In Ariel Dorfman’s “The Suicide Museum,” a billionaire with a scheme to save the planet needs to know exactly what happened in the 1973 Chilean coup.
Salvador Allende, the socialist Chilean President who died in a coup fifty years ago, remains a subject of fascination and conjecture; in Dorfman’s new novel, his fate may have significance for our shared future.Salvador Allende’s election, in 1970, to a six-year term as President of Chile—though he got to serve only about half of it—was one of those rare moments which give the world reason to believe there might be an alternative to the rapacious, greed-based way we have always run things.
Dorfman’s new book, his thirty-eighth, feels like a valediction to a career that, until now, has been varied in its instruments but consistent in its vision.
The billionaire, as a character, is having a moment in contemporary fiction. The ascendant trope seems to be that there is nothing of which a billionaire is not capable, which makes such figures sinister but also exquisitely useful in plot terms. Their combination of endless resources and psychological deformity means that you can use them to make anything happen. Even in the most naturalistic settings, they wander freely beyond the borders of realism.
But there are two levels to this mystery: one is why generations of Allende followers care about it so much; the other, more immediate one is why Hortha needs it solved. He withholds his reasons from Dorfman, and thus from the reader, for hundreds of pages. This is a prime example of the authorial license to justify any effect you like, as long as it involves a billionaire.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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