Chilean military junta period

The Chilean military junta period enters the narrative both as the historical condition that drove Óscar Amalfitano from Chile and as the political atmosphere surrounding a disputed book published in 1978. The period is not presented through a continuous account of government or public events. Instead, it emerges in memories of exile and in Amalfitano’s reading of Lonko Kilapan, whose text leads him to consider how authoritarian power might shape, appropriate, or become indistinguishable from literary language.

Exile and the consequences of the coup

In a conversation with the European critics, Amalfitano explains that he was in Argentina in 1974 because the coup in Chile had obliged him to go into exile. He apologizes for the grandness of the word, observing that everything becomes a habit. His account makes the political rupture concrete through its personal consequence: a change of country that he later describes, not simply as catastrophe, but as a movement that can help abolish what people usually call fate.

Amalfitano’s retrospective formulation does not erase the coercive circumstance behind his departure. He was not describing an abstract preference for travel; he connects his presence in Argentina directly to the coup. Yet his later understanding of exile as a movement also complicates a purely tragic account. What forced a break in one life can, in retrospect, appear to have loosened the grip of an expected destiny.

A book published under dictatorship

Amalfitano’s reflections on the period gather around Dieste’s geometry book, which hangs outside his window, and around his consideration of a separate work attributed to Lonko Kilapan. He imagines the 1978 publication being negotiated with printers at Editorial Universitaria on Calle San Francisco in Santiago. The imagined scene is specific: Kilapan bargains over the printing cost, invokes two further books supposedly already completed, and appeals to the prestige of having a book published by that institution. The word “distinguished,” and the promise of distinction, become the point that persuades the printer to offer a discount.

That imagined transaction is set against the publication date. Because the book appeared in 1978, Amalfitano sees it as emerging during the military dictatorship, in an atmosphere he characterizes as one of triumph, loneliness, and fear. His scene is not an independently verified account of how the book was produced; it is a conjectural reconstruction prompted by his reading. The distinction matters: the passage shows political pressure entering the reader’s imagination, but it does not settle who actually wrote the book or how its publication was arranged.

Authorship, political language, and suspicion

The book’s opening assertion—that the Yekmonchi, called Chile, was geographically and politically identical to the Greek state—strikes Amalfitano as a provocation. He considers incompatible possibilities: Kilapan might be a straw figure serving an intelligence officer or a general with intellectual ambitions; the named author, the Indigenous Confederation of Chile, and the Academy of the Araucanian Language might not exist as represented. He even entertains the possibility that Kilapan is a pseudonym for Augusto Pinochet. These are Amalfitano’s suspicions, not facts established by the narrative.

His doubts do not stop at one political leader. He imagines that the book’s prose could belong to Pinochet, but also to Aylwin, Lagos, Frei, or a right-wing authoritarian; he then expands the possibility until Kilapan’s writing seems to contain the styles and political factions of Chile as a whole. The movement from a suspected mask to an all-encompassing national voice makes authorship unstable: the question is no longer only who wrote the book, but whether political language can be cleanly separated from the country and its conflicting histories.

Historical memory and the limits of comparison

The novel places Amalfitano’s Chilean reflections beside other accounts of violence and its public recognition, without making those histories interchangeable. In a discussion of earlier societies, a speaker contrasts deaths treated as socially legible with mass deaths that failed to produce comparable public attention, including the killing of thousands during the Paris Commune. That contrast helps clarify the broader concern with whose suffering enters public language and whose remains outside it. It does not equate the Commune with the Chilean dictatorship; rather, the juxtaposition draws attention to recurring failures of recognition and representation.

Elsewhere, the novel’s account of a young Archimboldi wearing a black leather jacket that recalled, to the Swabian cultural promoter, jackets associated with Gestapo officers places postwar memory in another register. The association belongs to the observer’s recollection and to the clothing’s historical suggestion, not to a claim that the wearer was an officer. Likewise, the critics’ later speculation that Archimboldi might be a World War II deserter on the run is speculation about him, not evidence about the Chilean junta. Across these distinct histories, the narrative lets political violence and its aftermath surface through objects, recollections, and conjecture, while preserving the difference between what is known and what a character suspects.