Feeding On Dreams
Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
In September 1973, the military took power in Chile, and Ariel Dorfman, allied to deposed president Salvador Allende, was forced to flee for his life. Feeding on Dreams is the story of the transformative decades of exile that followed. Dorfman portrays, through visceral scenes and powerful intellect, the personal and political maelstroms underlying his migrations from Buenos Aires, on the run from Pinochet’s death squads, to safe houses in Paris and Amsterdam, and eventually to America, his childhood home. The toll on Dorfman’s wife and two sons, the ‘earthquake of language’ that is bilingualism, and his eventual questioning of his allegiance to past and party—all these crucibles of a life in exile are revealed with wry and startling honesty.Feeding on Dreams is a passionate reminder that ‘we are all exiles’, that we are all ‘threatened with annihilation if we do not find and celebrate the refuge of common humanity’, as Dorfman did during his ‘decades of loss and resurrection’.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Exploring for the first time his years in exile following the brutal 1973 overthrow of President Allende by General Pinochet, celebrated Chilean novelist and playwright Dorfman (Death and the Maiden) gorgeously evokes his lifelong search for home, country, and belonging. Born in Argentina, raised briefly in the United States before moving to Chile, Dorfman joins Allende's revolution, but unlike his hero, escapes death during Pinochet's military coup and is able to flee the country with his wife, Ang lica, and their young son, Rodrigo, in 1973. So begins, through a network of contacts, his long exile, with the family staying for several years in Paris which Dorfman hated before moving on to Amsterdam, where Joaqu n was born. Intercut with the present day are sections from Dorfman's journal of his brief 1990 return to Santiago, his first time back in Chile since his exile. Amsterdam is followed by the U.S., a place that provides both opportunity and angst, as Dorfman must wrestle both with the role of his adopted country (he became a U.S. citizen in 2005) in Pinochet's regime and with the English language in general, as he more thoroughly embraces bilingualism. Never is the pain of his or Chile's past minimized or truly healed, but rather lyrically shared, for, as his exile taught him, the people's strength is everywhere, "beating in all the friends abroad who have cared for us, literally giving us heart, their heart, when we had felt most abandoned."
