In Chile, a Quest for Truth Driven by Survivor’s Guilt

THE SUICIDE MUSEUM, by Ariel Dorfman

On Sept. 11, 1973, President Salvador Allende of Chile died inside the national palace in Santiago during a U.S.-backed military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. Afterward, the Chilean army announced that suicide was the official cause of death, which many Chileans distrusted, if not flatly rejected. But in 1990, after 17 years of authoritarian rule in which any challenge to the junta’s line was dangerous, Pinochet lost power, and the nature of Allende’s death swiftly became a public question.

Was he assassinated? Did he die fighting, or choose death over capture? This is the mystery that powers “The Suicide Museum,” a new novel by the Chilean American author, playwright and activist Ariel Dorfman. It’s set mainly in 1990, during the thrilling, troubled months after Pinochet left, when Chile was starting to rebuild its democracy while still “crawling with criminals and accomplices and collaborators.” Its narrator, also a Chilean American author, playwright and activist named Ariel Dorfman, goes back to Santiago after years as a “man without a country,” dreaming of resuming his old life before the coup. But he’s got a secret mission, too.

In 1983, while working against Pinochet from the United States, Ariel met an odd billionaire named Joseph Hortha. (For simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to the author as Dorfman, and the character as Ariel.) Hortha, a Dutch Holocaust survivor and plastic-industry macher, worships Allende and what he stood for: the Chilean road to socialism, or “socialism through peaceful, electoral means.” He tells Ariel that, after his wife’s suicide in the late 1960s, only Allende’s inspiring presidential victory kept him from dying the same way. Hortha offers to pay Ariel a huge sum of money to return to Chile and figure out, “with utmost certainty, whether Salvador Allende killed himself. Whether his life was tragic or epic.”

For Ariel, even considering the possibility that Allende died by suicide isn’t easy. Like his creator, he was a member of Allende’s cabinet; he venerates the former president nearly as much as Hortha does. He is attached to an epic narrative in which Allende died fighting; any alternative theory “desecrated a sanctuary that was out-of-bounds.”

But Ariel also recognizes that the truth has inherent value — and besides, he’s a broke writer, and he wants the cash. Dorfman often juxtaposes the profound and petty in this way, mixing for example Ariel’s traumatic memories and hopes for Chile’s future with his grievances at not getting a warm-enough welcome home from the leftist elite. The author also frequently combines emotional intensity and absurdity, mainly in the person of Hortha.

Ariel’s benefactor, unlike many billionaires in literary fiction (not to mention real life), is not evil. But he has done great wrongs: He got wealthy by developing plastics that now pollute the earth. He feels profoundly guilty about this, and dreams of making amends by building a Suicide Museum, featuring his hero Allende, that is persuasive enough to stop both individual deaths and the “collective suicide” of unmitigated climate crisis.

Ariel thinks this idea is ridiculous — it is ridiculous — but he likes Hortha. Indeed, he sees himself in him. Both men are Jews rendered nationless for much of their lives by state violence, both look up to Allende and both carry horrible burdens of guilt. Ariel, again like his creator, was supposed to sleep at the palace the night before the coup; the political situation had grown fragile enough that Allende’s advisers had set up a rotation in case of emergencies. But he traded shifts with an old friend, Claudio Jimeno, who fought alongside Allende on the day of the coup, and was taken prisoner, tortured and disappeared. His body still has not been found, and in “The Suicide Museum,” this weighs so heavily on Ariel he can hardly say Jimeno’s name.

Hortha and Ariel are not the only Allende devotees in the novel. Characters are constantly popping up to talk for three or four pages about why they “owed Allende everything,” from their homes to their health to their children, who grew up strong “because of the half liter of milk Allende distributed to each child every day in school.” In one scene, Ariel and his son Joaquín visit the former president’s grave, where countless Chileans have left notes of love, gratitude and prayer, as if the tombstone were the Wailing Wall.

Dorfman, though, is not interested in simply praising Allende’s memory. Early in the novel, Ariel tells Hortha that he won’t write about the former president out of fear that his admiration would make him write “a lazy book, full of myths but no transgressions.” “The Suicide Museum” does not transgress against Allende’s memory, beyond a line or two about his tendency to cheat on his wife — but that’s because it isn’t actually a book about Allende. Dorfman is less interested in writing about his hero than creating a portrait of hero worship, which shades gradually into an intricate examination of guilt and grief.

In the United States, Dorfman generally gets read alongside other Spanish-language writers (he writes in both English and Spanish and translates his own work between them). But “The Suicide Museum” feels much more evocative of Philip Roth. Its prose is brainy and confident, building momentum through the intensity of its ideas. Discussions run long; Ariel’s monologues run longer. As often happens in Roth’s work, the narrator’s intellectual life effectively crowds out the plot, complicated and intense though the plot may be.

“The Suicide Museum” foreshadows more events than it contains; its climate-crisis through line is underdeveloped and easily could have been cut. Still, its presence dovetails well with Ariel’s dogged hopefulness. He tries his hardest to get to the truth — though it will be decades before forensic experts conclude, in 2011, that Allende shot himself with an assault rifle. Ariel’s search takes him around the world, and through his efforts, he faces down his sorrow for Allende, for Jimeno and for the Chile he lost. Watching him do so is profoundly moving, and a reminder that courage, if not heroism, can happen at any scale.

Lily Meyer is a writer, critic and translator. Her debut novel, “Short War,” is forthcoming in 2024.

THE SUICIDE MUSEUM | By Ariel Dorfman | 676 pp. | Other Press | Paperback, $21.99

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