The Suicide Museum
A Novel
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
A Best Book of 2023 by The New Yorker
A billionaire Holocaust survivor hires a writer to uncover the truth of Salvador Allende’s death, and they must confront their own dark histories to find a path forward—for themselves and for our ravaged planet.
An expansive, engrossing mystery for fans of Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood, and Bill McKibben, from the acclaimed author of Death and the Maiden.
Ariel needed money, and Joseph Hortha had it. Bound by gratitude toward the late Chilean president and a persistent need to know whether murder or suicide ended his life during the 1973 coup, the two men embark on an investigation that will take them from Washington DC and New York, to Santiago and Valparaíso, and finally to London. They encounter an unforgettable cast of characters: a wedding photographer who can predict a couple’s future; a policeman in pursuit of the serial killer targeting refugees; a revolutionary caught trying to assassinate a dictator; and, above all, the complex women who support them along the way, for their own obscure reasons.
Before Ariel and Joseph can resolve a quest full of dangers and enigmas, they must help each other come to terms with guilt and trauma from personal catastrophes hidden deep in the past. What begins as an intriguing literary caper unfolds into a propulsive, philosophical saga about love, family, machismo, fascism, and exile that asks what we owe the world, one another, and ourselves. By boldly mixing fiction and reality, imagination and history, The Suicide Museum explores the limits of the novelistic genre, expanding it in an unsuspected and exceptional way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Was Chilean president Salvador Allende's death during the 1973 military coup a murder or a suicide? That real-life historical inquiry animates this engrossing work of autofiction from Dorfman (Death and the Maiden). In 1990, enigmatic Dutch billionaire Joseph Hortha commissions protagonist Ariel Dorfman—an Argentine Chilean author and activist living in exile in the U.S. who bears a more than passing resemblance to the author—to dig into Allende's fate. Ostensibly, Hortha craves the information as part of the secretive project he's planning as "a wake-up call to humanity," but it's clear to Dorfman, spinning the tale three decades later, that the puzzle holds a far more personal meaning for Hortha. It certainly does for Dorfman, an Allende associate who, but for a last-minute change of plans, was scheduled to be at the president's side on the day of the coup and would likely have died as well. The ensuing odyssey wends its way from Santiago to the Chilean hinterlands, North Carolina to London, as Dorfman delves into dark truths about Chile's past as well as his own, and gradually unearths some of Hortha's secrets en route. Less a conventional thriller than an erudite riddle that gracefully melds history and fiction, this feels like the capstone to Dorfman's literary career. It's a brainy, dazzling treat.
