Desert Memories: Desert Memories

By Ariel Dorfman

The Norte Grande of Chile, the world's driest desert, had ''engendered contemporary Chile, everything that was good about it, everything that was dreadful,'' writes Ariel Dorfman in his brilliant exploration of one of the least known and most exotic corners of the globe. For 10,000 years the desert had been mined for silver, iron, and copper, but it was the 19th-century discovery of nitrate that transformed the country into a modern state and forced the desert's colonization.

The mines' riches generated mansions and oligarchs in Chile's more temperate region—and terrible inequalities throughout the country. The Norte Grande also gave birth to the first Chilean democratic and socialist movements, nurturing every major political figure of modern Chile from Salvador Allende to Augusto Pinochet. In this richly layered personal memoir, illustrated with the author's own photographs, Dorfman sets out to explore the origins of contemporary Chile—and, along the way, seek out his wife's European ancestors who came years ago to Chile as part of the nitrate rush. And, most poignantly, he looks for traces of his friend and fellow 1960s activist, Freddy Taberna, executed by a firing squad in a remote Pinochet death camp.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781426209024

Ariel Dorfman

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.

Reviews for Desert Memories

[theonearmedcrab · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Ariel Dorfman’s “Desert Memories: Journeys through the Chilean North” (2004). Mr Dorfman is a poet and a novelist, which comes back in his eloquent, lyrical writing about the issues that really matter in this part of the world. He is fascinated by, and at the same time fears the desert, the emptiness, yet finds there the world’s largest telescopes, the world’s largest Coppermine, and above all, Chile’s now abandoned nitrate ghost towns, one of the main themes of the book. The other theme is his personal quest to find what exactly happened to an old friend of him, who was executed under the dictatorship.Mr Dorfman’s early background is one of an Allende supporter, and activist, who lived in exile during the Pinochet years. This aspect comes back frequently in the book, sometimes unnecessarily (as in the meeting with company representatives in the nitrate towns), but at other times it adds perspective. He has an impressive network of friends and acquaintances on whom he can call in every aspect of his journey, who open doors, and who provide an incredible amount of insight and experience. and which significantly adds to the value of Mr. Dorfmans account. Beautiful book.

[quondame · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A journey through the northern desert of Chile and through the past which like the desert hides and reveals and is implacable. Poetic and philosophical, the joys of companionship are contrasted constantly by the loneliness of the desert in which we meet and must rely upon only ourselves.