Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean writer born in Buenos Aires in 1942. His widely translated plays (“Purgatory” or “Death and the Maiden”, filmed by Roman Polanski) have been performed in more than 100 countries. As a novelist, Allegro, Konfidenden and Apparitions stand out. In the last months of 1973 he was Press and Cultural Adviser to the Secretary General of the Government.
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Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean writer born in Buenos Aires in 1942. His widely translated plays (“Purgatory” or “Death and the Maiden”, filmed by Roman Polanski) have been performed in more than 100 countries. As a novelist, Allegro, Konfidenden and Apparitions stand out. In 1973, during Salvador Allende’s final months as Chilean president, he was press and cultural advisor to the secretary general of the government.
“Allende and the Suicide Museum” has its author as a character as well as his family on the board. In front of him stands a millionaire, Joseph Hortha, who has the idea of setting up a suicide museum, but – for him – missed the jewel in the crown: the suicide of Salvador Allende in the attack on the Moneda Palace on September 11, 1973. He gets involved Dorfman as a disguised reporter, detective and double spy to find out whether Salvador Allende died from coup bullets or his own. At the time, this circumstance, about which there is still controversy – despite the current evidence that allows us to know what happened – was the subject of partisan representations by some and others, which gave his death an extraordinary political and symbolic dimension .
The plot with Salvador Allende as a pretext and purpose, the guilt that chance created between Allende and him, make Dorfman’s literary journey a delicate subject in a certain way, but one that can be endured without fear. There are more flammable materials. The crucial problem right from the start is that the novelistic device barely gets off the ground in “Allende and the Suicide Museum.” Its author decides to offer us a fiction with many ingredients from other genres that the novel easily absorbs – theatrical scenes, monologues, interviews, testimonies, investigations, autofiction – but the colors of these paintings reach us in pieces, without mixing. More than a book for readers, it seems to be a letter to his loved ones (family, friends, compatriots, comrades…), a faith in life and testimony, a testament in which he speaks and settles important questions for him wanted to, but we, the anonymous readers, forgot so much that we had to buy the trick.
The artificiality of the figure of the millionaire and his mission for the museum, as well as the characterization of the characters closest to him – masks that are no longer visible – torment us by making the truthfulness of the reading difficult. To learn the truth about Salvador Allende’s last minutes, one did not need all this equipment – the museum, the millionaire, his tortured and troubled past, his dead mothers – nor a narrator trying to pass off as a novel what is not a novel, but spoken statement of the author.
With a lot less and more willingness to play, Ariel Dorfman’s talent would have solved the puzzle and with a better hand. An example: In the novel he explains that he was not with Allende on the day of the attack because he had swapped work shifts with a colleague because of a domestic matter. He was saved, he was able to live a life in exile with his wife and children, his companion died, leaving a widow and orphans. Coincidence and guilt. And like this anecdote, there are many others at the various crossroads of the novel. But Dorfman decides, as a man, to set the record straight and not bother us as a writer with the already current truth of lies.
Ariel Dorfman
Gutenberg Galaxy, 2023
576 pages. 22 euros
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