
Savage Detective
The Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra was born in 1975, two years after the violent military coup that ousted Chile’s democratically elected, Socialist president, Salvador Allende. It would be impossible to overstate the shattering impact of that coup, not only on Chile but on the entire Left in Latin America. It was the darkest event in one of South America’s darkest decades.
I was staying in Mendoza, Argentina, at the time of the coup, only 112 miles from the Chilean capital, Santiago, but separated from it by the Andes, a monolithic, glacial divide. Conservative Chileans, who had shipped