In September, Argentine-Chilean novelist Ariel Dorfman released his latest novel, The Suicide Museum (Other Press)—one that has been fifty years in the making. In the narrative, we follow the author’s eponymous alter ego, who is sent by a man named Joseph Hortha to uncover the truth behind the death of socialist president Salvador Allende. Was it murder or suicide?
Fifty years ago, on September 11, 1973, the Chilean Armed Forces, led by Augusto Pinochet and with the support of Richard Nixon, the US government, and the CIA, launched a military coup against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. The coup targeted Palacio La Moneda, resulting in the death of President Allende and the dawn of a military dictatorship led by Pinochet, which lasted until 1990; during Pinochet’s rule, approximately three thousand people were killed, and one thousand more are still missing. Dorfman offers a unique perspective to these events; in 1973, he (and “Ariel”) served as cultural advisor to Allende. He was supposed to be with Allende in La Moneda on September 11, 1973, but switched places with a colleague at the last minute. So, the author survived—unlike many of his friends and colleagues.
Set in 1990, “Ariel’s” search occurs twenty-one years before Allende’s body was exhumed a second time, and a judge “with impeccable credentials,” according to Dorfman, finally determined his cause of death. Juxtaposed by this reality, The Suicide Museum is a political thriller, a historical fiction novel, and a murder mystery.
In the fallout of this turmoil, Dorfman has spent most of his life living in exile. Even after democracy returned to Chile, he’s remained abroad, returning only occasionally. We see and feel that distance and familiarity in The Suicide Museum; we feel “Ariel’s” nostalgia and survivor’s guilt, his shame and regrets, his courage and his dreams, and through that emotional journey, we also see Allende’s first exhumation, we feel the effects of the dictatorship, we see the end of that dictatorship, we get a glimpse of “Ariel’s” creative process, and we see how life rapidly changed for Chileans after the coup, through flashbacks.
“Ariel” and Joseph Hortha ruminate on life, death, suicide, socialism, capitalism, climate change, Latin America. Like a pair of boxers, these two friends, allies, adversaries, confidants, challenge each other, interject each other, insult, comfort, and—sometimes—agree. After claiming that Allende saved his life, Hortha now wants to know if Allende committed suicide. “Ariel,” then, must go to New York, London, Chile. He must talk to the people, to Allende’s gravedigger, to rivals and sympathizers. He must talk to Patricio Guijón, Allende’s doctor, who was next door at the time of Allende’s death. He must talk to Adrián Balmaceda, Allende’s bodyguard, and the last person to see him alive, to determine the presidente’s cause of death.
Ariel Dorfman remains a towering figure in Latin American and World literature. He’s the author of books such as How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, Death and The Maiden, and Heading South, Looking North. In this interview, we talked about his latest novel, but also about autofiction, inspiration, survivor’s guilt, his relationship with English and Spanish, living in exile, how Latin America is brothered through exile, the future of Chile, and what he remembers of that September 11, fifty years ago.
José García Escobar (JGE): I wanted to talk first about the blend between fact and fiction in The Suicide Museum. In Michael Chabon’s Moonglow, we can find a type of disclaimer at the beginning of the novel: “In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it.” The book is marketed as a “novel,” and that word appears on the cover, but much like Chabon, the characters in this “novel”—particularly Ariel—call it a “memoir.” How did you handle this distinction?
Ariel Dorfman (AD): When I first realized that the only way—at least for me—to narrate this quest (the search for the truth about Salvador Allende’s death on September 11, 1973), was to send my own self—really, an alter ego—to Chile, I did so with both joy and trepidation. Trepidation, because it was risky to use my own life, sticking to as many details of that life as possible (my wife, my children, my friends, my return to my country in 1990), and to simultaneously treat all of it fictionally and invent many scenes and characters (including how I present myself) within the straitjacket of a pre-existent chronological order. And joy because I was able to explode the limits of the genre, particularly what is called “autofiction.”
I very much admire Michael Chabon, but would dare to suggest that, in fact, I go further than he does. I call it a “memoir,” of course, because that is part of the game I’m playing: that the speaker is writing what veritably happened. But he is, as you well know, an inveterate liar and often unreliable. And remember that within the novel itself, Ariel (the narrator) tells his Maecenas, Joseph Hortha, that he, “Ariel,” could never write a novel where he was the protagonist; this, in the very novel that we are reading.
The point is that readers should never know if the event being narrated (for instance, my standing outside the US Embassy in Santiago not wanting to enter because I was uncomfortable meeting a CIA agent) is true or false. And this delicate uncertainty feeds into the fact that the past itself is difficult to disinter completely, that it depends on the contingency and perspective of who is remembering it. In other words, this generic ambiguity resonates with the difficulties of discovering whether Allende committed suicide or was murdered. The past, like the novel, is slippering, swerving this and that way.
JGE: Now I feel more comfortable directing questions as if Ariel, the author, and Ariel, the character, are the same—even if they’re not. So, in that spirit, did you, despite the agreement you made with Hortha not to write about the events depicted in The Suicide Museum for thirty years, know that you were eventually going to write about them? On page 669, you write that the recent “popular revolt,” the 2019-2020 protests, “moved you to write this memoir,” but was it always in your head?
AD: I think it helps to call the narrator Ariel and the author Dorfman, as the reviewer in the New York Times did, because we are, in fact, quite different, despite sharing so much (we even sleep with the same wife—talk about literary adultery!).
Now, as to the idea of writing about Allende’s death. That had been churning around in my head for many decades, and it certainly helped that I came upon a way to tell the story precisely when Allende’s words and images were reappearing on the streets of Chile. That this should coincide with my promise (in the novel, and maybe in reality) to Hortha that three decades should pass before I inserted him in my fiction—well, that made sense. Though, I would be suspicious if I were a reader, as that deadline seems far too convenient and self-serving to “Ariel.”
JGE: Perhaps that “convenience” is part of what you said about the limits of the genre. However, in an recent interview, you said: “In the weeks before the coup, I was too busy to write anything of the sort, and after the coup, I was in hiding, just trying to survive. But memory was raging inside me and so many others.” In another interview, with Amy Goodman for Democracy Now!, you talk about how you believe you were “spared” because you were meant to tell the story of that day. I like to think that the time was just right. For you. For Chile. Can you explain the relationship between your “raging memory” then, in 1973, and the act of writing this novel in 2020? How did you build a bridge between the two?
AD: The memory has been raging since the coup, but its fury has seemed to attenuate with time as I age. The current novel is written from a place of serenity, perhaps melancholy, perhaps wisdom, even while often animated by indignation. But I needed distance—geographic distance and distance in years that have passed—from the events, to allow them freedom from the constraints of history.
Or maybe I should say that I needed those almost fifty years to transpire because they were years of learning and experimentation; I had to write many other texts before this one could be conceived. For one example, in Death and the Maiden, I take a real historical tragedy (the coexistence of perpetrators and victims in the same country)—which is more tragic because there is no justice—and I imagine a situation that never happened but could happen, or should have happened, or might still happen: a woman judging the man whom she thinks tortured and raped her during the dictatorship. This taught me that it was possible to play with an alternate history while remaining true to pain and resistance.
I’ve now taken that strategy to delirious extremes in my new novel. I was also influenced by the work of contemporary Latin American writers, like Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Héctor Abad, or Tomás Eloy Martínez, and from my reading of Javier Cercas. Without their explorations, I would not have ventured into the areas I did by repurposing one’s own person in a fictional context.
JGE: And yet, you have written about the coup before. Most notably in Heading South, Looking North. How was the experience of writing about the coup then different from now, with The Suicide Museum?
AD: All the non-fiction I have written about the coup, and also about my return to Chile in Feeding on Dreams, as well as books about Pinochet like Exorcising Terror, and the execution of a friend in the North of Chile a week after the coup such as in Desert Memories, were absolutely real in every detail, even if—with thanks to Capote and Mailer—I treat them with literary and stylistic flourishes. They may read as if they were fictional because my experiences have been so improbable, often unbelievable, but there is not one event in those memoirs that I invented.
But to tell the story of Allende and link it to the potential suicide of our species, I needed the freedom that unverifiable fiction offers, to allow the characters—even the ones who carry the names of my family and friends and rivals—to swerve into experiences that they might not have had in historical reality, but that they could have, given who they are. So, my friend Queno is, in effect, a walking encyclopedia, and was an archivist of human rights abuses, which made him an excellent ally to gather information for “Ariel.” And my friend Pepe was, indeed, a major factor in Chile’s Truth Commission and used to play a wicked game of chess. But whether things with him transpired exactly the way I describe them, that is not something this Dorfman, as author, will ever reveal.
JGE: In the previous question, you said, “fury has seemed to attenuate with time, as I age.” As a reader, that’s evident. But I think that one element has not “attenuated”: your survivor’s guilt of not being at La Moneda on September 11, 1973. It’s there in interviews, in your fiction and non-fiction books. How important was it for you to address that guilt in the novel? How did “Ariel” deal with that guilt? How do you deal with that guilt still today?
AD: It gave “Ariel” a compelling motive for investigating Allende’s death, beyond the fact that he needed the money; at the same time, it was a sort of therapy for Dorfman, the author. In fact, what the character Adrián Balmaceda says to “Ariel” towards the end of the novel reverberated profoundly inside me, and helped my real psyche to deal with that specific guilt and maybe even to alleviate it to some extent. Pirandello would have enjoyed, I presume, the situation: a character helps the person writing about him to become sane or at least at peace.
The novel helped, as I just mentioned, to deal with the particular case of someone having died instead of me. But the novel does not delve into other questions in my life because that would have complicated the story I was telling. I mean, the fact that I felt guilty in the way I did, it has to come from something deeper, something corrosive from before the coup, probably going back to childhood and family matters. That would be a subject to explore, if I have enough energy and time, in yet another memoir.
JGE: Naturally, another important element of this book is living in exile. You beautifully write: “When you’re in exile, you end up with many debts, and the hardest to pay back are the debts of gratitude, the ones that haunt you, how to ever thank enough those who helped you out when the going was rough . . . how to begin to show thankfulness.” Living in exile is perhaps one of the many unifying factors that have defined Latin America, at least in the last one hundred years; it is a cloud that often darkens our region but also protects our dissidents, our artists, our intellectuals. We’re brothered through exile. You have written about living in exile before, and you talk about it often in interviews. Was it a challenge to tackle the events that prompted your exile head-on yet again?
AD: Thanks for your recognition about how exile has been fundamental in the shaping of Latin America. Though this could be said about the modern world, it is particularly true of our continent south of the border.
One of the reasons I was eager to write The Embassy Murders (a novel that “Ariel” is frustratedly trying to work on as he researches Allende’s death) is because in the Argentine Embassy, where I sought asylum after the 1973 coup, every Latin American country was represented among the refugees, and all of them were exiles from their troubled fatherlands. This is a fascinating idea which I have developed a bit further in a long short story, just published in Index on Censorship—and it would make a terrific film.
As to being particularly challenged by the theme of my own exile, it was, in fact, a relief to return to those distressing events, a way of making clearer to myself and to my readers why I ended up leaving Chile after trying desperately for seventeen years to return there. I had never, for instance, associated my own arduous return with the story of Odysseus, but then Hortha suddenly asks: “How is Ithaca treating you?”, and all sorts of feelings and sorrows come pouring out. The suitors, in our case, were not slain but had occupied and continued to occupy the house we longed to go back to.
JGE: I think that part of this exile, for you, is language. You wrote The Suicide Museum in English. However, Spanish often rears its head throughout the book. How has your relationship with Spanish as a writer changed since 1973, since your exile?
AD: I wrote a whole book (Heading South, Looking North) on how my Spanish and English evolved, became rivals and lovers, on and off, over decades, so it would be a disservice to try to summarize here what I have already probed minutely elsewhere. (For those interested in a shorter version, see my contribution to Wendy Lesser’s excellent anthology, The Genius of Language, an essay of mine that is made up almost entirely of Nabokovian footnotes.) But it is worth answering the question about how my two languages collaborated in the making of The Suicide Museum.
It is true that Spanish words crop up from time to time, but the real influence comes from the fact that Spanish is inside me as I clack and clock out English sentences. There is a rhythm, a sonority, and a certain lyrical (if you will) quality to the prose, which distinguishes it from typical English. So, Spanish is always there, vigilant, murmuring suggestions, smiling at some sentences, frowning at others.
But also, this: once I finished this text, I then rewrote it in Spanish (like anything I write in English). Not quite translating, but transposing, recreating; and with that Spanish version, I then go back and correct the English, making it (I hope, Egad!) better. And then, when I reread the English, I go back to the Spanish, and this (quite exhausting but exhilarating) process goes on for a while. The same happens when I write something first in Spanish. I say it’s to keep both my loves at peace with each other, but probably something less altruistic occurs. This method makes me a sharper writer, more aware of failures and limitations, more willing to revise over and over again, and submit myself to my own critical eye in another language.
JGE: I’m also interested in this novel’s pendulum swing between hope and disillusion. Given the subject matter, I figure it must’ve come out naturally during the writing process; perhaps Latin American history, in general, is framed by hope and disillusion. But did you explicitly think about these two and the relation between these two during the writing process?
AD: I rarely think about anything during the writing itself, as I want to make sure I am not imposing my previous thoughts and potential prejudices on the characters and plot. But yes, hope and disillusion have been central in my life and the life of Chile and Latin America, as well as the world, so they seep into the story. What is always there, in everything I write, no matter how depressing the material or the evil I am confronting, is a sense that there must be hope, that I cannot add to the sadness of the world—even as I reveal that sadness and its many causes. I discussed this often with my friend Eduardo Galeano: how can we tell the truth about the terrors and oppression we are witnessing, and not become agents of despair?
JGE: One of your novel’s most illuminating and hopeful moments is perhaps your “sort of epilogue,” where you address the recent changes in Chile. Again, you mentioned the 2019-2020 protests “moved you to write this memoir.” But in contrast, in a recent article for The New York Times, you expressed concern that a right-wing leader named José Antonio Kast, who you call “a sort of Trump of the Andes,” is favored to win Chile’s presidency in 2025. What could someone like him represent for modern-day Chile, Allende’s legacy, and the progressive actions and initiatives of Gabriel Boric’s government?
AD: I am hopeful (there’s that word again!) that Kast will not be our next president. I find it hard to believe that someone who admires Pinochet so ardently and is so retrograde regarding women’s and indigenous people’s rights, who is so conservative and faux-populist, and a climate change denier who is a lackey of the Opus Dei, can convince the majority of Chileans that he will solve their problems. What worries me most is that he would respond to protests against him with “mano dura,” an iron fist, a form of repression that would lead to even wider and more violent uprisings, which, in turn, might open the door to some kind of dictatorship. And, of course, he is only one of several authoritarian tempters intoxicating Latin America and the world. The only thing good that can be said about Kast is that, compared to Milei in Argentina, a man who seeks advice from his dead dog, Kast seems relatively sane.
JGE: Notably, you close that NYT op-ed with the following statement, “Seguimos. We go on. We do not flag. We will not be discouraged.” I’m Guatemalan, and as I’m sure you know, with the election of diplomat, sociologist, and writer Bernardo Arévalo, we’re also transitioning into a progressive government for the first time since 1954, when the CIA similarly launched a coup against democratically elected Jacobo Árbenz; Chile and Guatemala are brothered this way. Arévalo, however, is already facing hostilities, and local media reported that government operatives had planned to assassinate him and his vice-president Karin Herrera. So, how can we hang on to hope? How can we not be discouraged?
AD: First, let me say how heartened I am by Arévalo’s victory (I met his father, by the way, when I was a youngster, as my parents received many exiles from other Latin American countries in our home in Santiago). But I am also fearful for his life and the future of democracy in your sweet land, which deserves better governments than those which have plagued its people.
Regarding hope, even when events seem to stubbornly discount the possibility, we have no alternative but to hope. Esperanza, in Spanish, is allied to esperar, to wait, indicating that it will take time for the better angels to prevail. One of my books of essays on Latin American authors is called Someone Writes to the Future, and we must believe that the future is waiting for us (esperándonos), that we must write, as John Berger once told me, as if we had already won—but without lying about how difficult the past and the present are.
JGE: You have previously reviewed the works of Alejandro Zambra and Nona Fernández, to name a few who have made work that deals with the coup, the dictatorship, the 1988 plebiscite, and the enduring effects of the dictatorship. Pablo Larraín just released a new movie called El Conde, in which he reimagines Pinochet as a 200-year-old vampire. What do you think about the work of these younger Chileans who address the dictatorship and the enduring effects of the dictatorship? Is art yet another manifestation of our hope and disillusion?
AD: I am very impressed with Zambra and Fernández (whose books I have reviewed for The New York Review and The New York Times, respectively), and know Pablo Larraín and his extraordinary work (his Tony Manero is one of the best films I have seen about the corrosive effects of dictatorship). They prove, as do others in my country (and in yours—for instance, Eduardo Halfon), that in the midst of the ruins and la ruindad (ruination) we can rescue some fierce beauty, some uncomfortable truth, and at the very least bear witness.
JGE: Finally, on page 667, you write that you hope Hortha will reappear. Has he?
AD: He must know that the novel has been published, and with a title that refers to his pet project, I assume he’s read it. I mean, he still must receive the New Yorker, where there was a long review of the book and where his name is prominently mentioned. And yet, the phone has not rung in my home, not a word from him or Pilar. They haven’t even contacted Angélica, my wife. I hope he’ll call and suggest another mission for me, or at least for my character: maybe a museum dedicated to Forgiveness, The Forgiveness Museum. Now, that would be a perfect sequel.
José García Escobar is a journalist, fiction writer, translator, and former Fulbright scholar from Guatemala. He got his MFA in creative writing from The New School. His writing has appeared in The Evergreen Review, Guernica, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. He’s a two-time Dart Center fellow. He is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Central American region. He writes in English and Spanish, and has translated into Spanish Solito by Javier Zamora and I’m Not Broken by Jesse Leon, both for Penguin En Español.
Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American author, born in Argentina, whose award-winning books in many genres have been published in more than fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries. Among his works are the plays Death and the Maiden and Purgatorio, the novels Widows and Konfidenz, and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. He writes regularly for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Guardian, El País, and CNN. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Threepenny Review, and Index on Censorship, among others. A prominent human rights activist, he worked as press and cultural advisor to Salvador Allende’s chief of staff in the final months before the 1973 military coup, and later spent many years in exile. He lives with his wife Angélica in Santiago, Chile, and Durham, North Carolina, where he is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.
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