“The Compensation Bureau is no tonic for our blues, but it qualifies as a warning to Look Up and see the stars and know our place before it’s too late. And Dorfman writes with love. The book is worth a read.”

Read the full article here.

“‘La lucha es por la memoria enterrada, marginada, dejada de lado, de aquellos que hacen la historia pero que rara vez aparecen en los libros de historia. Y en el caso de Chile se vuelve cuerpo, se vuelve carne, se vuelve fotografía, se vuelve palabra y se vuelve edificio el Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos.’“

“Despite challenges and disputes aplenty, my country has embarked on a remarkable project: a truly popular debate about what sort of nation it should aspire to be.”

“For the 30 years since democracy returned to Chile, as I have walked the streets of Santiago, Valparaíso, and other cities, I have been concerned by what I did not know about what had happened in the houses I passed during the 17 years (1973–90) of the Pinochet dictatorship.  Who had been dragged from there in the dead and dread of night? Who had never come back home from the detention center—or came back destroyed by what had been done to him, to her? What pain was hidden behind each door, and inside those who had survived?”

“I have seen what the men and women of Chile can do when they are called to a noble cause. I can only pray that now, yet again, my country will be a shining example of liberation for a turbulent world that is crying out for some light in the midst of so much darkness.”

“There is not only the hope that millions of living Chileans will vote in the upcoming elections not to go back to an authoritarian past, but also, perhaps, that the dead will inspire those they left behind not to betray their pain and memory. Perhaps those guardians of my country’s dignity, the ghosts of those that Pinochet banished from this world, will protect their compatriots as we decide the fate of our beloved and besieged land.”

“Ariel Dorfman describes his fascinating novella-cum-parable, The Compensation Bureau, as ‘love in the time of Apocalypse.’ The High Commission that controls the universe needs to do something to deal with that little rock in space, the Earth, whose unruly inhabitants have descended into a plague of self-destructive violence.

One of the Actuaries whose task involves compensating those multi-millions who throughout human history have been deprived of their full lives through physical deprivation or savagery, unfortunately falls in love with one of the victims he seeks to award with a digitally researched afterlife.

A fantasy, yes. But when the Commission decide to call time on this troubled world – a decision Dorfman fears may be at hand – who, with our daily news diet of largely self- inflicted crises, can dismiss this as fanciful self-indulgence?”

“I can only hope that my country of origin offers the world a lesson in how to conquer the phantoms of fear, finding the courage, when our hard-earned democracy is in peril, to build a better and more just social order, rather than retreat to the shadows of authoritarianism.”

Listen to the full interview here.

Watch the full interview here.

“A firsthand witness to the 1973 execution of the Chilean vision to a kinder world, Dorfman has pondered the nature of human brutality and the nature of true justice throughout a long and distinguished career. The country’s victims and victimizers coexisted in the country (and sometimes even within the same person), and this tension has lessons with relevance far beyond its borders.

Dorfman has been instrumental in demonstrating the universality of Chile’s plight… Bearing witness for decades has undoubtedly led to some compassionate fatigue along the way. By taking a step out of this world, Dorfman finds new reasons for hope. The Compensation Bureau is an abstract, late-career addition to a notable body of work.”

“As world crises accumulate daily and mankind’s political leaders appear incapable of understanding let alone acting to work together for species survival, The Compensation Bureau reads as anything but a fanciful entertainment.”

“It is the mobilization today of young people… from Hong-Kong to Belarus and Nicaragua, from Iran and Sudan to Honduras and Colombia, that give us hope that the world can be a better place. This is particularly so in Chile… because today, inside the building in Santiago that once housed the Chilean Congress, a Constitutional Convention has assembled, with the express purpose of writing a new Constitution that will replace the one that Pinochet fraudulently pushed through in 1980…

The Convention is discussing how to inscribe in the new Magna Carta a series of rights, all of them so central to the struggles in Chile, in the United States, in the whole world: water and ecological rights, LGBTQ rights, health care and education and pensions that are meant to lift the majority and not enrich a small group of profiteers, the establishment of a pluri-national, multilingual republic, the end to police brutality, especially against the young, because it is always the young who get beaten and always the young who rise and rebel.”

Read the article here.

“Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen delineates what the last century’s macho dictators have had in common.”

Read the article here.

“The saga of Chilean director and playwright Oscar Castro is a vivid example of how art can help us endure—and thrive.”

Read the article here.

“Behold A Pale Rider”

Read the short story here.

“It was back in 1984, in Chile, a country then suffering under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, that I first read the sordid story of the torturer Andrés Valenzuela.

A barely tolerated opposition magazine had published an excruciating interview with him, and I forced myself — having recently returned to my native land after 12 years of exile — to devour it with a mix of perverse curiosity and obvious dread. It was a tale of multiple horrors, detailing how Valenzuela and his fellow state agents had abducted dissidents, applied electricity to their genitals, dumped the corpses in rivers and ravines. I knew some of those victims personally and was aware that the viciousness inflicted on them and so many others could very well erupt into my own life.

Overcome with revulsion, I resolved to forget that name, Andrés Valenzuela. As if banishing him from memory could deny his ferocious persistence. Because here he is again, the protagonist of Nona Fernández’s novel “The Twilight Zone,” translated fluidly into English by Natasha Wimmer. Given my initial distressing experience with the magazine interview, I approached this book with trepidation, also wary that a plethora of investigations, memoirs, films, fiction, essays, plays and poems had extensively covered the themes of terror, memory and the obstacles to national reconciliation since Pinochet’s loss of power in 1990. Could anything original still be expressed on the subject?”

Read the article here.