El delirante y perturbador misterio de un impostor El narrador vio por primera vez a aquel hombre en 1971 o 1972, cuando Allende era a n Presidente de Chile. Escrib a poemas distantes y cautelosos, seduc a a las mujeres y despertaba en los hombres una indefinible desconfianza. Volvi a verlo despu s del golpe, pero en ese momento ignoraba que aquel aviador, que escrib a vers culos de la Biblia con el humo de un avi n de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y el poeta, eran uno, y el mismo. Y as nos es contada la historia de un impostor, de un hombre de muchos nombres, sin otra moral que la est tica, dandy del horror, asesino y fot grafo del miedo, artista b rbaro que llevaba sus creaciones hasta sus ltimas y letales consecuencias. Novela clave en la obra de Roberto Bola o, Estrella Distante es, adem s de un apasionante thriller intelectual, una escalofriante investigaci n sobre la mentalidad fascista y sus efectos en la sensibilidad literaria.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTIONA chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship.

The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot 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. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this star in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime. The narrator, unable to stop himself, tries to track Ruiz-Tagle down, and sees signs of his activity over and over again. A corrosive, mocking humor sparkles within Bolano's darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolano's world there's a big graveyard and there's a big graveyard laugh. (He once described his novel By Night in Chile as a tale of terror, a situation comedy, and a combination pastoral-gothic novel.) Many Chilean authors have written about the bloody events of the early Pinochet years, the abductions and murders, Richard Eder commented in the The New York Times: None has done it in so dark and glittering a fashion as Roberto Bolano.