Written in the skies | Roberto Bolao
Roberto Bolaño This article is more than 19 years oldReviewWritten in the skies
This article is more than 19 years oldNick Caistor is intrigued as pilots and poets seek to make sense of Chile's turbulent past in Roberto Bolaño's Distant StarDistant Star
by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews
160pp, Harvill, £11.99
Turn up any stone in Chile, the writer Pablo Neruda used to say, and five poets will crawl out. The narrator of Distant Star is one of them: a young Chilean in the far south of the country, enamoured of poetry, political debate, and the two Garmendia sisters.
Unfortunately for him - and very soon, for them as well - the sisters only have eyes for another of the aspiring poets in their workshop, the aloof figure of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, a vaguely aristocratic youth who does not share the others' political beliefs or bohemian lifestyle.
The poetry workshops are taking place in Chile in 1973, just as the socialist president Salvador Allende is being overthrown and General Pinochet's brutal regime begins. In the vertiginous first chapter of Distant Star, we descend rapidly from the student world of literature and hopeless poetic passions to the ghastly realities of military repression and disappearances.
From that moment on, the narrator, like so many of his fellow countrymen, is a haunted man. He is picked up as a "terror ist suspect", and spends several months in a concentration camp. Although he is eventually released without charge, he finds he has been expelled from his university and has no chance of getting work in Pinochet's Chile. He then begins a wandering life in Europe that is forever defined by this historical moment.
As he wanders, he hears more of Ruiz-Tagle, who now calls himself Carlos Wieder and has re-invented himself as an officer in the Chilean airforce. He is continuing his poetic career, however, using the small planes he pilots to write messages in the skies over Chile, combining violent and patriotic slogans in a way reminiscent of the Italian Futurists.
This skywriting adds still further to the romantic reputation of the young officer, so that when he announces that he is holding a photographic exhibition in his apartment, influential figures from the armed forces and Chilean high society show up for the opening. What they discover is the opposite of what they had been expecting: instead of romantic, heroic images they are suddenly confronted with the horror that has been inflicted in their name in Chile.
The narrator meanwhile is still struggling to make ends meet and to make sense of what has happened to him and his generation through literature. His destiny is suddenly reconnected with that of Wieder when a Chilean private detective turns up at his home in Spain. The detective wants his help as a poet to track Wieder down - to see if he can use his hermeneutic skills to identify the airforce pilot's hand behind articles in various neo-fascist publications from several European countries.
He helps the detective, and between the two of them they track Wieder down to his hiding-place, also in Spain. The detective does what he has been hired to do, and the two men walk away into the night.
Until his untimely death last year, Roberto Bolaño was one of the most influential of a new generation of writers in Spanish. His own personal history mirrors that of the narrator: he left Chile in the 1970s, living first in Mexico and then in Europe. As in his previous novel Chile by Night, in this novel his approach to horror and the sense of guilt felt by those who survive it is full of irony and artifice, and it is this oblique, wry style which has appealed to many Hispanic writers unhappy with the lazy, indulgent fantasies of magical realism.
In the preface to Distant Star, Bolaño tells us that it is a development from the last chapter of one of his earlier books, his imaginary History of Nazi Literature in Latin America. There as here, the shadow of Jorge Luis Borges is obvious. But Bolaño is far less sure of himself and the unsullied values of writing than the great Argentine writer ever was. To Bolaño, the writer is in the "cesspool of literature" and inevitably loses his innocence just by "sharing the same boat" with evil.
This sense of unease means that Bolaño's narrative style is fragmented and loaded. It is also full of a strange kind of gallows humour, as we are swept along by stories that are invented and presented entirely convincingly, only to be suddenly brought up short by a reminder that this has not been done innocently. Baudelaire warned us long ago that reader and author are linked together in their complicity: if anyone kicks away the stone from Bolaño, he emerges fighting into the daylight.
· Nick Caistor is the translator of Juan Marse's Lizard Tails.
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