Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin (Paperback)

“Clandestine in Chile is a memoir of Mr. Littin’s six-week adventure, as told to and recast by Mr. Garcia Marquez, and a sketch for what the latter calls the film behind the film, the personal story he finds more moving than the original film project. The idea is moving, indeed dazzling...[Gabriel Garcia Márquez] seems chiefly to have lent some of his own quietly lyrical cadences to certain images and chapter endings…he evokes well the haunting cold of autumn in Chile, and gently registers the exile’s nostalgias and surprises.” –Michael Wood, The New York Times

“Garcia Marquez has written a terse political thriller with shafts of insight into conflicts of identity.” –Newsweek

“It is excellent journalism...this book remains an interesting historical document—smuggled across the Chilean border like contraband—of what life was like under the old dictator…I have never read a book that pokes quite such irreverent fun at the dangers of military power.” –The Independent (London)

“In Garcia Marquez’s prose, Littin’s actions become truly heroic and the clandestine hero achieves the grandeur of all popular heroes…readers now have the story of a magnificent civil disobedience.” –The Globe and Mail (Canada)

“Garcia Marquez’s book is based on hours of taped interviews with Littin, and is retold in the first person, which gives it suspense and immediacy and brings embattled Chile vividly to life…it portrays a government without legitimacy, a people living in fear and a resistance movement determined to fight for change.” –The Sunday Times (London)

“A rousing adventure story, this is also the best reportage available about conditions in Chile today.”

“Fluid and full of surprises.” –The Washington Post

“Two foremost artists of Latin America meet in this breathtaking story…Clandestine is a fascinating literary journey…the book alone is celebration enough of human ingenuity and determination. I recommend it wholeheartedly.” –Marjorie Agosin, The Christian Science Monitor

“Marquez re-creates the story brilliantly from taped interviews with Littin and writes it in first person.” –Claire Scobie, The Sun Hearld (Sydney)

“An extraordinary if Chaplinesque adventure which would make good comedy if it did not take place against the background of one of the most repressive regimes in modern times…[it succeeds] as a reporting style swinging freely between effervescence and emotionalism.” –Courrier Mail

In 1973, the portly, dark-haired, bearded film director Miguel Littín fled Chile after a U.S.-supported military coup toppled the democratically elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende, replacing it with the rule of General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet’s cruel reign was to last some seventeen years, during which Chile was turned into a laboratory for the economic ideas of Milton Friedman, leading to a society where the rich became richer and the poor much poorer, and the government was sustained by an ongoing reign of terror. In 1985, Littín returned to Chile, now slim and clean-shaven, with a false name, false passport, and false wife. Pretending to be a Uruguayan businessman, he was bent on making a movie that told the truth about life under Pinochet.

This is the story of Littín’s escapade, which was a journey to a risky and in many ways unexpected new country—and into his own complicated feelings as an exile. Gabriel García Márquez brings all his gifts as a novelist to the telling Littín’s tale, revealing the unreal essence of life in a country where the plain truth was inadmissible. Clandestine in Chile is a true-life adventure story and a classic of modern reportage.