Rach's Reading Club 2024

Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin

So to find a book from South America which interested me, I settled on Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Translated to English by Asa Zatz.

I had never heard of Miguel Littin before, but evidently, he is a Chilean filmmaker who was forced to leave his country and live in Europe when the country fell into the hands of a dictator named Augusto Pinochet. In the early 1980s, he traveled back to his country in secret and made a documentary about the country.

Later, the Colombian journalist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, interviewed him about the experience and ended up with 80 hours of tape. He condensed it to this book which is actually less than 200 pages and it is definitely a worthwhile read even if you don't have much interest in Chilean politics.

In order to get away with this, Littin disguised himself as a Uruguayan businessman and traveled into the country with a female resistance member who was supposed to be his wife. Littin describes this transformation with some detail. He mentions how he not only altered his physical appearance but learned to speak Uruguayan Spanish which is somewhat different from Chilean Spanish. On a similar note, he learned upon his arrival that Chilean Spanish itself had changed since he left which caused problems.

He also spent a month living with his "wife" in France before they came to Chile. He said that during that time, he learned that he could not have really been married to this woman because they were too different.

Throughout the book, there are several incidents. Some suspenseful, some humorous, some touching. At times, I wanted it to go into more detail, but if it did, it would be much longer than 132 pages. As it is, it's just the right length for the topic.