Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey - Review

Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey by Ariel Dorfman / Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998, pp. 282, $24.00

(***) Ariel Dorfman begins his memoir with Sept. 11, 1973, the day he should have died, when a last-minute change kept him from work at the moment that a military junta stormed Chile's presidential palace and killed the occupants. A former cultural advisor under Pres. Salvador Allende, Dorfman lives with the knowledge that he narrowly dodged death and with a vexing riddle: Why was he delivered?

Heading South, Looking North crosscuts between chapters that scan the author's 56 years and those that recount in detail the violent fall of Latin America's first popularly elected socialist government. The book basks in quickened memories of a fervent time when Dorfman--alienated from each of the three countries he has called home: Argentina, Chile, and the U.S.--felt connected to others in an ardent effort at social transformation. In everything he has written since 1973, insists Dorfman, he bears witness to the trauma of idealism betrayed.

Yet, betrayal of a more fundamental sort is the true theme of Heading South, Looking North. Faithful to two languages and three nationalities, Dorfman has based his life on treachery. Beyond its value in documenting the Allende debacle, his book, begun in Spanish, but completed in English, is an anatomy of duplicity--"the anxiety, the richness, the madness of being double," the fluent testimony of a man whom circumstances and ambition have made into "a bigamist of language."

Heading South, Looking North is an affirmation of its author's bilingual identity. Even if his most lyrical prose recalls an Andean sunset, Dorfman a valuable intermediary between North and South, seems to be reconciled to life between languages.

(***) Excellent

STEVEN G. KELLMAN

Literary Scene Editor, USA Today, and Ashbel Smith Professor of Comparative Literature, The University of Texas at San Antonio

COPYRIGHT 1999 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group