Publisher's Synopsis
El delirante y perturbador misterio de un impostor
El narrador vio por primera vez a aquel hombre en 1971 o 1972, cuando Allende era aún Presidente de Chile. Escribìa poemas distantes y cautelosos, seducìa a las mujeres y despertaba en los hombres una indefinible desconfianza. Volvió a verlo después del golpe, pero en ese momento ignoraba que aquel aviador, que escribìa versìculos de la Biblia con el humo de un avión de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y el poeta, eran uno, y el mismo. Y asì nos es contada la historia de un impostor, de un hombre de muchos nombres, sin otra moral que la estética, dandy del horror, asesino y fotógrafo del miedo, artista bárbaro que llevaba sus creaciones hasta sus últimas y letales consecuencias.
Novela clave en la obra de Roberto Bolaño, Estrella Distante es, además de un apasionante thriller intelectual, una escalofriante investigación sobre la mentalidad fascista y sus efectos en la sensibilidad literaria.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
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."
