Art and Its Consequences under Dictatorship

Richard Cho offers another Good Read for Sheltering in Place.

Click to read more about Distant Star by Roberto Bolano

Since his untimely death at the age of fifty in 2003, Roberto Bolano has garnered worldwide literary acclaim, especially following the publication of his posthumous, encyclopedic, monstrously imagined, 900 page-long magnum opus titled "2666." There seems to be a general consensus that since Gabriel Garcia Marquez, only Bolano has incurred the similar scale of tectonic shift in Latin American literary landscape. This era of quarantine is better time than ever to tackle some long novels we never had time for, yet I would like to recommend "Distant Star" first, a novel less than 150 pages long, an ideal primer to Bolano's oeuvre.

To borrow the author's words on the novel, "Distant Star" delves into the nature of evil. The plot circumnavigates around the avant-garde poet Carlos Wieder, who attains renown during the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, the poet who represents the new Chile under Pinochet. His trademark poetic act is "sky-writing": he writes verses on sky while flying a plane. An unnamed narrator tells the story of various characters, all literature enthusiasts, all either fleeing Chile or staying despite the political unrest, all who have met Wieder at one time or another. Under the worst conditions imaginable, they struggle toward what they presume to be their destiny. The narrator's best friend Bibiano O'Ryan, while scavenging in the recesses of libraries for literary output left by Wieder, meets another researcher who interprets evil as thus: "In his personal theology, hell was a framework or chain of coincidences. He explained serial killings as "explosions of chance." He explained the death of the innocent (and everything our minds refuse to accept) as the expression of chance set free. Fortune and Luck, he said, are the names of the devil's house."

The narrator is only eighteen when the novel begins, and near the end, he is well into his middle age when one day, he receives a visit from an ex-cop who was hired to murder Carlos Wieder. Like any great work of literature, "Distant Star" resists the summary of its merits. Ultimately, it is about the ineffable workings of life. Although the novel incorporates a number of post-modern motifs (e.g. narrator's digressive tendency, hefty intertextuality, and penchant for enumerating seemingly superficial details), it is accessible and utterly captivating due to the power of the narrator's voice. Bolano addiction will take hold after this novel.

Link to the ebook

Richard M. Cho is research librarian for Humanities and Literature at UC Irvine and contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books