The Tipping Point

Originally published in 2010, Arturo Fontaine's novel La Vida Doble has now appeared in an excellent English translation (by Megan McDowell) under exactly the same title.
I don’t know that a more commercially driven publisher than Yale University Press would have allowed this but I have read that English readers can work out that ‘doble’ means double and have probably heard of ‘vida’ as life.
‘Double Life’ is very firmly set in the Chile of Salvador Allende and Pinochet and has – a good sign – managed to upset many with vested interests in their version of events. At one level it is the stuff of thrillers but, despite for example, an excellent account of an armed robbery in which a very short period of time is slowed down and heightened, it does not read like a thriller but something very much grimmer and more harrowing.
It is an exhaustive and careful account of people under unbearable pressure and particularly one person, then a young woman with a small daughter, now a woman dying of cancer and speaking in Sweden to a journalist. She has several names – Irene, Lorena, La Cubanita – given to her as aliases by others. She is a pawn but a pawn prone to self-justification, vanity, guilt and hopelessness.
The historical background to this is that a woman really did crack and moved from armed revolution in a left wing group to working for her torturers and indeed joining them.
The book begins with torture. The woman does not break when physically brutalised.  She is released. What she cannot resist three months later when her torturers have worked out who she is, is the threat to her five year old daughter. She recognises the moment she switches sides, transfers her loyalties and a perverse sort of love to the people who had treated her so badly.
Stockholm syndrome exists. Reading of a particularly brutal case of it may seem depressing. It may even shock. But there is an element here of a gruesome fairy tale of what happens to girls who need approval, want to be attractive, want to love and be on the right side of history. There is a funny scene in which the main character is sent to Paris and behaves like a groupie dropping her university degree to the floor like a paper napkin when she see the great Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar. In Chile, her side have the aspects of a cult – she does not know who anybody really is (for security they all have aliases). And the poor are tediously recalcitrant when it comes to armed revolution.   
Arturo Fontaine is a founding member of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile. La Vida Doble however is not limited to Chile. Similar brutality is happening now in maI don’t recommend this novel as a thriller – I do recommend it as a timeless account of what happens when extremism takes hold of the political process.
One of my deepest impressions of my time in Spain was the bafflement, the look of sheer incomprehension on the faces of the young when they learnt what their grandparents had done during the Spanish Civil War.  ‘And in the name of what?’ one disbelieving girl said.
La Vida Doble does not explain that – but it does explain the dynamics of what can happen anywhere. History can be a mincer.