The glory and sad politics of Chile

Desert Memories: Journeys Through the Chilean North; Ariel Dorfman; National Geographic Directions: 284 pp., $21

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Some travel books, especially commissioned works by authors whose names you already know, wind up being superficial, if not downright hollow. Then there are volumes like this one, which tells, sometimes with aching beauty, at least three stories.

One tale -- and you may want to brace yourself for these pulse-quickening words -- is about mineral extraction.

Wait. Come back. It’s about how Chile, famed for the glamour of its lake-filled, mountainous south, owes what prosperity it has to the weird geology of its vast desert north. First through the nitrates trade (the business of making fertilizer from desert dirt that keeps gardens green worldwide) and then through copper mining, the country’s severe northern end has kept Chile’s economy viable, while shortening and constricting the lives of countless miners and other workers.

Through its minerals, author Ariel Dorfman writes, “the Chilean desert [is] scattered almost invisibly to every corner of the globe, stirring inside a snapshot taken in Sri Lanka and a tomato eaten in Chicago and a toy truck running on batteries in Tokyo.”

Wandering through ghost towns and ghost-towns-to-be, listening to lamenting old workers, Dorfman gives us fond reminiscence and activist outrage over a southerly Wild West that few North Americans imagine.

And that activist outrage ties directly to the book’s second story: how Chile’s north, especially the tiny coastal town of Pisagua, became a sort of gulag zone during the Augusto Pinochet era of the 1970s and ‘80s, a dark spell of dictatorship and “disappeared” dissidents that Dorfman narrowly avoided by fleeing the country.

On his way, Dorfman deftly sketches Lautaro Nunez, a survivor of that era, and their mutual friend Freddy Taberna, a charismatic dissenter who was executed in 1973.

“I never thought,” Nunez tells the author at one point, “when I decided to go into archeology, that the techniques I learned in order to detect the remote past I would someday have to employ to look for the bones of one of my dearest buddies. And I’m not the only one -- ask any archeologist or anthropologist in Chile. Every one of them has probably spent some time searching for the remains of former classmates and friends disappeared during the dictatorship.”

The book’s most affecting pages come near its close, when Dorfman takes us to the prison where Taberna was held, then to the site of his execution, retelling the political prisoner’s last days with a harrowing mix of precision and mournful speculation.

The third story here is the book’s weakest. Throughout the travels in 2002 that led to this book, poet, playwright and author Dorfman and his wife, Angelica, carried a secondary task of solving mysteries in the operatic history of her family. In the end, they make a happy breakthrough. But the ins and outs of Angelica’s half-Croatian heritage don’t quite match the striking imagery and wise prose of this book’s other pages. Maybe, as a playwright mindful of his audience, Dorfman liked the idea of a lighter subplot to leaven the bleaker scenes here. Instead he should have trimmed.

But that’s a quibble. Dorfman is a startling writer and an excellent reporter -- another trait not always found in travel projects by big-name authors. Here he is, standing by night near the room where his captive friend Taberna probably drew his last breaths:

“His cell was right behind me, slightly above me in the nocturnal mist that hung on the trees, that dripped from the leaves of the trees. This is what he must have heard on his last night and if I was sure of anything it was that he had not slept at all, he would have been listening to these sounds, the waves and [their] tide of pebbles, the pi-pi-pi lament of seabirds, the barking drone of dogs, the entreaty of the wind.”

*

Eat. Shop. Portland.; Kaie Wellman; Cabazon Books: 152 pp., $9.95 paper

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Wearing glasses,

rose-colored

Kaie Wellman, a fifth-generation Portlander, is the creator, writer, designer and principal photographer of this intriguing, square, stylish paperback. (Volumes on Seattle and Austin will follow.) It makes me want to visit the Oregon city immediately, which is surely one key measure of a guidebook, and it’s full of photos, whimsical description and service information. But be warned: It says nothing about where you should sleep, and there aren’t many critical words to be found; the author has clearly decided that if she can’t say something kind, she’ll say nothing.

*

The Missions of California; Melba Levick (photographs) and Stanley Young (text); Chronicle Books: 144 pp., $19.95 paper

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A coastal tour with 21 stops

Here is the emblematic architecture of California history, a red-tiled theme with 21 variations. This volume is the third edition, colorfully illustrated, of a book that’s been around since 1988. Working its way south to north, as the Franciscans did in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the authors begin with San Diego and end up with Mission San Francisco Solano in Sonoma. Each section on the 21 missions includes a few pages of description and history, directions, a phone number and hours; many include websites.

But events have already overtaken one chapter: Mission San Miguel, eight miles north of Paso Robles, much admired for its enduring original details and long in need of $10 million in repair and restoration, was hit hard in the Dec. 22 earthquake. Now the bill is put at $20 million.

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