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9781854593764

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'A remarkable attempt to dramatise in a semi-mythical way the consequences of the recent appalling abuses of human rights' * Independent on Sunday *

Dorfman, a Chilean novelist in exile, introduces his novella with a foreword aiming it directly at the political situation in Chile, though the book itself is set in German-occupied WW II Greece. And indeed the anger here registers beyond one place and time: the story is deliberately unparticularized, universalized. Sofia Angeles, an old Greek country matriarch, has been robbed of all her family's men - father, husband, two sons - by the military authorities, who accuse the Angeles men of being subversives. Now, day by day, still other male bodies come floating down the local river: bloated and unrecognizable corpses that the military government wants quickly removed, hidden. However, the women of the town, all 37 of them, the widows of the title, claim each body as individually theirs - frustrating all attempts at disposal of such evidence of wanton murder. To the officer in charge, this choral and obdurate claim is collective hysteria ; yet, as a tactic of responsibility (and threat), it first haunts him - and then starts to undo him. Dorfman presents the women (in black, huddled as one) very visually, strongly conveying the stench of torture, of silent reproach. His point, at the end, is made starkly: There were the bodies that someone was dumping with premeditated efficiency upriver, the bodies that would go on turning up later, perhaps by accident, in cesspools, ravines, crossroads, and they'd have to keep killing so that no one would ask where they came from, who'd put them there, why, how, how much longer. And though the story becomes monotonous, with a single idea that never develops into fully-characterized fiction, the 37 widows make for a powerful image - in a thin yet vivid slice of polemical fable-telling. (Kirkus Reviews)

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Ariel Dorfman, born in Argentina in 1942, is a Chilean citizen who was forced into exile after the 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende and established General Pinochet as dictator. His numerous books have been translated into over twenty languages. Tony Kushner is an American playwright and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for his play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Tony Kushner's other plays include A Bright Room Called Day; Hydriotaphia, or The Death of Dr. Brown; The Illusion, adapted from the play by Pierre Corneille; Slavs!; Homebody/Kabul; Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures; and The Visit, adapted from the play by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. His translations include S. Y. Ansky's The Dybbuk; Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Sezuan and Mother Courage and Her Children; and the libretto for Hans Krása and Adolf Hoffmeister's Brundibár, a children's opera for which he wrote a curtain-raiser, But the Giraffe! He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols's film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg's Munich and Lincoln. His books include The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; Brundibar, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon. Among many honours, Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.

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