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Loading... Distant Starby Roberto Bolaño
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Un joven poeta chileno, que se movía en los círculos literarios de Santiago en la época anterior a la dictadura militar, recuerda estos anos y a sus companeros de entonces. Describe como fueron sus vidas después del golpe, investigando el pasado de uno de ellos que se unió a los golpistas y persiguió a los demás poetas. Este sujeto, y sus opiniones sobre el rol de la poesía en la sociedad y sobre como esta debe ser 'puesta en escena' es una parte importante del relato. La caracterización de este personaje es negativa, y su figura es contrapuesta con otras que se comportan de una manera ética y razonable, sin embargo, al dedicar tanto tiempo describiendo sus ideas y su comportamiento en la novela, en cierta manera este personaje tiene un reconocimiento que no merece. Esta es una novela corta interesante y muy intensa que recuerda un poco a 'Los detectives salvajes', y que podría ser una buena introduccion a la obra de Bolano. (  ) alalba | Oct 9, 2009 |  I picked this up in my local library because of all of hype surrounding the publication in English of Bolano’s 2666. I shy away from long books at the best of times, but 2666 sounded particularly daunting. So I thought I would start with one of his shorter works. It is about a mysterious poet who becomes both a celebrated artist for his sky-writing poetry and a murderous soldier in the early days of Pinochet’s regime. The early part of the book was excellent. The sinister atmosphere of this time and place in history where it became the norm for people to “disappear” was chilling, as was the glimpses we were given the central character. Unfortunately, in the later part of the book becomes more concerned with endless literary name-dropping of mainly Latin American writers and poet, plus a chunk on Les Miserables too, which was completely lost on me. I imagine it is this high-brow stuff that earned Bolano his reputation but I preferred the atmospheric part with a plot! (  ) sanddancer | Mar 10, 2009 | Distant Star was my introduction to Bolano. It is a pleasure to see the rest of his work finally being translated and released here in the U.S. This is a great novel. It explores the horrors resulting from the Chilean coup of 1973. Written with much grace as well as guilt. I really enjoyed the use of poetry throughout this story depicting the importance and helplessness of poems. ( ) duckwood | Jul 1, 2008 | A short time before Pinochet’s military coup in Chile, a university poetry group is joined by an enigmatic student, Carlos Wieder, who is soon to explore various forms of poetry and meaning of art within the new Nazi parameters. The story is narrated through the eyes of one of the students of this workshop who is imprisoned shortly after the coup, then leaves the country for political reasons and lives in different places in Europe, but never completely loses sight of his friends and other members of the group. I feel vaguely disappointed by this book. I read Bolano’s _By Night in Chile_, which was more interesting both in style and in its scope. The Distant Star is more popular and better known, and for some reason I expected it to be better than By Night, but it wasn’t. (  ) Niecierpek | Jan 20, 2007 | 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. rnarvaez | Jul 22, 2006 |  no reviews | add a review
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| Book description |
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The star of Roberto Bolaño'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 multi-media 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 Bolaño's darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolaño'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 Bolaño."
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:55 -0400)
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