Distant Star

“[One] of his best.” —Daniel Zalewski, The New Yorker

“A masterpiece.” —Los Angeles Times

The year is 1971, or perhaps 1972, in Salvador Allende’s Chile. Arturo B. is just one of a motley crew of young bohemians attending Juan Stein’s poetry workshop at the University of Concepción when a mysterious newcomer by the name of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle arrives. Though Alberto’s taciturn manner, patrician airs, and cold, distant poetry confound the group, he catches the attention of Veronica and Angelica Garmendia, the twin stars of the workshop. When Chile’s government is toppled and replaced by a brutal military dictatorship, many of the young poets—among them, the Garmendia sisters—disappear, and Arturo is horrified to learn that Alberto, now revealed to be Carlos Wieder, an air force pilot and a darling of the new regime, may have something to do with it. Wieder’s great ambition is to revolutionize Chilean poetry—to mythologize the new order in a spectacle of verse—and he takes to performing his poems in the skies above the Andes, using the sky as his paper and an old Nazi aircraft as his pen. But when Wieder takes his radical art a step too far, he, too, disappears without a trace. Decades later, Arturo, living in exile in Europe, and still preoccupied by the fates of his old classmates, is presented with an opportunity to track Wieder down—a journey that will lead him to one last encounter with the violence of their generation. A detective novel, a horror story, and a tragicomedy of global proportions, Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star is a haunting tale about the grotesque collisions of high art and politics, of idealism and brutality, and of hopes and reality.

With a new introduction by Ben Lerner.