Estrella distante (1996), the fourth novel by Roberto Bolano, is presented as a re-reading and re-writing of the Chilean dictatorship and post-dictatorship at the time that focuses its interest on two main figures, the narrator, Arturo Belano and the murderer turned artist Carlos Wieder. Both figures sustain the narrative construction of a novel that, starting from the elaboration of a photographic record of a work, manifests or stresses the traditional notions about the artistic and ethically questions its procedures. The impossibility of the ekphrasis or vivid description of the plastic stimulus seems to emphasize the horror of the works, sustained at times around a voice that functions as a censoring entity and, on the other, as a curatorial voice that highlights the macabre photographic records made by the artist / murderer.