Latin American literature always offers great examples of writers committed against authoritarianism in any country. From the Nicaraguan Sergio Ramirez even the very Julio Cortazar and reaching Roberto Ampuero.
Some from the heart of politics and others from activism. All of them always from their literature with those necessary touches to support the due freedom of human beings and modern societies.
Roberto Ampuero also combined his literary passions and his sociopolitical concerns until reaching an early exile that ended with Pinochet's coup d'état in his country at the age of 20.
Marked antecedents, we will now focus on the literary, on the vital result that ends up remaining black on white in a bibliography by Ampuero sometimes loaded with the essential ideology of the writer in search of freedoms. But also a narrative work oriented towards entirely fictional genres, with that black register that captivated with its creepy connection with reality.
Top 3 recommended novels Roberto Ampuero
The last tango of Salvador Allende
The story of Allende, his end ..., of the character made one of the last great political myths. The tragic also serves in the political to enhance the virtues of the current leader.
Ampuero was going through those effusive twenty years that lead through life between insolence, vitality, almost novice youth and the intensity of everything for the better almost always and for the worse at some point of stubbornness. The point is that in this book Ampuero makes his reconstruction of those moments prior to what could have been Salvador Allende's last tango. Because nothing more elegant than to think about his departure, about the lowering of the curtain of his life while executing the last steps of a tango.
And deep down, this is what the idealization in the face of suicide always questioned, in any case, forced by the coup d'état and honorable if it had been, achieves. With Ampuero's vital perspective, we went from the military preparation for the coup, noted by Rufino, a friend of the president, to the recovery of those notes when the world seems to escape from its own shadows as it approaches the XNUMXst century without the burden of endless, cold wars. and hot. Between the two times, a story is being told in which David Kurtz, the retriever of the notebook, faces historical discoveries that not even himself, as a former US intelligence agent, could imagine ...
Sonata of oblivion
This story begins with horns. A musician returns home, eager to melt into his wife's arms after a tour that has taken him away from home too long. But she has not expected it. As soon as he enters the house, the desolate musician discovers that a young man in his twenties is now the one making the strings of his wife's soul vibrate.
The scorned man easily assumes his defeat. It is so easy to feel defeated and surrender to perdition and forgetfulness of oneself... The author himself, Roberto Ampuero, appears on the scene to try to alleviate the violent loss of love. But as happens during writing, the character listens but does not pay attention, and continues to search for his place in the depths of the world, where memories do not reach.
And in his easy descensus Averno You will find the most strange, picturesque and grotesque in society, politicians included. All of them, losers, but also winners wanting to show their fatuous glory in the underworld, will give themselves over to immediate pleasure, to sex... Already in hell, the old musician, forgotten about himself, may discover that things can always be done. influential, powerful friends who can rescue you from the lowest depths to rebuild your soul, already cured of all fear.
Our olive green years
Every writer who has gone through difficult years and who finds himself a survivor in spite of everything, has to take on the task of composing his biography at some point.
Only perhaps, after telling so many stories, with the sediment of memories making their own in that incorporation of new aromas that perhaps did not exist at the time things happened, the biography becomes an autobiographical novel. But if so, then go to confession and that's it. We all know that part will be rescued from reality and the other will be duly disposed of by that historical memory that ends up sifting from illusions ...
But of course, writing a biography of a certain period of time implies doing a social chronicle exercise. In the case of Ampuero, with his exile and his intense days lived, history ends up reaching historical transcendence on hopeful ideologies of social transformation and hopeless defeats, discoveries that the political systems that sold the most hope ended up betraying everyone.
Please find a real translator to rewrite the article. I can do it if you want. I am an American and a translator. It is almost impossible to understand the English of the article. Maybe Google Translate was used? I love Ampuero's novels but I couldn't understand the translation as it is.