In its synecdochic mapping of two rival poetry scenes run by the Chilean poets Juan Stein and Diego Soto in the two years between Salvador Allende’s election and Augusto Pinochet’s September 11, 1973 coup, and its story of the rise and fall over the next two decades of the enigmatic avant-garde poet Carlos Wieder, Bolaño’s 1996 Distant Star continues and deepens his investment in the novel as a form for exploring poetry and politics, history and literary history, by other means (“de otra manera”). Characterized by Marta Posadas, a medical student and aspiring Marxist critic who writes prose poems, as the poet who will “revolutionize Chilean poetry,” Wieder is the central figure of a novel of poetic apprenticeship at once national and transnational, aesthetic and political, focusing on the choices aspiring poets of Bolaño’s generation faced from their late teens through their early forties. In the transatlantic arc of the novel’s final three chapters, which takes the detective Abel Romero’s search for Wieder from Chile to Spain, Bolaño figures both the ambivalence of his attraction to detective fiction at the expense of a more exclusive orientation toward poetry, and the irresistible pull of his work in that direction.