Roberto Bola\u00f1o’s novel is really interesting because of the way that he treats the main character of the novel, Alberto Ruiz-Tagle\/Carlos Wieder. While the events of the story are obviously meant as symbols for the subversive, seductive and destructive actions of Carlos Wieder and the Chilean military dictatorship, Bola\u00f1o never tries to lay it on the reader that Wieder and his supporters are incredibly bad, he leaves it up to us to reach that conclusion. One of the reasons why I use the word ‘seductive’ in describing Wieder, is because of the way that Wieder portrays his outward persona to the public. As Ruiz-Tagle, Wieder is popular, intelligent and finely dressed, probably personifying everything that Arturo, Bibiano and most Chilean poets of the 20th century wished they were. As Carlos Wieder, our protagonist is still popular, intelligent, and finely dressed, but his secretly cruel and sadistic side is celebrated and rewarded by the new regime. What I think was the main ‘moral’, that Bola\u00f1o tried to get across was that, instead of dictatorships creating horrible people, it is horrible people who create dictatorships, even if their cruelty is not obvious.<\/p>\n
To me Roberto Bola\u00f1o added various themes of how individuals react and act in the world and society that they live in. The themes that I identified in Distant Star\u00a0<\/em>are, grief, friendship, social amnesia, love, familial relationships, art and passion. But if I was asked what broad theme Distant Star\u00a0<\/em>is about, I would say that the story is about memory overall, and how we choose to interpret the events of the past retrospectively. An example of social and individual memory are, the Messerschmitt 109 that Wieder flies over the prison and the portrait of Ivan Chernyakhovsky kept by Juan Stein, what I think that Roberto Bola\u00f1o wanted to show with these, is that the effects of the Second World War and its fascist\/communist divide and collective trauma still impacted the Chile of the 1970s in a lot of ways.<\/p>\n Overall, I enjoyed Roberto Bola\u00f1o’s novel, partially because I like reading and watching media about manipulative villains, because they make for good detective stories or psychological thrillers and I just find them personally intriguing. But I also appreciated the way that Roberto Bola\u00f1o tried to use his novel as a way to remember the people who were disappeared during Pinochet’s rule, and the struggle against tyranny and oppression and how art can be used to support or dismantle these regimes.<\/p>\n My discussion question for this reading is: How did you interpret the character of Carlos Wieder, were you disappointed that we never know his final fate in the novel?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Roberto Bola\u00f1o’s novel is really interesting because of the way that he treats the main character of the novel, Alberto Ruiz-Tagle\/Carlos Wieder. While the events of the story are obviously meant as symbols for the subversive, seductive and destructive actions of Carlos Wieder and the Chilean military dictatorship, Bola\u00f1o never tries to lay it on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86902,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,33,34,2,35,13],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-art","tag-chile","tag-fascism","tag-memory","tag-morals-and-ethics","tag-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86902"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions\/45"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}