The same bookish friend with opinions about Aslı Erdoğan and Tezer Özlü was so enchanted with Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that she picked his much shorter Distant Star for the online book club she started this year. I opted for the Swedish translation by Lena E. Heyman because if I’m reading a translation anyway, why not boost my Swedish numbers for the year?
This is a short novel that retreads (and is maybe even literally the same text?) as Bolaño’s earlier Nazi Literature in the Americas. An unnamed narrator, who is understood to be Arturo Bolaño from Nazi Literature working together with a metafictional Roberto Bolaño, relates the story of skywriting poet and serial killer Carlos Wieder, alias Alberto Ruiz-Tagle. After making an initial splash in the years of Pinochet’s rule, Wieder vanishes into thin air.
Or so it seems.
Decades later, the unnamed narrator (now residing in Europe) is contacted by a Chilean detective on the hunt for Wieder. Hired by a very wealthy client who believes that Wieder is still alive, the detective in turn wants to hire the narrator to comb through a bizarre international collection of genre fiction magazines. The detective is convinced that Wieder has submitted work to at least some of them, but needs the narrator’s poetic and aesthetic sensibilities to more specifically hunt him down. The story ends with the narrator positively identifying Wieder in person at a café, after which point the detective pays a visit to Wieder at home to (it is understood) murder him.
Distant Star met mixed reviews in our book club. Despite being only novella in length, it’s full of long asides that are completely irrelevant to the primary story: German vocabulary, Paralympics mascots, Soviet generals, fictional (?) Chilean revolutionaries and literary movements. The ending is inconclusive; we never find out who this wealthy client is or why they want Wieder dead.
I probably liked it the best out of everyone, but that was maybe because I’m so busy with other things right now I didn’t have the focus or mental processing power left over to even try to make sense of anything. Something about the narrator’s journey through the zines and his attempt to hunt down Wieder by way of his publications also reminded me of Foucault’s Pendulum, a book that will always inspire warm and fuzzy feelings in me.
I also finished Avlägsen stjärna a week ago at the time of writing (this entry is backdated because I’m fussy). That kind of delay is not ideal for writing a more thoughtful review, but such is life.
