Hard Rain - Hardcover

Dorfman, Ariel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0930523776 ISBN 13: 9780930523770

Publisher: UNKNO, 1990

Synopsis

Dorfman's innovative novel encompasses and expands on his first full-length fiction, published in Spanish after Chile's coup in 1973 and unpublished in English. Thus it looks back at the artistic and political experimentation of the Allende period from this leading writer's tragic perspective on Chile today.

About this title

Reviews

Composed of fragments of narratives interspersed with reviews of other novels whose subject is the socialist revolution in Chile during the early '70s, this novel, written in 1972 and until now unavailable in English, tells the story of a country undergoing a radical "process of collective and personal self-examination." 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. According to an interview with Dorfman contained within the novel itself, the author has attempted to depict "a mosaic of Chile, a sample of what had remained outside the book," of the "insignificant fragments of reality." The reader is likely to resist Dorfman's ( Mascara ) 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 almost 20 years after the failure of Chile's socialist revolution.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Dorfman is a critic and poet, as well as a novelist ( Widows, LJ 6/1/83; The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, LJ 1/87). His highly political and experimental first novel was written in 1972, 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. Though full of humor, it is ultimately a plodding work that will be difficult going even for those accustomed to contemporary Spanish American fiction.
- Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, Ore.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: UNKNO
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0930523776
• ISBN 13: 9780930523770
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 250