Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was once the quiet, unknowable, unpromising member of Chile’s young poetry scene.
But the military coup of 1973 sees Alberto reborn as Chile’s leading celebrity poet, Carlos Wieder. Known for his daring sky poems, penned in smoke high above the cities, Weider’s dazzling trajectory is a cause for astonishment and speculation amongst his old poetry friends. Where did this talent suddenly spring from? And, how is it connected to the disappearance of the beautiful Garmendia twins?
Told from across the years in exile in Europe, the narrator’s attempts to trace the fate of his old circle will lead him to one last confrontation with the brutality of their generation.
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS
‘Roberto Bolaño's universe – huge, interconnected, polyphonic – is formed from the collision of a wicked sense of humour and a vast and white-hot moral fire... His oeuvre is among the great, blistering literary achievements of the twentieth century’ Lauren Groff
‘For stunning wit, brutal honesty, loving humanity and a heart that bleeds into the simplest of words, no other writer ever came close’ Marlon James
About the Author
Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile in 1953 and died in Catalonia in 2003. He was widely regarded as the essential Latin American writer of our age. He was best known for his novels (including The Savage Detectives, which won a number of prestigious literary awards, Nocturno de Chile, translated as By Night in Chile, and 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award) and his short stories, first published in English in Last Evenings on Earth.
