Hard Rain

by Ariel Dorfman, George Shivers (Translator)

Overview

"You don't know us," the writer said. "We're different here in Chile."

Ariel Dorfman's early novel Hard Rain was written in the last chaotic months before the Pinochet bloodbath ended Allende's elected government. The publication of this book to acclaim outside Chile enabled the author to escape into exile.

Here is all the drama and tension of those last months and days, vividly delivered through the eyes and experience of one of Latin America's greatest writers. The tragedy of fifty years ago now comes alive again, in George Shivers' expert English translation.

"That was Chile: all these individual wills, thoughts, journeys, betrayals, acts of generosity, acts of faith, obscenities, evasions;...you'd have to freeze time and bring every life to a halt so that no one would forget what had happened at that precise moment..." - from Hard Rain



Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780930523787
Publisher:	Readers International
Publication date:	08/10/2023
Series:	Readers International Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	350
Product dimensions:	4.87(w) x 7.67(h) x 0.53(d)

About the Author

Born in 1942 in Argentina, ARIEL DORFMAN as a young academic and writer served as a cultural adviser to President Salvador Allende from 1970 to 1973. During this time he became know more broadly as co-author of How to Read Donald Duck (1971) from which he includes snippets in the Tarzan chapter of Hard Rain, his first novel (1973). Hard Rain won a literary prize in Argentina that allowed him and his family to leave Chile after the Pinochet coup. In exile, Dorfman has become famous as a prolific writer and fierce critic of Pinochet and other despots. He defines himself as an Argentine-Chilean-American novelist (Hard Rain, The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, Mascara) , playwright (Death and the Maiden, Widows, Reader), essayist (The Empire's Old Clothes, Someone Writes to the Future, Heading South, Looking North), academic, and human rights activist.

GEORGE SHIVERS is a distinguished Spanish-English and Portuguese English literary translator who was a professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages at Washington College for many years and is still engaged in teaching in Maryland. Besides Hard Rain, his translations include several other works by Ariel Dorfman: The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, My House Is on Fire, and Someone Writes to the Future. He has also translated works by the Brazilian writer Márcio Souza. George Shivers wrote many of the Spanish-English translations for articles in the volume Guide to Documentary Sources for the Andes, published by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Editorial Reviews

Composed of fragments of narratives interspersed with reviews of other novels whose subject is the socialist revolution in Chile during the early '70s, this novel, written in 1972 and until now unavailable in English, tells the story of a country undergoing a radical ``process of collective and personal self-examination.'' Dorfman segues, without explanation, from one well-crafted, piquant fragment to another, using the narratives and reviews to question, mostly indirectly, the role of politics, art, love, work and spirituality in an unstable Latin American society. According to an interview with Dorfman contained within the novel itself, the author has attempted to depict ``a mosaic of Chile, a sample of what had remained outside the book,'' of the ``insignificant fragments of reality.'' The reader is likely to resist Dorfman's ( Mascara ) unconventional, self-referential method, but by giving us several novels in one, he provides us with a rich contradictory work that feels alive with the promise of social and artistic change almost 20 years after the failure of Chile's socialist revolution. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Dorfman is a critic and poet, as well as a novelist ( Widows, LJ 6/1/83; The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, LJ 1/87). His highly political and experimental first novel was written in 1972, in the midst of the Chilean revolution, and was first published in Spanish in Argentina in 1973. Its intricately woven melange of voices--segments of novels, filmscripts, interviews, and criticism (of the novel itself)--creates an aura of the times centering on the literary circle of Chile's revolutionary writers and the revolution itself. Though full of humor, it is ultimately a plodding work that will be difficult going even for those accustomed to contemporary Spanish American fiction.-- Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, Ore.

Library Journal