Description:
Vivid and experimental novel of Chile's last months before the Pinochet bloodbath.
Brief description: Born in 1942 in Argentina, ARIEL DORFMAN as a young academic and writer served as a cultural adviser to President Salvador Allende from 1970 to 1973. During this time he became know more broadly as co-author of How to Read Donald Duck (1971) from which he includes snippets in the Tarzan chapter of Hard Rain, his first novel (1973). Hard Rain won a literary prize in Argentina that allowed him and his family to leave Chile after the Pinochet coup. In exile, Dorfman has become famous as a prolific writer and fierce critic of Pinochet and other despots. He defines himself as an Argentine-Chilean-American novelist (Hard Rain, The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, Mascara), playwright (Death and the Maiden, Widows, Reader), essayist (The Empire's Old Clothes, Someone Writes to the Future, Heading South, Looking North), academic, and human rights activist.
Review Quotes: "Deftly translated into English by the author and George Shivers, Hard Rain is a collage of fictitious book reviews...prologues to anthologies, student term papers, sales pitches to film companies...interspersed with fragments from the imaginary books themselves.... Throughout, Mr Dorfman ponders, paradoxically, the value of writing itself in a time of crisis.... Intellectually fascinating...[and] eloquent in dramatizing both the inability of art to capture reality and the unthinkableness of life without art."
New York Times Book Review "An incandescent narrative...a testament to the workings of the creative process."The Guardian (London) "Funnier and friskier than a term like 'experimental' would suggest, ...the method recalls Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch."The Times Literary Supplement "Perhaps such a conglomeration is, in fact, the only way to convey the ferment and apocalyptic energy of a world on the brink. Readers who persevere will be plunged into old questions about art, society and change, but asked in ways that may lead to unexpected answers. They will also be rewarded with a novel of consistent richness and power."The Philadelphia Inquirer "Dorfman segues, without explanation, from one well-crafted, piquant fragment to another, using the narratives and reviews to question, mostly indirectly, the role of politics, art, love, work and spirituality in an unstable Latin American society... The reader is likely to resist Dorfman's unconventional, self-referential method, but by giving us several novels in one, he provides us with a rich contradictory work that feels alive with the promise of social and artistic change...." Publishers' Weekly "This highly political and experimental first novel was written...in the midst of the Chilean revolution and was first published in Spanish in Argentina in 1973. Its intricately woven melange of voices--segments of novels, filmscripts, interviews, and criticism (of the novel itself) -- creates an aura of the times centering on the literary circle of Chile's revolutionary writers and the revolution itself.... Recommended."Library Journal "While to a great extent it is a documentary on a specific period of Chile's past, it is also a profoundly experimental novel that questions traditional notions of literature, writing and the role of the writer in society."Choice