Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Ariel Dorfman’s, Heading South: Looking North is a biography all about language and identity.
Dorfman is a well known playwright. People will know about his play Death of the Maiden and he has written a lot of novels. And this is his autobiography. It is the story of a peripatetic intellectual. He wondered all over the place. He was born in Argentina and spent a long time in the United States. I think what he does extremely well is to give us an insider’s view of what is happening. But he also has the perspective of someone who is looking at it from the outside. He speaks and writes in English as well as he speaks and writes in Spanish.
He was very involved in the cultural side of the Allende period. A lot of things happened in Chile during the Allende years and one of the impressive ones was the cultural innovations that were taking place in song, painting, theatre and in writing. What this book does is show you what it was like to be an intellectual at a time of great social turmoil. He is looking into where his roots are. It is a very personal as well as a very political book.
Read full interview
Alan Angell is Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford and was formerly University Lecturer in Latin American Politics and Director of the Latin American Centre. His first published work was a study of the union movement in Chile published during the Allende government. He was made a Gran Oficial of the Order of Bernardo O’Higgins in 2007 for academic work on the country and for support for human rights during the Pinochet dictatorship. He has published widely, not only on Chilean politics but on the left in Latin America and aspects of social policy.
