Estrella distante
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Book Overview
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 Bola o's darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bola o'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 Bola o."
Customer Reviews
Rated 5 starsMetáfora fracturada de una Vida y de una Dictadura
Primero decir que no tiene mucho sentido estar comparando siempre toda obra de Bolaño con "Los Detectives Salvajes" y "2666". Esas son sus obras maestras, pero no por eso sus obras "menores" son menos relevantes. En "Estrella Distante", una novela corta pero intensa, Bolaño traza la Dictadura de Pinochet en Chile a través de los ojos algunos poetas. Es una historia fracturada (tanto temporal como narrativamente) en donde...
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Rated 5 starsViva Bolano!
Some may write better, but nobody and I mean nobody digresses as well, or in quite the same fashion, as does Roberto Bolano. Okay, okay, there is, of course, Cervantes in his Don Quixote, but I think you get my point. I absolutely loved all of Roberto Bolano's crazy little diversions in Distant Star, just as I did when reading The Savage Detectives: each and every one of his windings along and around and thru the twisted...
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Rated 5 starsThe Poetry of Fascism
Like a lot of people in the English speaking (or reading, rather) world, I cannot seem to get enough Roberto Bolano. Would that I had discovered his writing at least prior to his death. There is reason to be optimistic in any event as there is still a substantial body of his work that has yet to be translated. Concerning the matter at hand, Distant Star has once again proved to me that there are a seeming unlimited number...
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Rated 5 starsPoignant, poetic, unanswerable
This is an almost perfect short novel. For this American reader, it was an eye-opening introduction to the nightmarish world of the early Pinochet years, and yet it bears kinship to other novels about political alienation, like Koestler's Darkness At Noon. But it's not a typical denunciatory polemic (although Pinochet makes an easy target)--it examines the complex relationships (potential and actual) between poetry and politics,...
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Rated 5 starsTheater of Cruelty
Distant Star is one of the best books that I have read recently, and one that I highly recommend. The realism in this book is not magical so much as it is fractured. In the world of Distant Star, poetry is powerless and power is used to write lines in both blood and the clouds. It holds a faceted lens to the atrocities of the Pinochet years. At the same time, it muses on a world where the people need ever-increasing atrocities...
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