His destiny is eventually reconnected with that of Ruiz-Tagle/Wieder when a Chilean private detective seeks his help in tracking Wieder down[2] by trying to identify the air force pilot's hand behind various articles printed in neo-fascist publications.

As stated in its introduction, Distant Star is an expansion of the final chapter of Bolaño's later work, Nazi Literature in the Americas,[3] an encyclopedic novel composed of short biographies of imaginary Pan-American authors on the political right.

In the expansion of the text, some of the characters' names remained unchanged (e.g. the narrator's fellow prisoner Norberto and the detective Abel Ramirez) but for most of the main characters, the names were altered: In spite of the differences between the texts, Bolaño places them within the same fictional world, claiming that the story was narrated to him by Arturo B. in Nazi Literature in the Americas, but Arturo was displeased with the outcome: "So we took that final chapter and shut ourselves up for a month and a half in my house in Blanes, where, guided by his dreams and nightmares, we composed the present novel.

"[4]Nick Caistor, for The Guardian, said, of the book's historical backdrop of "evil", namely its origination from Nazi Literature in the Americas, lends a strange feeling to the novel: "This sense of unease means that Bolaño's narrative style is fragmented and loaded.

"[5] Glen Helfand, in SFGate, said that the novel's characters, who exist in a "specific literary milieu", may be hard to follow, especially with Bolaño's imagined combinations of fact and fiction: "In their brief appearances, these Chileans embody themes of disappearance, loss, murder, exile and occasionally personal triumph.