Estrella distante (Spanish Edition)

El narrador vió por primera vez a aquel hombre en 1971 o 1972, cuando Allende era aún Presidente de Chile. Escribía poemas distantes y cautelosos, seducía a las mujeres y despertaba en los hombres una indefinible desconfianza. Volvió a verlo despues del golpe, pero en ese momento ignoiraba que aquel aviador, que escribía versiculos de la Biblia con el humo de un avión de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y el poeta, eran uno, y el mismo. Y así 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 fotografo del miedo, artista bárbaro que llevaba sus creaciones hasta sus últimas y letales consecuencias.

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.