The political and the personal blur through a series of tense, tantalizing conversations about resistance.
A pared-back yet gripping psychological novel from the acclaimed author of Death and the Maiden and Allegro.
The gifted and versatile Ariel Dorfman’s novel, written almost entirely in dialogue, develops a feverish intensity as it charts the relationship between its two principal characters in a setting that is deliberately left vague. A woman, Barbara, has been brought to Paris to see Martin, her lover. At her hotel, she takes a phone call from Leon, who claims to be Martin’s friend and informs her that her lover is doing resistance work and could soon be in great danger. During a series of phone calls that lasts for nine hours, alliances shift and the nature of the men’s political mission becomes both more and, paradoxically, less clear. Leon, a skilled manipulator, seduces Barbara with words, yet he clearly wants something from her that isn’t entirely sexual. By the time their political and personal situations are entirely obvious to the reader, nothing is as it first seemed.
A political novel as well as an acute study in character and obsession, complete with interspersed commentary apparently addressed to the reader and the novelist equally, this brief, tightly constructed work addresses multiple themes. Dorfman uses the tension of an unstable political situation to force the reader into questioning his characters’ stated truths, as well as their motivations.
