Books in Brief: The Chilean Spring

The Chilean Spring, by Fernando Alegría, translated by Stephen Fredman (Latin American Literary Review Press, 160 pp., $7.95). This imagined journal by a (real) young photographer-journalist executed by the military shortly after the fall of the Allende government on September 11, 1973 throws no light whatever on Chile’s cataclysmic shift from Left to Right. The preface quotes approvingly Al-lende’s misguided assessment of “This grey and bitter moment, when treason is in the ascendant . . .”; it follows that not a clue is offered to explain why the middle class revolted, why the armed forces eventually joined in, and why Allende proved incapable of ruling once he had brought the economy down in ruins.

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Selden Rodman

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The Chilean Spring, by Fernando Alegría, translated by Stephen Fredman (Latin American Literary Review Press, 160 pp., $7.95). This imagined journal by a (real) young photographer-journalist executed by the military shortly after the fall of the Allende government on September 11, 1973 throws no light whatever on Chile’s cataclysmic shift from Left to Right. The preface quotes approvingly Al-lende’s misguided assessment of “This grey and bitter moment, when treason is in the ascendant . . .”; it follows that not a clue is offered to explain why the middle class revolted, why the armed forces eventually joined in, and why Allende proved incapable of ruling once he had brought the economy down in ruins.