Death and maiden panty gag9/8/2023 ![]() Dorfman was arrested and deported, however, so his wife Angélica prudently advised him to stay out of Chile until the political landscape became more inviting. After 10 years of exile he returned to Chile, which had progressed in terms of democracy, justice and human rights. “There are men in rooms who I know nothing about,” Dorfman begins, but “with a pen-stroke or piece of intelligence” they forced him into exile.Īccording to Dorfman it’s a great luxury to be permitted to choose where and how you live because, when you least expect it, “history intervenes”. The Dorfman family has, over the past century, repeatedly escaped from the wars and antisemitic pogroms of Europe, but the New World has been just as problematic. ![]() It’s nearly impossible to speak with him and not address travel, exile, otherness. ![]() Like Fitzroy Foster, Dorfman is a wanderer. Photograph: Sutton-Hibbert / Rex Features It’s a thriller, mystery, ghost story and sea adventure that sits easily within his collected works but which is also a departure in style and scope.Īriel Dorfman in 2003. Dorfman succeeds in this, but the novel is much more than a Kafkaesque meditation. He was hoping to capture and evoke the haunted, claustrophobic atmosphere of Kafka, the anxiety between the mundane and ethereal worlds. Dorfman describes Darwin’s Ghosts as a work about “people transiting from one state to another”. This changes Foster, of course, in ways that can never be undone. Foster is a representative American – young, naive, cosseted – forced to encounter the hardships that Dorfman, and his countrymen, have experienced. The boy, and his sweetheart Cam, set off on a 10-year voyage, like Odysseus, to find this man, discover who he is, and what can be done about the crimes, the guilt, the ghosts of the past.ĭorfman sees himself as “a bridge between cultures”. The man and his people, Foster eventually discovers, are victims of a horrible brutality. It’s a man, one who’s traveled great distances. In the background, there’s a murky image, an apparition. His father takes a Polaroid to commemorate the event. The action begins on 11 September 1981, two decades before this date identified itself as 9/11 (and eight years to the day after Pinochet’s coup). His new book Darwin’s Ghosts, like most of Dorfman’s work, explores the dynamics of power, identity and empire. The site, just up the street from the Chilean embassy, is nearly visible from the hotel. He discusses the car bomb, planted by Pinochet’s secret service in September 1976, that killed Orlando Letelier, the Chilean defense minister. “Embassy Row has a very special resonance for Chileans,” Dorfman begins. This becomes apparent from the outset when he looks out a window of the hotel cafe, pointing north-west up Massachusetts Avenue. Today, he’s a celebrated writer who splits his time between the US and – because democracy has been restored – Chile.ĭespite his amiability and lightness, Dorfman is also a man of gravity and high seriousness. Roman Polanski’s 1994 film Death and the Maiden, with Ben Kingsley and Sigourney Weaver, based on Dorfman’s play, catapulted the writer to fame. These are only a few brief highlights of his dramatic life. He lived in Paris, Holland and later returned to the US. After Gen Pinochet’s coup in 1973, Dorfman was exiled. ![]() ![]() He returned to Chile after graduation and, in the early 70s, worked as a cultural adviser to Salvador Allende, the president. Dorfman became a Chilean citizen in his 20s, but attended graduate school in the US, at Berkeley. ![]()
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