To Die in Berlin

By Carlos Cerda

Wrought through personal experience and a clear-eyed perception of exile in the 1970s, this historically based novel relates the lives of Chileans taking refuge in East Germany. Delving into their... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1891270028
• ISBN13: 9781891270024
• Release Date: June 1999
• Publisher: Latin American Literary Review Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.5" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

This is one terrific book

To Die in Berlin is obviously a book about exile and the situation of Chilean exiles during the Pinocet dictatorship. It is also a book about East Germany and the forces at work in the 80's that were undermining the Communist regime. But for all of the interest in the social and political background of the book, what is really most wonderful is Cerda's exploration of the psychology of his characters--all of his characters. He deftly goes into the heads of each of them: Mario the fiction writer and academic who has left his Chilean wife for a young German woman whose father is a high level minister in the East German government; Lorena, the abandoned wife, who gave up her career as an actress to follow her husband into exile; Don Carlos the dying Chilean communist who rose from the hell of Chile's nitrate mines to become a friend and associate of Neruda and Allende, and Leni, Don Carlos' beautiful young neighbor, a ballerina whose career in East Germany is frozen because of her father's defection to the West. While the action of the book is driven by both the political situation and by the desires of the characters themselves, Cerda explores how those two forms of motivation determine the lives of his characters, and, in the process, reveals that we are all, to some extent, prisoners of forces that are really outside our control, and, indeed, that control itself may not really be possible in human life. In other words, Cerda both explores his characters' circumstances and transcends them. It is a book about Chilean exiles but it is also a book about human beings. Unlike many small press translations of foreign literature, there is nothing stilted or wooden in this wonderful translation and it is even easy to forget that the book was not orignially written in English. It is a superb book and anyone interested in Chile or the former East Germany will find it interesting, but anyone who likes really well written psychological fiction will also enjoy this book.