distant star [w. bolaño]

If your themes are poetry; fascism and Chile it's hard to imagine coming up with a better conceit to wed the three than a sky writing poet from Pinochet's airforce. Carlos Wieder is as evil and complex an anti-hero as they come. His charisma shines through in spite of Bolaño's antipathy to his position. He comes across as an enigmatic genius. It is only when what he writes in the sky is revealed that the banality and lack of originality underpinning his mystique is revealed.

Bolaño's text is brief, corrosive, shines itself like the heavens above a cold Chilean night. Each page contains little gems that sparkle: the alt-German etymology of Wieder's name; or the performance art of Wieder's catastrophic 'exhibition'. As ever in Bolaño's work there's the pleasure taken from the pleasure taken by the author as he concocts his tales. Distant Star uses the format of The Savage Detectives - a detective story where two friends hunt down a lost poet. The blending of discursive fable, sharp characterisation and detective novel is as effective as ever, spun around the image of the fascist poet, lost in his isolation.

Distant Star is a minor masterpiece. It is the fourth novel of Bolaño's I've read this year, and I still await the translation of 2066. The slimmer volumes feel like prose poems. A narrator wends thoughts around his or her theme. The novels exist as much for their digressions as their narrative. The introduction claims this text is amplified from a short story in a previous volume, Nazi Literature in America, and, as with all Bolaño's smaller works, it feels as though this too could be amplified into something more extravagant. If it were not for The Savage Detectives and (I assume) 2066, the feeling might have persisted that Bolaño was almost as much of a dilettante as some of his anti-heroes: a great talent that never quite flowered. As it is, the longer novels did get written, and Distant Star shines as a highly enjoyable crystallisation of Bolaño's talent - a talent as transparent as Wieder's sky-writing, but coupled with depth and durability and a humanity the book's anti-hero so palpably lacks.

This text would be the best introduction to the writer's work I have so far read.