Ariel Dorfman has spent his adult life "obsessed with problems of pain and justice and redemption." Each is a Rosetta Stone, and the bilingual Chilean writer has sought to decipher them in Spanish and English, poems and plays, chiseling deep into scarred humanity, good and evil.
Lurking in the margins of each of his texts is General Augusto Pinochet, the man whose violent regime sent Dorfman into exile in 1973. For years, the writer imprisoned the General in the shadows of his work, a dark undercurrent in every victims' story. Now Dorfman is "trying to draw close to Pinochet, to close in on him. But," he writes, "there is a danger in that closeness." The perilous quest for literary justice.
