Saturday Review: “The Search for Truth in Ariel Dorfman’s The Suicide Museum” a review by Lisa Wenger Bro of Ariel Dorfman’s novel The Suicide Museum (2023) in NCLR Online Winter 2025
In her review of Ariel Dorfman’s The Suicide Museum Lisa Wenger Bro begins with a discussion of the novel’s hybridity. Dorfman’s story is a complex one dealing with several conflicting ideas, including the death of Chilean President Salvador Allende, which could have been either suicide or murder, and the existence of “the desaparecidos (the disappeared), the hybrid “missing” but dead.”
Bro writes “As a blend of fiction and memoir, the essence of The Suicide Museum is an examination of how fact and fiction blur” both in the history the narrator (a fictionalized version of Dorfman himself) is investigating and in the lives and identities of the novel’s characters. In the course of his investigation Dorfman encounters conflicting stories about the 1973 coup in Chile. He also deals with the more personal, but no less blurred, narrative of his own involvement with the coup. As Bro puts it, Dorfman must deal with the question of “how can both versions be true and coexist simultaneously? Which is the truth and which a lie? Or as Ariel discovers, who needs which truth?”
Bro finishes her review with an assertion that “The Suicide Museum is a novel that raises complicated questions about masculinity, identity, climate change, political and economic ideologies, and more”, and that Dorfman’s exploration of these topics offers both the characters and the audience a chance to gain greater understanding of the world and to heal old wounds.
Read the entire review here in NCLR Online Winter 2025! And order the book from Other Press.
