DISTANT STAR
āBolaƱo has proven that literature can do anythingā Jonathan Lethem
ROBERTO BOLAĆO
EX LIBRIS
VINTAGE CLASSICS
ROBERTO BOLAĆO
Roberto BolaƱoĀ was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealism poetry movement. Described by theĀ New York TimesĀ as āthe most significant Latin American literary voice of his generationā, he was the author of over twenty works, including The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the RĆ³mulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998, andĀ 2666, which posthumously won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. BolaƱo died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty, just as his writing found global recognition.
Praise for r oberto b olaƱo
āBolaƱoās oeuvre is among the great, blistering literary achievements of the twentieth centuryā
Lauren Groff
āBolaƱo was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia . . . and his writing was always unparalleledā
Mariana Enriquez
āOne of the greatest and most distinctive voices in modern fictionā
The Times
āThe most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking worldā
Susan Sontag
āRoberto was one of a kind, a writer who worked without a net, who went all out, with no brakes, and in doing so created a new way to be a great Latin American writerā
New York Times
āThe triumphant posthumous entrance of Roberto BolaƱo into the English-language literary firmament has been one of the sensations of the decadeā
Sunday Times
āWe savour all he has written as every offering is a portal into the elaborate terrain of his geniusā
Patti Smith
āA supernova of creativity whose light is still arriving at our shoresā
New Yorker
āHis fiction was hallucinatory, haunting and experimentalā
Times Literary Supplement
āBolaƱo: that poĆØte maudit, irreverent and brilliant, who wrote many of the best stories and novels of his generationā
Samanta Schweblin
āBolaƱo mastered the alchemy of turning the trivial into the sublime, the everyday into adventure. BolaƱo is among the best at this diabolical skillā
Georgi Gospodinov
āBolaƱo offers a unique, multilayered and quirky perspective on contemporary lifeā
Daily Mail
āOne of the most respected and influential writers of his generation . . . At once funny and vaguely, pervasively, frighteningā
John Banville
āBolaƱoās work is a sprawling labyrinth of surprise, bold invention and images that will live with you foreverā
Chris Power
āAn acid-tongued, truth-telling, peripatetic genius, who lived all too briefly, wrote in a fever and did not go gentle into that good nightā
Washington Post
āFor stunning wit, brutal honesty, loving humanity and a heart that bleeds into the simplest of words, no other writer ever came closeā
Marlon James
āBolaƱoās books are volcanic, perilous, charged with infectious erotic energy and demonic lucidityā
BenjamĆn Labatut
āAn exemplary literary rebelā New York Review of Books
āBolaƱo is the writer who opened a new vein for twenty-firstcentury literature . . . Vivacious and weird and madly alive againā
Kevin Barry
āBolaƱoās uncontrollable storytelling pulsion, his savage way of using adjectives, his melancholic, almost tormented urban realism, changed the tone of a whole traditionā
Ćlvaro Enrigue
āWhen I read BolaƱo, I think: everything is possible againā
Nicole Krauss
āBolaƱo made each book more ambitious so that it will take us many years to come to terms with his vast achievementā
Colm TĆ³ibĆn
āBolaƱo continues to cast a spell, thanks to the wild metaphorical reach of his tumbling sentences, his implausibly encyclopaedic grasp of global affairs and the seductive sense that twentieth-century history is a nightmarish riddle to which only literature is the solutionā
Guardian
āLatin American letters (wherever it may reside) has never had a greater, more disturbing avenging angel than BolaƱoā
Junot DĆaz
āBolaƱo was a flat-out genius, one of the greatest writers of our timeā
Paul Auster
Novels
The Savage Detectives
2666
Nazi Literature in the Americas
The Skating Rink
The Third Reich
Woes of the True Policeman
The Spirit of Science Fiction
Novellas
By Night in Chile
Amulet
Antwerp
Monsieur Pain
A Little Lumpen Novelita
Cowboy Graves s tories
Last Evenings on Earth
The Insufferable Gaucho
The Return
Poetr Y
The Romantic Dogs
Tres
The Unknown University
ROBERTO BOLAĆO DISTANT STAR
tra N slate D fro M t H e s P a N is H b Y
Chris Andrews
Vintage Classics is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
This edition published in Vintage Classics in 2024 First published in Spain with the title Estrella distante by Editorial Anagrama in 1996 First published in Great Britain with the title Distant Star by Harvill Press in 2004
Copyright Ā© the heirs of Roberto BolaƱo and Editorial Anagrama 1996 Translation copyright Ā© Chris Andrews 2004
Roberto BolaƱo has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This edition was translated with the financial assistance of The Spanish DirecciĆ³n General del Libro y Bibliotecas, Ministerio de Cultura
penguin.co.uk/vintage-classics
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
The authorised representative in the EEA is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH68
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isb N 9781784879457
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For Victoria Ćvalos and Lautaro BolaƱo
āWhat star falls unseen?ā william faulkner
In the ļ¬ nal chapter of my novel Nazi Literature in the Americas I recounted, in less than twenty pages and perhaps too schematically, the story of Lieutenant Ramirez Hoffman of the Chilean Air Force, which I heard from a fellow Chilean, Arturo B., a veteran of Latin Americaās doomed revolutions, who tried to get himself killed in Africa. He was not satisļ¬ ed with my version. It was meant to counterbalance the preceding excursions into the literary grotesque, or perhaps to come as an anticlimax, and Arturo would have preferred a longer story that, rather than mirroring or exploding others, was, in itself, a mirror and an explosion. So we took that ļ¬ nal chapter and shut ourselves up for a month and a half in my house in Blanes, where, guided by his dreams and nightmares, we composed the present novel. My role was limited to preparing refreshments, consulting a few books, and discussing the reuse of numerous paragraphs with Arturo and the increasingly animated ghost of Pierre MĆ©nard.
I saw Carlos Wieder for the ļ¬ rst time in 1971, or perhaps in 1972, when Salvador Allende was President of Chile. At that stage Wieder was calling himself Alberto RuizTagle and occasionally attended Juan Steinās poetry workshop in ConcepciĆ³n, the so- called capital of the South. I canāt say I knew him well. I saw him once or twice a week at the workshop. He wasnāt particularly talkative. I was. Most of us there talked a lot, not just about poetry, but politics, travel (little did we know what our travels would be like), painting, architecture, photography, revolution and the armed struggle that would usher in a new life and a new era, so we thought, but which, for most of us, was like a dream, or rather the key that would open the door into a world of dreams, the only dreams worth living for. And even though we were vaguely aware that dreams often turn into nightmares, we didnāt let that bother us. Our ages ranged from seventeen to twenty-three (I was eighteen) and most of us were students in the Faculty of Literature, except the Garmendia sisters, who were studying
sociology and psychology, and Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, who, as he said at some point, was an autodidact. What this meant in Chile in the years before 1973 is in itself an interesting subject. But to tell the truth, he didnāt strike me as an autodidact. What I mean is: he didnāt look like one. In Chile, at the beginning of the seventies, autodidacts didnāt dress like Ruiz-Tagle. They were poor. True, he talked like an autodidact. I guess he talked the way we all do now, those of us who are still alive (he talked as if he were living inside a cloud), but I couldnāt believe, from the way he dressed, that he had never set foot in a university. I donāt mean he was a dandy āalthough, in his own way, he was ā or that he dressed in a particular style. His tastes were eclectic: sometimes he would turn up in a suit and tie; other days heād be wearing sports gear, and he wasnāt averse to jeans and T-shirts. But whatever he was wearing, it was always an expensive brand. In other words, Ruiz-Tagle was well dressed, and in those days, in Chile, autodidacts were too busy steering a course between lunacy and destitution to dress like that, or so I thought. He once said that his father or his grandfather used to have an estate near Puerto Montt. At the age of ļ¬ fteen he had decided, so he told us, or perhaps we heard it from Veronica Garmendia, to quit school and devote himself to working on the property and reading the books in his fatherās library. At Juan Steinās poetry workshop we all assumed he was a skilled horseman. I donāt know why, because