This book covers the heterogeneity of Chilean literary production from the times of the Spanish conquest to the present. It shifts critical focus from national identity and issues to a more multifaceted transnational, hemispheric, and global approach. Its emphasis is on the paradigm transition from the purportedly homogeneous to the heterogeneous.
Traverse Chile's diverse literary and geographic landscape with its best contemporary writers. Arranged geographically, these 20 stories-many of which appear in English for the first time-guide the reader through Chile's unique regions. Let Ariel Dorfman take you to Santiago with a prodigal son, discovering his own country for the first time; travel to the remote south with Enrique Valdes; and enjoy the charms of Valparaiso with Pablo Neruda, one of Chile's two Nobel Prize winners. With the return of democracy to Chile, large numbers of Americans and Chilean expatriates are rediscovering the rich cultural allure of Chile, as well as the draw of its unrivaled ecodiversity. Chile is an excellent literary guide for globetrotters and armchair travelers alike-for those new to Chile as well as those familiar with its charms. Katherine Silver is a freelance translator, editor, teacher and writer who has lived in Chile frequently and for prolonged periods from 1979 to the present. She has translated the Il Postino by Antonio Skarmeta, as well as the works of Elena Poniatowska, Jose Emilio Pacheco and Martin Adan. She is currently translating Pedro Lemebel's I Tremble Toreador for Grove/Atlantic Press.
"During the course of a single night, Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest who is a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a mediocre poet, relives some of the crucial events of his life. He believes he is dying, and in his feverish delirium various characters, both real and imaginary, appear to him as icy monsters, as if in sequences from a horror film. Among them are the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German novelist Ernst Junger, and General Augusto Pinochet - whom Father Lacroix instructs in Marxist doctrine - as well as various members of the Chilean intelligentsia whose lives, during a period of political turbulence, have touched his own."--Jacket.
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature A dreamlike evocation of a generation that grew up in the shadow of a dictatorship in 1980s Chile Space Invaders is the story of a group of childhood friends who, in adulthood, are preoccupied by uneasy memories and visions of their classmate Estrella González Jepsen. In their dreams, they catch glimpses of Estrella’s braids, hear echoes of her voice, and read old letters that eventually, mysteriously, stopped arriving. They recall regimented school assemblies, nationalistic class performances, and a trip to the beach. Soon it becomes clear that Estrella’s father was a ranking government officer implicated in the violent crimes of the Pinochet regime, and the question of what became of her after she left school haunts her erstwhile friends. Growing up, these friends—from her pen pal, Maldonado, to her crush, Riquelme—were old enough to sense the danger and tension that surrounded them, but were powerless in the face of it. They could control only the stories they told one another and the “ghostly green bullets” they fired in the video game they played obsessively. One of the leading Latin American writers of her generation, Nona Fernández effortlessly builds a choral and constantly shifting image of young life in the waning years of the dictatorship. In her short but intricately layered novel, she summons the collective memory of a generation, rescuing felt truth from the oblivion of official history.
The Savage Detectives elicits mixed feelings. An instant classic in the Spanish-speaking world upon its 1998 publication, a critical and commercial smash on its 2007 translation into English, Roberto Bolaño’s novel has also been called an exercise in 1970s nostalgia, an escapist fantasy of a romanticized Latin America, and a publicity event propped up by the myth of the bad-boy artist. David Kurnick argues that the controversies surrounding Bolaño’s life and work have obscured his achievements—and that The Savage Detectives is still underappreciated for the subtlety and vitality of its portrait of collective life. Kurnick explores The Savage Detectives as an epic of social structure and its decomposition, a novel that restlessly moves between the big configurations—of states, continents, and generations—and the everyday stuff—parties, jobs, moods, sex, conversation—of which they’re made. For Kurnick, Bolaño’s book is a necromantic invocation of life in history, one that demands surrender as much as analysis. Kurnick alternates literary-critical arguments with explorations of the novel’s microclimates and neighborhoods—the little atmospheric zones where some of Bolaño’s most interesting rethinking of sexuality, politics, and literature takes place. He also claims that The Savage Detectives holds particular interest for U.S. readers: not because it panders to them but because it heralds the exhilarating prospect of a world in which American culture has lost its presumptive centrality.
The Chile Reader makes available a rich variety of documents spanning more than five hundred years of Chilean history. Most of the selections are by Chileans; many have never before appeared in English. The history of Chile is rendered from diverse perspectives, including those of Mapuche Indians and Spanish colonists, peasants and aristocrats, feminists and military strongmen, entrepreneurs and workers, and priests and poets. Among the many selections are interviews, travel diaries, letters, diplomatic cables, cartoons, photographs, and song lyrics. Texts and images, each introduced by the editors, provide insights into the ways that Chile's unique geography has shaped its national identity, the country's unusually violent colonial history, and the stable but autocratic republic that emerged after independence from Spain. They shed light on Chile's role in the world economy, the social impact of economic modernization, and the enduring problems of deep inequality. The Reader also covers Chile's bold experiments with reform and revolution, its subsequent descent into one of Latin America's most ruthless Cold War dictatorships, and its much-admired transition to democracy and a market economy in the years since dictatorship.
The Mapuche are the most numerous, most vocal and most politically involved indigenous people in modern Chile. Their ongoing struggles against oppression have led to increasing national and international visibility, but few books provide deep historical perspective on their engagement with contemporary political developments. Building on widespread scholarly debates about identity, history and memory, Joanna Crow traces the complex, dynamic relationship between the Mapuche and the Chilean state from the military occupation of Mapuche territory during the second half of the nineteenth century through to the present day. She maps out key shifts in this relationship as well as the intriguing continuities. Presenting the Mapuche as more than mere victims, this book seeks to better understand the lived experiences of Mapuche people in all their diversity. Drawing upon a wide range of primary documents, including published literary and academic texts, Mapuche testimonies, art and music, newspapers, and parliamentary debates, Crow gives voice to political activists from both the left and the right. She also highlights the growing urban Mapuche population. Crow's focus on cultural and intellectual production allows her to lead the reader far beyond the standard narrative of repression and resistance, revealing just how contested Mapuche and Chilean histories are. This ambitious and revisionist work provides fresh information and perspectives that will change how we view indigenous-state relations in Chile.
Patrick Barr-Melej here illuminates modern Chilean history with an unprecedented chronicle and reassessment of the sixties and seventies. During a period of tremendous political and social strife that saw the election of a Marxist president followed by the terror of a military coup in 1973, a youth-driven, transnationally connected counterculture smashed onto the scene. Contributing to a surging historiography of the era's Latin American counterculture, Barr-Melej draws on media and firsthand interviews in documenting the intertwining of youth and counterculture with discourses rooted in class and party politics. Focusing on "hippismo" and an esoteric movement called Poder Joven, Barr-Melej challenges a number of prevailing assumptions about culture, politics, and the Left under Salvador Allende's "Chilean Road to Socialism." While countercultural attitudes toward recreational drug use, gender roles and sexuality, rock music, and consumerism influenced many youths on the Left, the preponderance of leftist leaders shared a more conservative cultural sensibility. This exposed, Barr-Melej argues, a degree of intergenerational dissonance within leftist ranks. And while the allure of new and heterodox cultural values and practices among young people grew, an array of constituencies from the Left to the Right berated counterculture in national media, speeches, schools, and other settings. This public discourse of contempt ultimately contributed to the fierce repression of nonconformist youth culture following the coup.