Roberto Bolano

Let us not forget those writers whose voices are silenced because they live under repressive regimes or are in prison for their writings. I say this up front, because Salman Rushdie made the same statement up front last night at PEN’s “Readings from Around the World” at the 92Y on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. As if to drive the point home, an empty chair graced the stage, in honor of those writers whose voices go unheard around the globe. An empty chair will be present at all PEN World Voices Festival events this year.

A “true masterpiece” said Vanguardia about this novel. It must be the case that Vanguardia doesn’t get out to the bookstores that often, because for me Distant Star is consistently less than stellar. It is not an entire disaster: the story is book-ended by twenty exciting pages on either side. But for the most part, the middle of the book sagged under its own boring weight. Many of the sentences just zipped past my eyes, like cockroaches skittering across dirty floors. I know what I saw, but couldn’t tell you what I read.