Join us to discuss Roberto Bolaño's 1996 novel Distant Star.
The "star" of Roberto Bolaño's hair-raising Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, 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.
Our unnamed narrator first encounters him in a college poetry workshop (where Ruiz-Tagle only has eyes for the beautiful Garmendia twins, Veronica and Angelica: unfortunately for them).
The next sighting comes as the narrator stands in a prison camp for political undesirables, gazing up at a WWil Messerschmitt sky-writing over the Andes. The aviator is none other than Ruiz-Tagle, now serving in the Chilean air force under his actual name, Carlos Wieder.
Behind any evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime, our narrator, more and more obsessed, suspects Wieder's silent hand.
For most of his early adulthood, Roberto Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France and Spain.
Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, working as a dishwasher, a campground custodian, bellhop and garbage collector- working during the day and writing at night. He continued with his poetry, before shifting to fiction in his early forties.
