El delirante y perturbador misterio de un impostor

El narrador vio por primera vez a aquel hombre en 1971 o 1972, cuando Allende era aun Presidente de Chile. Escribia poemas distantes y cautelosos, seducia a las mujeres y despertaba en los hombres una indefinible desconfianza. Volvio a verlo despues del golpe, pero en ese momento ignoraba que aquel aviador, que escribia versiculos de la Biblia con el humo de un avion de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y el poeta, eran uno, y el mismo. Y asi nos es contada la historia de un impostor, de un hombre de muchos nombres, sin otra moral que la estetica, dandy del horror, asesino y fotografo del miedo, artista barbaro que llevaba sus creaciones hasta sus ultimas y letales consecuencias.

Novela clave en la obra de Roberto Bolano, Estrella Distante es, ademas de un apasionante thriller intelectual, una escalofriante investigacion 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.