Download Distant Star Roberto Bolano Chris Andrews Books
Download As PDF : Distant Star Roberto Bolano Chris Andrews Books
A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship.
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."
Download Distant Star Roberto Bolano Chris Andrews Books
"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."
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Tags : Distant Star (9780811215862) Roberto Bolano, Chris Andrews Books,Roberto Bolano, Chris Andrews,Distant Star,New Directions,0811215865,Historical - General,Literary,Chile - History - 1973-1988,FICTION / Classics,FICTION / Hispanic Latino,FICTION / Literary,FICTION / Political,FICTION / War Military,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction / Historical,Latin American Novel And Short Story,Literature Texts,Political
Distant Star Roberto Bolano Chris Andrews Books Reviews :
Distant Star Roberto Bolano Chris Andrews Books Reviews
- 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. - Genre-bending novels are often the most interesting ones. Here we have political/literary crime fiction.
Though Roberto Bolaño wasn't a writer of 'crime fiction', this is a novel about a serial killer and mass murderer. The novel reads like a joint venture of Nabokov and Eric Ambler.
The atrocities committed by the Pinochet coup in Chile provide the historical framework. In a very short preface, the short novel is announced as an expanded chapter of Bolaño's own 'Nazi Literature in the Americas'. To me, it seems also like a possible chapter in his Savage Detectives, a fat novel that I liked a lot.
Bolaño was a specialist in mixing up 'real life' events and history with fictional characters, and with invented writings, in the tradition of Borges.
The subject here is murder and literature post Allende. The anti-hero is a charismatic and mysterious monster, a stunt pilot, a 'poet', a sadistic proponent of the school of 'barbaric writing'. He is also an officer and a gentleman, an undercover agent who spies on leftist student circles and then gets his kicks out of killing the people whom he had spied upon.
The story stretches in time and space into Europe and towards the end of the century. The 'poet' has expanded into other genres, like science fiction and porn. An ex cop with a good professional name is paid a hefty sum by an unnamed source for finding the monster... No spoilers here.
The power of this novelette lies in its laconic tone and its briefness. Facts speak for themselves. There is no interpretation, explanation, condemnation. Bolaño was a writer of many pages, often far too many. He did better when he restricted the output of words, like here. He says very little about the main character's politics and instead focuses on his 'esthetics', his 'revolutionary poetry', his personal attractiveness.
Blackest satire, but also a monument to those who disappeared.
