I love Roberto Bolaño’s writing style. His ability to weave rich language into a flowing narrative puts him in the same class as Borges and García Márquez. I’m so happy a friend introduced me to him. I just bought three more of his books.
Distant Star is a dark tale of people who are not who they say they are. Chile is going through a revolution and a coup, and poets are disappearing or being thrown in jail. This opens the door for even greater darkness to fly under the radar. Those dark days color the life of our narrator and everyone he knows.
Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who displays photographs of his gruesome murders in an art show, is the epitome of this darkness, as is the passive reaction to him as a murderer. The entire book crackles with Ruiz-Tagle’s monstrous deeds in a fractured country and a fractured psyche.
It’s a story that could be told only in the aftermath of Pinochet’s Chile. As Richard Eder wrote in The New York Times, “None has done it in so dark and glittering a fashion as Roberto Bolaño.”
See Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño on Audiobooks, Amazon/Audible, and Bookstores who are not Amazon.
You might like Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003 by Roberto Bolaño. And check out “Vlad by Carlos Fuentes Review“on Noovella!
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