CHILE: Death in the South

by Jacobo Timerman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 14, 1987

In this galled, passionate set of impressions of Chile's current ""dictatorship by the last Prussian army in the world,"" Argentine journalist Timerman (Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number) is all over the place and filled to the brim with unconcealed judgment, chiding every Chilean for quietism yet (with his own experience as a chief victim of Argentine state terror) deeply tuned-in to the horror of Pinochet's successful facism, to the popular confusion and paralysis it brings. But though Pinochet's quiet barbarism is the given, Timerman is more transfixed by Chile's famously sophisticated intelligentsia, a class he feels is too bound to sentimentality and passive analysis. Writers (excepting Jose Donoso) come in for a bad time here--for either spouting naive ideology or for cocooning the pieties of the Chilean soul. The many disappeared are discussed, as is the role of the Church (surprisingly positive); but the book's oddest note is Timerman's discussion of left-wing terrorism, the threat (real or imagined) that Pinochet uses to keep himself in power. Odd, because when Timerman chides the left's bent for terrorism, he does so on what seem rhetorical grounds only: ""They tried to make themselves appear more dangerous than they were. They boasted of their omnipotence, they exaggerated their operational capacity, they intellectualized their phobias, proclaiming a revolutionary military strategy. It was nothing more than a tale told by an idiot."" On the face of it, this seems fair and balanced--yet Timerman's blithe dismissal of leftist terrorism as over-threat unsettles, especially since it seems that the hero instead for Timerman is Chile's Italian-ate Communist Party, which has accepted ""pluralism and rejected violence."" That this party, though, plays no role--nor is likely to in the future--opens Timerman to the charge of the sentimentality that he accuses Chile's intelligentsia of. . .and worse, makes the denunciations of terrorism here less believable, a matter of technical disagreement, exactly the sort of thing that crippled anti-Hitler sentiment in Germany in the early 30's. A scattered, inchoate book then--fiery, of course, but vaguely suspect (and muddleheaded) in its partisanship.

Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1987

Categories: NONFICTION