The Suicide Museum: A Novel

(Paperback)

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In this "murder mystery memoir," a Dutch billionaire and Holocaust survivor named Joseph Hortha hires writer "Ariel" to investigate Salvador Allende's mysterious death in the 1973 coup in Chile, in the hopes of discovering whether Allende committed suicide or was murdered. Dorfman takes us along a spectacular journey, from Washington, DC and New York City, to Santiago and Valparaiso, and finally to London. Along the way, we witness a midnight gravedigging scene, are tracked by stealthy stalkers, and interview sources of varying credibility to discover what transpired at La Moneda. Through this gripping investigation, Joseph and Ariel attempt to redeem themselves, as they are both plagued by guilt. While Joseph grapples with how he has made his fortune unwittingly destroying his beloved planet, Ariel is haunted by the fact that his absence at the coup led to the disappearance of his friend. What begins as a puzzling quest unwinds into a fabulous saga about our duties to the world, one another, and ourselves.

Reviews

The wildly brilliant Ariel Dorfman has outdone himself with this rivetingly original and mesmerizingly profound supernova of a novelThe Suicide Museum is so many perfect things: a globetrotting mystery, a courageous journey into Chiles nightmare past, a tender paean to the bonds that keep us human, but above all its just about the best book Ive read in a decade.Junot Daz, author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Awardwinning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Suicide Museum is a memoir, a mystery, a tragedy, a philosophical treatise,a song of homecoming, and a spectacular mix of the real and the imagined.In this novel Ariel Dorfman puts his whole literary life on the pageand what a life it has been!For decades Dorfman has written in defiance of the ordinary.He gets to the very pulse of who we are: the social, the political, the artistic, and beyond. Right down to its moment of last-line grace, The Suicide Museum keeps the essential questions alive and, at the same time, joins us all together. Colum McCann, National Book Awardwinning author of Let the Great World Spin

Author Bio

Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American author whose books in many genres have been published in more than fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries. Among his works are the plays Death and the Maiden and Purgatorio, the novels Widows and Konfidenz, and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. He writes regularly for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Guardian, El Pais, and CNN. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, and Index on Censorship, among others. A prominent human rights activist, he worked as cultural advisor to Salvador Allende in the final months before the 1973 military coup, and later spent many years in exile. He lives with his wife Angelica in Santiago, Chile, and Durham, North Carolina, where he is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.