Caravana de recuerdos has a bilingual review of Gabriel García Márquez’s Clandestine in Chile. The book sounds interesting for the adventure of the story, but also to see García Márquez as not only a novelist, but a journalist. It is a very short review (half of it is right here) but it is a good an introduction to the book as any, and sometimes brevity is best.

How cool, how absolutely cool, to be able to close out my 2010 reading year with this little gem of a book.  The year is 1985.  After a long absence in exile abroad, Chilean film director Miguel Littín, “who figures among a list of 5,000 exiles absolutely forbidden to return to their country,” resolves to return to Chile in order to shoot a documentary about “the reality of his country after twelve years of military dictatorship”  (7). Passing himself off as an Uruguayan businessman with false papers and an unconvincing Uruguayan accent, Littín spends six weeks undercover in Chile working with three European film crews to try and “pin the tale on the Pinochet donkey” (22).  My, how I loved this work!  Although it reads like a spy novel, the key moments in this first-person, non-fiction account poignantly underscore the Pinochet regime’s oppressive nature and the will of the Chilean people to live with dignity in spite of the political difficulties.