Even though I had only read 4 of his books (now 5), I thought of myself as someone who had read "a lot" of Bolaño, so I was a little alarmed yesterday -- after I finished Distant Star -- to find that I had 7 books of his on my shelves that I have not read, and these don't include his latest book that just came out in February and at least a couple others. I read his two big books first, The Savage Detectives in 2009 and 2666 a couple years later. I adored them both. I guess because so many of the others are slim volumes, I thought what I had read was the bulk of it and what remained were minor works. (Yes, I am aware of my own bias toward tomes thank you.) Later, when I was in a short-story-reading phase, I read Last Evenings on Earth. Later still, immediately after finishing José Donoso's Curfew, I read By Night in Chile, which absolutely stunned me (definitely not a minor work!), but which melds a bit with Curfew in my memory. The books are actually good complements: the main events in By Night in Chile take place roughly a decade before the main events of Curfew, and there is a sort of salon of intellectuals in the former who could easily be characters in the latter (assuming they survived the first decade of the Pinochet regime), but having read them in quick succession occasionally makes it hard for me to distinguish them.
Distant Star too reminded me of these books, though it also reminded me a little of Donoso's The Garden Next Door, about a Chilean ex-pat who lives outside Barcelona. The Garden Next Door was the book that really opened my eyes to the Latin American diaspora in Europe, people who fled the totalitarian regimes in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, among others. If I had been a closer reader of Savage Detectives, I would have seen it there too; it's just more explicitly explained in The Garden Next Door. When I was in Barcelona in 2014, I stopped for a glass of wine at a small bar in El Born and met a woman there from Argentina, who told me the whole neighborhood used to be full of Argentinians. It was a whole wave of migration that I'd never been aware of. (And I find it very interesting that so many people left the dictatorships of Latin America to settle in Franco's Spain, though I guess he died right around that time.)
But the book Distant Star reminded me of most was Savage Detectives. The young people mixing poetry and revolution. (Or the idea of revolution.) The beautiful sisters. The idea of a new poetry for the future. The events (and locations) of the books are different, but the themes overlap quite a bit. Of course, I haven't yet read Nazi Literature in the Americas, which is explicitly referenced in Distant Star. Reading Bolaño can feel like piecing together a story the way his characters often do.
