Distant Star
  • Published:
    Sep-2009
  • Formats:
    Print / eBook / Audio
  • Main Genre:
    General Fiction
  • Time Period:
    1960's-1970's Contemporary
  • Pages:
    149
  • Rating:
  • Purchase:
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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."
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EDITIONS
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    • First Edition
    • Sep-2009
    • Vintage (UK)
    • Paperback
    • ISBN: 0099461722
    • ISBN13: 9780099461722
    •  
    • Nov-2004
    • HarperCollins (UK)
    • Paperback
    • ISBN: 1843430940
    • ISBN13: 9781843430940
    •  
    • Dec-2004
    • New Directions Publishing Corporation
    • Trade Paperback
    • ISBN: 0811215865
    • ISBN13: 9780811215862
    •  
    • Sep-2020
    • Vintage (UK)
    • Paperback
    • ISBN: 1784876399
    • ISBN13: 9781784876395
    •  
    • Dec-2004
    • New Directions Publishing
    • eBook
    • ISBN: 0811220524
    • ISBN13: 9780811220521
    •  
    • Mar-2016
    • New Directions
    • eBook (Kindle)
    •  
    • Mar-2016
    • Vintage
    • eBook
    • ISBN: 1446442454
    • ISBN13: 9781446442456
    •  
    • Jul-2017
    • Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial
    • Audible



View the Complete Roberto Bolano Book List