Dorfman, Ariel

New York. 1983. May 1983. Pantheon Books. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0394527127. Translated from the Spanish by Stephen Kessler. 147 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Bascove. keywords: Literature Translated Chile Latin America . FROM THE PUBLISHER - In a country ruled by a military regime, in a village where most men have been taken away as rebels, on a dusty riverbank, a body, unrecognizably battered by water and rocks, washes ashore. An old peasant woman, missing her tow sons, her husband, and her father, claims the body and refuses to turn it over to the local military officials for an anonymous burial. Within days, thirty-seven such women have come forward to claim the body, each in the name of a different ‘disappeared' man. Military officers, a judge, and a powerful landowner and his brother, believing a conspiracy is afoot, try to convince, intimidate, or force the women to turn over the body. In this spare book, Dorfman spins out a complex, moving drama of a nation under siege and vividly creates a village where the servile and the arrogant, the weary and the caste-conscious, the religious and the romantic struggle to survive. In the end, though, the book is the women's, for it is they who resist the soldiers, question the dictatorship, unsettle the officers, and in a final moment when two side face each other on the same riverbank. The setting is ostensibly Nazi-occupied Greece in 1940, but Dorfman's Greece could be Argentina, El Salvador, Chile, or a host of other places around the world today. Only the classic power and the tragedy embodied in this stark, wise book are truly Greek. WIDOWS is a rare book, a political novel that works at the deepest human level. inventory #2984 ISBN: 0394527127.