Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño is one of those books that is hard, so hard, to review.
Not because of the quality of the writing – it is without doubt a beautifully crafted work although ensemble piece might be a better word to describe it - but because the narrative just isn’t there.
Problems with the Publishers Blurb
Not helping matters is the publishers blurb. This Harvill Press edition speaks of a disturbing but fascinating subject; an enigmatic poet turned military assassin under the dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s. Potentially great stuff for great literature. Trouble is its not really there.
Yes the enigmatic poet and seducer of women Alberto Ruiz-Tagle does become a killer and under another name a member of the Chilean Air Force but the book only looks at that from the outside and in fragments.
Even then its with a great deal of doubt and uncertainty something that allows the reader to build their own expectations into the book in that way it has a kind of allure, a power almost.
Small City Poet Becomes Unpunished Killer
There is one jarring and very uncomfortable bit where Ruiz-Tagle, now Wieder, hosts a drinks party at an exhibition of his photos. Without any punishment or even irony the pictures are of the women he has killed but that is the one bit that has the reader stirring uncomfortably.
Balancing this and another fine bit of writing is the only uplifting bit in the book. It takes a staggering imagination and skill to do a realistic and credible account of a pilot ie Wieder writing the opening words of the Bible’s Book of Genesis in smoke over Concepcion in the early days of the 1973 coup. That it is written in Latin also speaks volumes.
Overintellectualised Parts
What is to be had around these two gripping scenes is alot of intellectual, make that over-intellectuallised, chatter and forensic work. One example the name Wieder is over- analysed.
It means again, somehow there is a sort of comment, maybe even an ironic one in there, but the discussion about it is too long, too obscure as is a similar discussion on Soviet Generals of World War Two.
Maybe there is a comment being made here? Maybe a telling criticism of the role the Chilean intelligentsia played in the rise of Allende and his fall as well as their acquiescence in the military dictatorship? If there is its all too obscure too far away like the actual story.
Maybe such was the lot of any intellectuals under Pinochet, irrelevance, a sense of wasted self importance and being totally peripheral to the action. As the narrator admits in a phrase that could be a metaphor for the book “In any case, by that time, Ruiz-Tagle had disappeared for good, and Wieder was all we had to give our wretched, empty days some meaning.”
Distant Star by Roberto Bolano published by the Harvill Press ISBN 97818434330940
