In fact, with my son Rodrigo, we decided to adapt the story of a censor who suppresses a book in which he himself is the main character for a science fiction film version called Paradise II, placing the protagonist on a dystopian planet in the future. Or Reader, which is a story and a play, and perhaps a film. Widows is one example of that kind of crossing, where there’s a poem, there’s a novel, there’s a play, there may be a film. In fact, there are several cases where one story, idea, or character travels from one genre to another. Therefore I don’t feel comfortable in only one genre. I’m probably fluctuating across genres perhaps because my identity itself is always in flux. When you have a story to tell, how do you decide which genre to work in?ĪRIEL DORFMAN: I think the genre decides for me-which sounds like a way of avoiding the question unless I explain first that this chameleon-like border crossing, this shifting of genre identities is, I realize, parallel to, or anticipates, or recollects my own life. You have also published more than ten works of essays.

MCCLENNEN: You’ve published eight novels, three plays, a memoir, a travel narrative, as well as collections of poetry and short stories. McClennen interviewed him via telephone as part of the research for her forthcoming book on his work, Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope, to be published by Duke University Press in 2005. His most recent works are a novel co-written with his son, Joaquín, The Burning City (Doubleday 2003) the play Purgatorio (which premiered in London in 2004) an account of the Pinochet case, Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of Augusto Pinochet (Seven Stories 2002) and a travel narrative about the north of Chile, Desert Memories: Journeys Through the Chilean North (National Geographic 2004). The author of eight novels, seven plays, a memoir, and several collections of essays, short stories, and poetry, Dorfman’s international success boomed with Death and the Maiden, a play about the complex and painful issues that confront nations as they transition from dictatorship to democracy. A professor at Duke University, he currently lives in Durham, North Carolina and now considers himself an expatriate. When Augusto Pinochet led a coup in 1973 against Salvador Allende, Dorfman was forced into exile again. They next fled to Chile, where Dorfman eventually gained citizenship. They then became the victims of McCarthyism in 1954, when Dorfman’s father was targeted as a communist threat. His family was forced to move to the United States in 1945 due to anti-Semitism and political intolerance. Dorfman was born in Argentina in 1942 to Jewish immigrants. Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, journalist, and human-rights activist.

Burning City by Ariel Dorfman