Roberto Bolano's Distant Star is pitch perfect

PASADENA, U.S.A. -- Roberto Bolano's darkly humorous novel, Distant Star, is a chilling homily to the vile excesses of the Pinochet regime in Chile and the demented fascist aesthetics of a particular pilot/poet of German extraction. Mr. Bolano's prose smokes off the page and the reader is left with the exclamation that art matters; art has consequences. He also more than hints that the creative process is far from a placid undertaking and can lead in dangerous directions.

Distant Star is written in a hard boiled style that follows in the footsteps of the classic noir writers and (as another reviewer noted) post-modern noir-ish writer Paul Auster.

The horrors of the disappeared and the torture warehouses struck down a generation of Chile's youth. Mr. Bolano will not let us forget. This short, pithy novel will keep one thinking about its many layers for a long time to come; it is also clear that a reader will never view the "art" of sky writing in the same way again.

The dust settles in Iraq to US benefit

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- In the span of a few hours, the symbolism of the U.S. occupation in Iraq has taken a wide turn for open waters as American ground forces turned over security in the Green Zone to Iraqi troops. Further south, the British turned over control of Basra International Airport to civilian Iraqi authorities. These two events are emblematic of the sea change in the broken country and, hopefully, the ceremonies and a host of other developments in the domestic situation will allow the Iraqis to take control of their society and allow U.S. forces to come home.

The pacification of Iraqi society should not be seen as a vindication of President Bush's mendacious imperial adventure but as a wider movement by the foreign policy elite away from Utopian and unrealistic ideologies and towards a new pragmatism. President-elect Obama should continue drawing down U.S. forces and cauterize the deep economic and human wounds wrought by the previous Administration.

Not withstanding the call by some progressives to abandon our commitment to Afghanistan, The Schadenfreude Post believes that we should stabilize the region to prevent the ungovernable regions of eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan from further deteriorating. While cleaning up the Indian sub-continent mess, President Obama needs to boldly address the Palestine issue and lessen U.S. dependence on Middle East oil.

America looks weak now but the steps being carried out will allow us to step back from the precipice.