A Tale of three exiles (4 actually): Kundera, Singer and Allende (and me!)

I've been slowly reading (for the 3rd time), Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits, and I've been reading the fictionalised, but true to history account of the coup and imposition of martial law in Chile.

Page after page of unrelenting horror.

What sticks out is that people thought that a coup couldn't happen here, could it.

And, then when it happened, they were in denail.

The right which had sanctioned it, expected the generals to hand power back to Parliament once they had sorted out the mess Allende was supposed to have got the country into, a mess orchestrated by the CIA and ITT.

Funny that three of my favourite books, all of which fall into the category of one or other kinds of magic realism, are written against the background of a coup or foreign invasion.

Milan Kundera's the unbearable Lightness of Being.

I read two essays by Milan Kundera on the Jewish contribution of the culture of Mitteleuropa (Mahler, Kafka), and how, after the annihilation of the Jews partitioning of Europe at Yalta, Central Europe ceased to exist and pan-slavism was imposed, and an extract from this book in the literary magazine, granta, in a hotel room in Arrezzo, one weekend back in 1985.

Because there was a long queue for the only copy of the English translation of this book when it came out later that year, I decided to buy it in Spanish and read it on the long trainride through the ever-changing landscape (greenery, desert, mountains) between the Basque country where I was living at the time and Madrid.

I had already begun to speak falteringly, and read, Spanish, but found the thick accent of Las Arenas very difficult to understand.

When I got to Madrid, I found I could speak Spanish better, either that, or the Madrilenos speak Spanish much more clearly.

I managed to book a hotel room without trouble at the station, and awoke the following morning feeling that I could speak a whole new language!

The second book is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Slave, about a Jew living in Poland in the aftermath of Bogdan Chmielnizki’s Cossack incursions into Poland in the seventeenth century.

And the third Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits.

Which brings me to the main point of this comment.

If the Chilean middle-classes thought that a coup could not possibly happen in Chile, are we any wiser?

Of, course it couldn’t happen here, could it?

Could it?

A happy new year everybody!