Distant Star - Softcover

"The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world" (Susan Sontag)

"One of the greatest and most influential modern writers" (James Wood)

"Invested with a rare belief in literature's importance, his enigmatic stories encompass deep feeling and extreme violence" (Guardian)

"Strenth, humour and brilliancecharacterise the work of Roberto Bolano...[and] the absolute masterpieces that are Distant Star and By Night in Chile" (Jorge Volpi)

"Bolano's language, alert and always graceful, his way of constructing narratives that are simultaneously disconcerting, brilliant and infinitely immediate, is a form of resisting evil, adversity and mediocrity" (Le Monde)

An unnamed narrator attempts to piece together the life and works of an enigmatic would-be poet turned military assassin during Pinochet's regime in Chile. In the early 1970s Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was a little-known poet living in southern Chile. After the military coup of 1973 that brought in the dictatorship of General Pinochet, he embarked upon a new career that involved him in committing murder and other brutalities, and subsequently led to his emergence as a lieutenant in the Chilean air force under his actual name, Carlos Wieder.

Some time later the narrator, now held in a prison camp, looks up and sees a World War II airplane writing the first words of the Book of Genesis in smoke in the sky. The aviator is none other Carlos Wieder, launching his own version of the New Chilean Poetry...

Roberto Bolano's novel is a chilling investigation of the fascist mentality and the limits of evil, as seen in its effects on a literary sensibility, as well as a gripping intellectual thriller.