unless you start with some knowledge of Latin American literature.There are hideous acts of violence that occur in this book, but they are subdued by distance and by indirect narration; since a good part of Bolaño's moral stance toward Pinochetism is based on revulsion from sadistic violence, it's very proper that the violence he recounts should NOT be vivid and thrilling. There are also passages of revolting scatology - near the end, when the narrator traces his political nemesis, Carlos Wieder, though a school of writers who claim that they can only 'create' the new literature by literally defecating and urinating on the classics. My stomach churned at this chapter, but Bolaño had to make his point.Carlos Wieder is a spy planted among the young intellectuals and poets of Chile, in fact an air force officer, a stunt pilot who writes his "poems' in the sky over Chile once the Pinochet coup is successful. His first sky-poems are in Latin, the opening text of Genesis. Soon enough he begins to sky-write in Spanish: "Death Is Responsibility", "Death is Cleansing", "Death is Chile". Meanwhile he's the leader of a right-wing death squad that rapes and murders the women poets with whom Wieder had consorted under a false name. His 'artistic' aspirations lead him to photograph his victims pornographically, and his ego betrays him into organizing an exhibit of these photos as evidence of the 'new poetics' he champions. And that, dear reader, is as much of the plot of this novel as I intend to share.The atrocities of Pinochet's Chileño-fascism are not the whole theme of "Distant Star." It is also a pain-ridden exploration of the nature of poetry and literature in Chile and in modern times at large. The portions of the book that anatomize writers "we" have never heard of, whole schools of literature "we" have never encountered, WILL confuse, defuse, or bemuse most Anglophone readers. One gets the impression, and I think it's a valid one, that 'revolutionary' idealism and poetry are inseparable. In Bolaño's Chile, there's a poet behind every banner or placard.The obvious comparison is between Bolaño and the Argentine Julio Cortázar. Based on "Distant Star', the only Bolaño I've read, the two share many preoccupations but Cortázar is the more masterful stylist and the deeper thinker. Bolaño is more immediate, more sensual, and at times more lurid. I'd place him on a spectrum of "metaphysical violence" about half way from Cortázar to the Mexican Carlos Fuentes. Whatever you find in Bolaño, it won't be "magic realism" or any form of melodrama. Rather, he offers a gritty integrity and indifference to mere entertainment that few English writers would dare to publish.