La Vida Doble
A Novel
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Set in the darkest years of the Pinochet dictatorship, La Vida Doble is the story of Lorena, a leftist militant who arrives at a merciless turning point when every choice she confronts is impossible. Captured by agents of the Chilean repression, withstanding brutal torture to save her comrades, she must now either forsake the allegiances of motherhood or betray the political ideals to which she is deeply committed.
Arturo Fontaine’s Lorena is a study in contradictions—mother and combatant, intellectual and lover, idealist and traitor—and he places her within a historical context that confounds her dilemmas. Though she has few viable options, she is no mere victim, and Fontaine disallows any comfortable high moral ground. His novel is among the most subtle explorations of human violence ever written.
Ranking with Roberto Bolaño and Mario Vargas Llosa on Latin America’s roster of most accomplished authors, Fontaine is a fearless explorer of the most sordid and controversial aspects of Chile’s history and culture. He addresses a set of moral questions specific to Pinochet’s murderous reign but invites us, four decades later, to consider global conflicts today and question how far we’ve come.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chilean author and poet Fontaine's searing examination of the consequences suffered by those who conspired against the Pinochet regime (1974 1990) raises timeless questions about the morality of torture. Fontaine interviewed both torturers and victims, and, combined with extensive documentary material from the era, has created this horrifying tale of duplicity told by Irene to a nameless interviewer. Safe in Stockholm under the assumed name Lorena, riddled with cancer, she looks back on her time as an idealistic participant in left-wing politics, transformed by arrest into a trapped and tortured captive of the state. Irene is stunned as are we by the strength she initially finds, in the face of torture and humiliation, to survive and protect her comrades, and Fontaine earns points for revealing these scenes in a nonvoyeuristic manner. But protecting her only daughter, Ana, from threatened violence is the one thing that breaks her, and Irene takes on an entirely different persona as a free-spirited, Dionysian mistress to one of her captors who conspires with the enemy to take down her former colleagues. Though haunted by her duplicity, she suffers all to keep her daughter safe, leaving the reader to stand in awe of the resiliency of the human spirit.
