![]() ![]() I knew nothing at all about the author before I read this book, so I started from zero. He was epitome of an academic idealist, and he left those remains in the book. ![]() ![]() Dorfman was not a savvy insider or a member of the struggling class. It was hard to take him seriously after that but I tried. In "Heading South, Looking North" my first clue that Dorfman wasn't paying attention to anything outside his own head, was how he "hoped," against all reason and evidence to the contrary, that Allende would be saved at the last minute by some Deus ex machina. They are not brimming with any real insight. These books are good for dipping into a culture and then moving on. They are all three very civilized books that told me nothing I didn't already know, and many things that I did know quite well from a totally different perspective. In that list I would include this book, Rushdie's "The Jaguar Smile," and Teju Cole's "Every Day is for the Thief." All three books were tarnished with the brush of what I call class unconsciousness, by men who have settled into the armchair of the elite-whilst they try to write with sympathy and thinly veiled self aggrandizement, about a place, a time, a set of experiences, and a population that they may claim to know, but don't quite. I found myself putting this book on a new shelf in my mind (I should make a virtual one too) of highly respected authors that fall short with a particular book. ![]()
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