That women see a lot of disturbing things in the story collection What She Saw should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the work of the Argentine-born Chilean American author Ariel Dorfman (The Suicide Museum; Konfidenz). Throughout his career, Dorfman has melded themes of love and war, with a frequent focus on the military coup that ousted Chilean president Salvador Allende, for whom Dorfman worked as a cultural adviser in the early 1970s. Dorfman returns to those themes in the eight pieces in this trenchant compilation.
Most of these pieces highlight a female character who is either a witness to proceedings or a victim of atrocities. In the latter category is the long opening story, "Corderita," a devastating work about the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. The married protagonists met in Santiago in 1973, when they marched in defense of the Allende government. Decades later, the man has lost his wife on a train from Paris's Gare d'Austerlitz station to Bourges, where she is scheduled to testify against the captor who tortured her. Her husband, meanwhile, wrestles with whether finally to reveal his involvement in her ordeal.
Other stories are equally immersive. In "Fair Trade," an American man who works to ensure fair-trade policies buys his wife a KingSky Memor-mattress, "soft as dreams and firm as forgetfulness," as a birthday present, then tries to buy it back from the Mexican man he gave it to when the gift threatened to ruin his marriage. "Amboise" is about a man whose body "had betrayed [him] with such malicious efficiency" and plots to kill himself, but not before taking his wife to the site where his parents conceived him in the aftermath of World War II. "Unspoken" is about a 14th-century witchcraft trial. One of the more surreal pieces is "Blank," a story about a firing squad told from a remarkable perspective: one of the 12 bullets "standing in a gleaming, black, metallic row." This story is a singular take on war, with the bullet articulating a statement that applies equally to most of this collection's protagonists: "I am about to find out who I really am." What She Saw is another excellent work by a dedicated polemicist unafraid to tackle the political travesties of his country and his era. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer
Shelf Talker: Ariel Dorfman's What She Saw is a superb collection of eight trenchant stories about witnesses to war, criminality, and other atrocities, and the quest for closure and restitution.