Distant Star - Softcover

Roberto Bolaño

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1843430940 ISBN 13: 9781843430940

Publisher: New Directions, 2004

Synopsis

This key novel by the outstanding, Chilean author of By Night in Chile, who died tragically young last year, is a chilling investigation of the fascist mentality and its effects on a literary sensibility. It is also a gripping intellectual thriller.

About this title

About the Author:

Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile in 1953 and died in Catalonia in 2003. He was widely regarded as the essential Latin American writers of our age. He was best known for his novels (including The Savage Detectives, which won a number of prestigious literary awards, Nocturno de Chile, translated as By Night in Chile, Amulet, and 2666) and his short stories, Last Evenings on Earth.

From The New Yorker:

"The melancholy folklore of exile" pervades this novel, which describes the divergent paths of three young Chilean poets around the time of Pinochet's coup. At university, the unnamed narrator and his friend are fascinated by a mysterious new member of their poetry workshop. Alberto Ruiz-Tagle is "serious, well mannered, a clear thinker," but his poems seem false, as if his true work were yet to be revealed. It becomes apparent that this is literally the case when Allende's government falls: as an Air Force officer for the new regime, he becomes famous for writing nationalist slogans in the sky. (The left-wing narrator, now in jail, reads them from his prison yard.) Bolano's spare prose lends his narrator's account a chilly precision—as if the detachment of his former classmate had become his country's, and his own.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1843430940
• ISBN 13: 9781843430940
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160