Darwin's Ghosts

by Ariel Dorfman

From the author of Death and the Maiden and other works that explore relations of power in the postcolonial world comes the story of a man whose distant past comes to haunt him. Is the sordid story behind human zoos that flourished in Europe in the nineteenth century connected somehow to a boy's life a hundred years later?

On Fitzroy Foster's fourteenth birthday on September 11, 1981, he receives an unexpected and unwelcome gift: when his father snaps his picture with a Polaroid, another person's image appears in the photo. Fitzroy and his childhood sweetheart, Cam, set out on a decade-long journey in search of this stranger's identity—and to reinstate his own—across seas and continents, into the far past and the evil and good that glint in the eyes of the elusive visitor. Seamlessly weaving together fact and fiction, Darwin's Ghosts holds up a different light to Conrad's "The horror! The horror!" and a different kind of answer to the urgent questions, Who are we? And what can we do about it?

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, The United States Of America, Latin American Literature, Literature, Magical Realism

304 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2018

About the author

Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman is an Argentine-Chilean novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. A citizen of the United States since 2004, he has been a professor of literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina since 1985.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chilean-American author and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman is both a leading Latin American man of letters and one of the most important cultural and political critics living in the United States. Among his many works is world-renowned play Death and the Maiden subsequently made into the 1994 film by director Roman Polanski starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley.

With recently published Darwin’s Ghosts Mr. Dorfman has written a novel for our time. Penetrating, profound and highly stimulating, Darwin’s Ghosts grabbed me right from the first pages and kept me eagerly reading on – the story was so engrossing, almost to the point of hypnotic, I could hardly put the book down.

Here’s the opening: the tale’s narrator, American whiz kid Roy, short for Fitzroy, Foster recounts the defining event of his life back in 1981: on his fourteenth birthday, having just masturbated for the very first time (bye, bye boyhood), he joins his mom, dad and two younger brothers downstairs for a birthday celebration. His father wants to catch this special Polaroid moment with his new SX-70 and “click” takes a photo of his family all smiling for the camera. Perfect shot, only there’s a problem – Roy's head is not Roy's; it’s the head of a young man with black eyes, high cheekbones, snub nose, thick lips and bad Beatles haircut looking straight out at the photographer with one hell of a rebellious, inscrutable attitude.

Dad can’t believe his eyes. Must be a technical glitch (Mr. Foster is Vice President of Marketing for the Polaroid Company). He insists on another shot and yet another, this time a close up. “Click.” "Click." Same result. Roy snatches the close up photo from shocked Dad and the entire family peers at the stranger’s strange head atop Roy's familiar body.

Thus, in the rich tradition of Latin American magical realism, we have a tale of the fabulous, but not in a Colombian village, not in a suburb of Santiago, Chile, not in an Amazonian outpost, not in an ancient Mayan temple, but set in good old apple pie Yankee New England, Cambridge, Massachusetts to be specific.

So, the question arises – how will our affluent all-American family deal with an infusion of Latin American fabuloso instantly injected into their lives? Perhaps predictably, Mom and Dad’s initial reaction is entirely pragmatic, to investigate the strange phenomenon using the power of reason via medicine, science and especially technology.

As a sensible first step, Mr. Foster stacks up every camera in the house, not only other Polaroids but also a number from archrival Kodak. “Click” “Click” Click” “Click” “Click.” He then goes off to develop the photos himself and returns home to announce with glee, “It’s every photo from every camera. All brands are equally liable! Look, look, look!” Roy is not surprised his father’s first priority is Polaroid since his father is a company man through and through and his family has a history with famous Polaroid stretching back to his paternal grandfather.

The final, irrevocable decision is made jointly by Roy's parents: none of this is to be made public (ah, the ravenous media and even more ravenous researchers can't get their hands on our son Roy!). Other than several visits to be tested by X-ray machines and a plethora of other medical devises, Roy is to remain indoors since, after all, everyone nowadays owns a camera and there always looms the possibility of a stray photo.

But there’s one other critically important person in Roy’s confined orbit, the love of his life he discovered back when a member of the school swim team: Cameron aka Cam Wood. Cam is also a whiz kid, eventually studying physics and biology at MIT and graduating in a record three years.

Cam picks up more directly with Roy after college and both form a husband/wife detective team to hunt down answers to two key questions: 1) Who is Roy's strange visitor, and 2) What does he want? Actually, the love Roy and Cam have for each other gives the tale an epic, almost mythic quality, one of the more endearing, elegant aspects of the novel.

And herein lies much of the juice of Darwin’s Ghosts. The young couple’s investigations and research lead to a number of disturbing, despicable chapters in the treatment of indigenous peoples in centuries past, brutality and dehumanization focused particularly within the nineteenth century. One such atrocity – eleven tribespeople from Patagonia in southern Chile kidnapped in 1889 to be put on exhibit as a human zoo in Paris.

Those human zoos where the product of many, many decades of harsh, thuggish judgement made by people from the world and culture of Europe. Roy unearths one such culprit, the son of Captain Cook, a young man by the name of Georg Forster (gulp! – one letter away from his own name). Georg joined his father on a voyage around the world in 1772-1775 and described the Patagonians as filthy and degenerate before going on to say “the whole assemblage of their features that formed the most loathsome picture of misery and wretchedness to which human nature can possibly be reduced," and capped off his rant by accusing the Patagonians of being “insensible to the superiority of European civilization.”

As ruthless and cruel as this chapter of history, let me point out the tone of this well-written novel is not heavy-handed or overly preachy. In many respects Roy is well aware of the dangers of preaching since his mother stressed the fact missionaries destroyed much of aboriginal cultures under the pretext of saving souls.

Reading Mr. Dorfman’s novel, I hear echoes of Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent as well as a number of other works by the Uruguayan author who wrote in an attempt to rescue the kidnapped memory of Latin America. One particular quote stand out: “In 1492, the natives discovered they were Indians, discovered they lived in America, discovered they were naked, discovered that sin existed, discovered they owed allegiance to a King and Kingdom from another world and a God from another sky, and that this God had invented the guilty and dress, and had sent to be burnt alive whoever worships the sun, the moon, the earth and the rain that wets it.”

I link this Eduardo Galeano quote with the very first lines of Darwin’s Ghosts: “It came a bit after dawn, the dark condition that was to plague me, so sudden that I was unable at first to give it a name. How to know right away that it had been incubating inside some ancient zone of myself and my ancestors for one hundred years, begin to guess that it had infected the vast, blind world for far longer?”

To what extent are we as members of a highly technical, highly advanced civilization carrying the ghosts of other peoples, other cultures, other civilizations? To explore such questions, I recommend Ariel Dorfman’s well-researched, compelling, philosophical novel. I guarantee it will prove a reading experience that will stick with you for a long time.


19th century stupidity and cruelty in action - Indigenous tribespeople kidnapped and brought to Europe to be put on display as part of a human zoo

[Gautam Bhatia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I went into this expecting something along the lines of Death and the Maiden and Heading North, Looking South. I came out of it with my head spinning. This is perhaps the most wildly creative novel I've read in recent times, even though not all of it always hangs together, and even though the resolutions are sometimes too pat (you see the ending coming from a mile away).

Dorfman's accomplished the seemingly impossible task of writing, in 2018, a novel about colonialism that is completely fresh, original, and like nothing that's ever been written before. The intellectual pyrotechnics reminded me of Laurent Binet's The Seventh Function of Language; the relationship between photography and colonialism had echoes of Maaza Mengiste's The Shadow King; the grant historical sweep was reminiscent of Vasquez's The Secret History of Costaguana; and parts of it were evidently inspired from the best traditions of Latin American magical realism. As mentioned above, there were a bunch of bitty little flaws (and the characterisation could have been better), but this is one of those books where even when it fails, it fails greatly, and you're tempted to ignore the failures simply because of how dazzling the effort is.

I don't want to add to the blurb as that will necessarily entail spoilers, so yes - just read this book.

[Nilo0 · Rating 4 out of 5]

یه کتاب عجیب و خاص. با موضوع خیلی عجیب‌تر

فیتسری پسریه که از 14 سالگی به بعد توی همه عکس‌هاش، به‌جای صورتش، صورت یه موجود بدوی عجیب روی عکس‌هاش ظاهر می‌شه.
توی ظاهرش هیچی مشخص نیست و فقط توی عکس مشخصه.
موضوع عجیب و کنجکاوی‌برانگیزیه که برمی‌گرده به چندین نسل قبل از اجدادش که این فردی که روی عکس‌ها ظاهر می‌شه از چه قوم‌وقبیله‌ایه و چی بهش گذشته که تصمیم گرفته در زمان حال و اونم روی عکس‌های فیتسری ظاهر شه.

داستان افت‌وخیز زیادی داشت. گاهی روندش کند می‌شه و گاهی تند. گاهی خسته‌کننده و گاهی جذاب. اما درمجموع یه داستان خاص و متفاوت بود که اطلاعات تاریخی جالبی داشت.

[Lori · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was a noble attempt to shine some light on a neglected historical tragedy, but unfortunately the result just felt preachy and pedantic. Now add to that a cartoonish villain and a love interest with absolutely no life outside the male protagonist (Fitzroy vanishes without warning when they're both fourteen and she spends the next seven years single and celibate, and then immediately dedicates her entire existence to solving his problems when they meet again), and you have a book that is almost amateurish in execution. I wonder if part of the problem was Dorfman (an immigrant from Chile and Argentina) choosing to write in English instead of his native Spanish. While I'm deeply impressed that he was able to compose a whole novel in a second language, the prose, while technically highly proficient, felt stiff and awkwardly formal to me. Disappointing.

[Deena Metzger · Rating 5 out of 5]

[From Tikkun by Deena Metzger] After many years, Ariel Dorfman, who has been writing essays, memoir, stories, plays, poetry and countless articles for news agencies and journals, has returned to the novel. For those of us who met him through his fiction, Widows, for example, this is most welcome for it allows him to engage the full range of his incisive imagination. A Chilean-American author, agile in two languages, writing alternately in one and then translating into the other as a way of honing his prose precisely, Dorfman has taken it on himself to speak truth to power, both to Chile, through, for example, Death and the Maiden and Feeding on Dreams and to the U.S. with his latest Homeland Security Ate My Speech: Messages From the End of the World. In doing so, Dorfman speaks to the world.

Darwin’s Ghosts benefits from Dorfman’s facility in navigating many worlds. The prose style of the linear contemporary novel is infused with the tradition of magic realism, if not in its language, in its storytelling. The binary form is apt; the extraordinary is grounded in the commonplace. This novel insists that we accept the events depicted as real. Our ethical lives depend upon it.

A young American boy has his photograph taken for his fourteenth birthday. Fitzroy Foster – any relationship to the Robert Fitzroy, Captain of the HMS Beagle is to be noted – is an ordinary boy, in the ways white middle-class and upper class American boys are so very ordinary while expecting to be special. He is part of a wealthy nuclear family, has two brothers, a devoted, self-sacrificing mother, and an executive father working for Polaroid obsessed with corporate success. Fitz is a math whiz, is on the swimming team, has a girlfriend, Cam [sic} Wood, his equal as a swimmer who surpasses him in intellect and ingenuity. He is on the brink of sexual anxiety, exploration and discovery, his future unknown but predictable. Like most such privileged white Americans boys, he is innocent, oblivious, limited, and as one notable moment in the novel indicates –

“I turned to the river, crept to the water’s edge, until I found a pond among the reeds, and searched for my reflection and again recognized the young man who had awoken to his birthday, that very morning, an eternity ago.”

– narcissistic.

The camera, a primary tool of acquisition, is at the core of the book; the landscape is photography. Fitz has not yet learned, what he and everyone else in this family will learn, that cameras can steal souls, at the click of the shutter, as a device of western culture’s hunger to capture and exploit whatever it can. Cameras may not be innocent instruments and we may all be responsible. Like everyone else, Fitz is looking for his own image, not ‘the other.”

But on this morning, at the opening of the book, it is ‘the other’ who appears at “the Polaroid moment of familial bliss” and then consecutively, every time Roy is photographed. ‘The other.’ A monster. A ghost. A face from the past, a visitor, superimposed upon his own recognizable body.

“The eyes of that man, his wild overgrown mop of black hair, his snub nose and high cheekbones, his thick aboriginal lips with barely a white hint of teeth flickering between them, his surly enigmatic look…. The eyes, the dark eyes. [18]

An ancestor. Not literally a forefather or a primogenitor, but as contemporary wisdom about ancestors and making amends informs us, someone who came before, someone with whom we are mysteriously and irrevocably intertwined, though unaware. Someone whose pain we carry or someone whose deeds we must amend. The consequences of epigenetics: trauma passed on and or the ancestors speaking.

Fitzroy Foster is the narrator of his experience. A coming of age story? Initiation? A hero’s journey? Close but not quite. There are two stories of identity here. One is of the young narrator, who, because of the ghost coming into vision, like the details of a Polaroid manifesting out of the haze, must learn who he is outside of the superficial life to which he presumed he was entitled. The second story is of “the other,” whose identity, life story, suffering must be recognized, acknowledged and met.

This is complex. The lives of a naïve young man and his confident and determined lover, depend on their entering an exhaustive and rigorous examination of colonial history, our love of power, our belief in progress, science and privilege.

[Cam] would leave early in the morning and come back late at night, full of date and exhibitions notices, names of entrepreneurs, and explorers and photographers. …Most of the victims were anonymous, forgotten by history except for a solitary snapshot, while those responsible for their captivity had led well-known lives. Kidnappers like … French entrepreneur Jean Tauver and his Kula tribe from Equatorial Guinea shown in Madrid and Xavier Pene, the owner of a plantation in Dahomey, who transported sixty-seven Africans against their will to Chicago in 1893. …The victims …far outnumbered the criminals… wild anything and anybody from the Philippines and Indonesia and Abyssinia and the Sudan …a perpetual planetary tour of horrors.” [198]

Their survival depends on challenging the assumption “of the superiority of European Civilization” and the unexamined and tragic consequences for the Earth, Indigenous peoples and ourselves. Two streams of ancestors—the perpetrators and ‘the others’ who suffered unbearably.

Why give such an intricate story to an innocent, unformed, uninformed, about to be entirely cloistered fourteen year old who will only be twenty-six at its conclusion? Because it is our story, our innocence, our obliviousness and narcissism that must be examined and transformed, because the original tragedies and violations continue into this time and so we are asked, as Fitzroy is asked, to accept the ghosts of our Darwinian past as our own:

“…there he was, on paper and sepia, something she could touch and carry and examine and track and hunt down like a wayward cancerous tumor, a palpable sample of evidence from the outside world of history that antedated his incursion into Fitzroy Foster’s life and therefore her own … a Patagonian Indian brought to Paris along with ten other members of his tribe …. They had been exhibited at the 1889 Exposition Universelle that celebrated on hundred years of liberté, egalité and fraternité. …The name of the savage was of no consequence…” [69]

Dorfman’s choice of a young narrator allows for a breathless, as if hormonally driven examination of the past, its consequences and the persistence of our most beloved shibboleths of entitlement, impelled by his desire to be free of the ghost, to see his own face. He wants to be a free man, wants to be freed from captivity, but so did his ‘visitor.’ The book suggests, when such apparitions occur, we are shackled to each other. Our relationship to history and what our ancestors perpetrated might well become a plague of recognition capable of freeing the present from the pernicious influence of our pasts.

“Who knows how many men and women are also haunted by ghosts from the past, just waiting for us to find them.” (p. 196)

Fitzroy wants to be free. What does ‘the visitor’ want? What does the past want? The past, like the’ visitor,’ also wants to be free. But for Fitzroy to be free, he must discover and take responsibility for the actions of remote ancestors who, until entering this search, were unknown to him. But neither innocence nor ignorance can redeem him. He must bear witness and disentangle himself from the commonplace values that approved exhibition, experimentation, imposed exile, enslavement of ‘the others’ for one’s gain. The past wants to be free of the myriad re-enactments and re-incarnations of colonialism, of the gross repetitive acts of massacre, captivity and violation as a result of Western society’s ravenous hunger for land and resources to claim as its own.

“Henri’s ocean had not been choking with plastic, he had not passed carcasses of fish and birds poisoned by the slick from oil rigs and the sun in his days had not been dangerous to the human skin, his ozone was not depleted, there was no rust crusting the waves. How would he have grieved to see the ocean ,which had given his people sustenance for millennia turned into a garbage dump, the sewer of the world? Perhaps he would have considered that crime more unforgivable than his kidnapping …”[235]

Indigenous wisdom recognizes, as does Quantum Physics, that time is not linear and that the past, present and future interact and affect each other. And so it is no surprise that a writer with Dorfman’s skill and brilliance would use an act of imagination as a means of inquiry into the very soul of Euro-American culture, the comforts it brings us and the price all beings are paying. The confluence of the past and the present repeats itself. Toward the end of the book, on his own involuntary journey, Fitz sees an imprisoned group within a large barbed wire compound.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, that’s Camp Bulkeley. Haitian refugees, rescued on the high seas by our Navy—fleeing their country after the recent coup d’état. The United States can’t let them reach our shores and can’t let them die in the ocean, so here they are till things settle down in their own land or we find some place that will accept them, though who knows who’d want the poor devils. I’ve been sending them extra food rations…” [274]

***

I received Darwin’s Ghosts in the mail on May 1, 2018 and began reading it immediately, swept into the past, particularly the 19th century, but it would not be contained. It began to speak and resonate with everything that concerned me in my/our lives as if the ghost was present and determined to bring our darkness to light.

Days before, on April 27, 2018, I had offered the Convocation at the International Conference and Film Festival to Free Elephants in Captivity in Portland, Oregon. Much of the Conference was devoted to chronicling the extremity of the current torture of Elephants, in the US and Asia with bull hooks, axe handles, and electric prods so that these wild animals who can never be domesticated, may be trained and confined, despite pain and anguish, whether it be to haul logs, participate in endless Temple ceremonies, paint self-portraits, pose for photographs, carry tourists, or be exhibited in zoos, roadside events or circuses for our profit and entertainment. This current situation heralded in Darwin’s Ghosts, in the neighborhood where I lived as a child.

“…–then the same girl, this time with the enormous head of an elephant mounted on her shoulder….a circus entrepreneur [had] brought the elephant Topsy from Africa in the 1870s. Topsy ended up at a Coney Island amusement park where, in 1902, she crushed a spectator who had burned her trunk with a hot cigar.” [281]

Cruelty against animals arising from the same mind that hunted, kidnapped, enslaved non-white human beings as if they weren’t people and continues to do so.

May 15, 2018— President Trump used extraordinarily harsh rhetoric to renew his call for stronger immigration laws Wednesday, calling undocumented immigrants “animals” and venting frustration at Mexican officials who he said “do nothing” to help the United States.
“We have people coming into the country or trying to come in, we’re stopping a lot of them, but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are,” Trump said.
“These aren’t people. These are animals.”

Darwin’s Ghosts is dizzying in the best ways. It is a presence. Open the book and the ghosts manifest. The immediate events of our lives parallel the events and concerns in the book. And vice-versa. This dynamic insists we engage in its profound inquiries and challenges to a way of life that in our innocence we have falsely valorized.

“Something had opened up in the history of humanity that day [October 12, 1492] when the world changed forever… Columbus had started it all, returning with six Arawak Indians to be flaunted in the court and streets of Spain, he was the first to call them cannibals, the first to decide that their earth and trees did not belong to them….”[183]

On May 11, 2018, a class action lawsuit was filed in a Canadian court on behalf of the thousands of Indigenous people alleged to have been unwittingly subjected to medical experiments without their consent.

At the same time. Michigan State University settled a class action lawsuit by paying $500 million dollars to women and girls sexually abused by Larry Nasser, MD, under the guise of medical exams.

Not different from the long ugly history of violation that Dorfman chronicles.

“In Munchen the captives are impatiently awaited by embryologist Van Bischoff, eager to study the native women’s sexual organs…. Told that these Patagons had no shame or decency, this specialist in the ovulation of mammals expected to be able to conduct a full cavity probe.” [153]

"Albert Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire… was more interested in animals as spectacle than as an object of study… His major innovation came in 1877, when he added fourteen Nubians to menagerie of exotic beasts, camels, elephants, giraffes, ostriches, dwarf rhinos. Attendance skyrocketed…”[105]

Another character, who resides in Punta Arenas near Patagonia, expresses his concern that he might be implicated through his great-grandfather in the “killing fields of Patagonia:

“He most certainly sold the guns that did the killing. …twenty-seven rifles and eight revolvers, all of them .44 caliber and twelve thousand and five hundred bullets for the rifles, nine hundred fifty for the revolvers. And the knives, biscuits, fishing nets, clothes and boots, everything that was used in the mass slaughter on the sheep farms and on the nomad islands. An accomplice. And so my dear friends, like you, I have something to atone for, a past that drives me.” [242]

The book takes us, back and forth between the events described by Dorfman, or Henri – the name given to him further dismissing his culture and being – from 1492 through the early 20th century, Fitzroy’s own history, 1967 to 1992, five hundred years after Columbus, and then mysteriously, as I was reading and writing, to the grievously resonant events of these very days.

On May 14th 2018 at least fifty-five protesters were killed by Israeli snipers in Gaza as the United States opened its embassy in Jerusalem.

It is May 18, 2018. The ghosts of the past and the present are speaking to us. What do they want? That we bear witness, account for our lineages, make amends, live transformed and conscious lives.

Sometimes a novel does more than tell a story revealing our history and lineage. Not simplistic cause and effect, but the nature of the field of consciousness and unconsciousness from which our lives and values emerge.

Sometimes a novel is itself a spirit speaking, a voice rising up through the generations, that finds a writer, enters his psyche, and through him enters our bodies and minds, so that we, the readers, may become exquisitely aware of the consequences of our lives.

“You can’t know it, unless you go through it yourself,” Dorfman said to me, reflecting on Fitz’s process as well as his process of writing it. Ariel Dorfman has always been the committed writer who lives through whatever he must so that his writing might be true and necessary. Darwin’s Ghosts is such a marvel of a novel.

[Daniel Garwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Darwin’s Ghosts is a first-person linear narrative from the perspective of Fitzroy Foster. Born in 1967, Fitzroy lives in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, USA, with his parents, Jerry and Margaretta, and his younger brothers, Hugh and Vic.

On Fitzroy’s fourteenth birthday, Jerry prints a Polaroid photograph upon which the face of a Patagonian Indian from the nineteenth century is superimposed onto Fitzroy’s body. Repeated attempts to capture an image of his son reveal that the visitor’s presence on film is unremitting.

Fitzroy shows a photo to his girlfriend, Camilla Wood, whom he met at the age of ten at the try out for the school swim team.

Under the pretext of persistent headaches, he undergoes a series of medical tests, but is given a clean bill of health.

The relationship with Camilla now ended, Fitzroy becomes a recluse; home-schooled by his mother. He struggles with depression and thoughts of suicide which he manages to overcome by plunging himself into the study of computing and digital imagery.

Meanwhile, his mother studies Portuguese and indigenous customs of the Amazonian Indians. When Fitzroy is nineteen, she heads to Brazil with the intention of confronting the loggers, but dies en route.

Camilla and Fitzroy remain chaste. She visits him on his 21st birthday with a vintage postcard of his Patagonian visitor being exhibited in Paris and their relationship continues where it left off seven years earlier.

Using her considerable scientific and linguistic training, Camilla sets out on a quest to establish a connection between Fitzroy and his visitor in the hope of finding a way to end his haunting and perhaps that of others plagued by a visitor.

Charles Darwin referred to the Patagonian Indians as, ‘stunted, miserable creatures, ignoble, infected, abject, wretched savages, wild animals… Devils, troubled spirits from another world.’ Accordingly, Mr Dorfman uses ‘Darwin’s Ghosts’ as a euphemism for the unwanted strangers.

This novel would have required a mountain of detailed research, but the material is presented in such a way that it is neither inaccessible nor tedious. The story is gripping and laced with beautiful prose. The prose is all the more remarkable when one realises that the novel is written in the author’s second language.

Darwin’s Ghosts could easily be described as a philosophical, coming of age or magical realism novel. For me, it is a ‘love story’. There is not a surfeit of North American cultural references, ensuring that readers from other countries are not in any way alienated. I would argue that most novels benefit from a little humour, but Mr Dorfman successfully uses alternative techniques.

I award five stars for an amazing piece of work.

[Zish · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love love love Ariel Dorfman’s depth and critical eye and honest to goodness desire to learn from the past.

[Eshraq]

۱۱ آذر ۱۴۰۴- کتابفروشی مورد علاقه‌ام.

شخصا اصلا دوستش نداشتم ولی این باعث نمیشه که بگم ارزش خوندن نداره. چرا اتفاقا خیلی هم کتاب درخور توجهیه. اما نه از نظر شخصیت‌پردازی و فضاسازی و نبوغ در داستان‌سرایی، بلکه از نظر موضوعی که داره بهش می‌پردازه.
آریل دورفمن انگار از تمام توانش و ابزارهاش برای ��رداختن به موضوع استفاده کرده. قطعا بدون مطالعه دقیق وقایع و مسائل مرتبط نمیشه اینطور منسجم درباره موضوعی حرف زد چه برسه که بخوای در قالب داستان درش بیاری.
یک اتفاق خیالی داستان رو رقم میزنه، اما هرآنچه که در بستر این خیال‌پردازی می‌خونید واقعیه. انگار که دورفمن یه تخیل کافکاگونه‌رو به کار گرفته تا بتونه درباره موضوعی که میخواد حرف بزنه بدون اینکه همه چیز خیلی سرد و حوصله‌سربر و بیش از حد جدی باشه. «دخالت‌های بی‌مورد بدون درنظر گرفتن محدوده و زمان زندگی انسان‌هایی که از ما متفاوت هستن و در نهایت نگاه ابزاری نسبت بهشون»؛ این موضوع کتاب قبلی هم بود (آن بهشت دیگر).

اما با تمام تلاش تحسین‌برانگیزش حوصله منو سرمیبرد. فکر میکنم با قلم دورفمن و شخصیت‌های که میسازه ارتباط نمی‌گیرم.
البته امیدوارم در پس ذهنم دلیلش مخالفتم درباره یه سری دیدگاه‌هاش نباشه. آدمیزاده دیگه، هرچقدر سعی کنه شاید بازم مغرضانه نظر بده.

[Lukas Hofmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

started off as an uncomfortable Kafka-esque story, crept its way towards a thoughtful deconstruction of the haunting presence colonialism holds today

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Late in Ariel Dorfman’s philosophical novel Darwin’s Ghosts, a professor asks the protagonist, “who is not the product of some crime committed in the past?” This question summarizes all that Fitzroy Foster and his wife, Camilla Wood, discover about his ancestry after Foster’s fourteenth birthday when all photographs of him bizarrely show the face of a long-dead indigenous man from Tierra del Fuego. The quest to figure out how to “cure” Foster leads the pair to uncover the tragic, horrific history of the men and women who were kidnapped and displayed in human zoos in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss, for review consideration.

[Carla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it. If you love photography, historical fiction, science and love....this is the book for you.

[mmasjam · Rating 2 out of 5]

Сначала у меня возникли вопросы к переводу - очень уж тяжеловесными казались конструкции, а в прямой речи было полно старомодных книжных выражений. А потом я начала понимать, что дело в исходном материале - так испортить его плохим переводом было невозможно.
Это ходульный и плоский роман, который держит читателя если не за идиота, то за тугодума - одна и та же дидактическая мысль (с которой я при этом полностью согласна!) повторяется через каждые 10 страниц, и это безумно утомляет. Да, за грехи отцов нужно будет расплачиваться. Да, о страшных последствиях колониального захвата ещё предстоит узнавать и ужасаться им. Но метафора, в которую автор попытался облечь эту мысль, выглядит беспомощной.
Что мы имеем: четырнадцатилетний Фицрой в день своего рождения впервые помастурбировал (don't get me startet on this shit) и теперь на всех фотографиях вместо его лица лицо туземца из Патагонии. Здесь наблюдается попытка усидеть на всех стульях сразу - с одной стороны, это как бы болезнь: клетки-днк-отражение на сетчатке-бла-бла-бла-пандемия и другая чушь, типа этим можно заразиться, поэтому на середине книги возникает водевильный злодей-доктор, которого разоблачают в последнюю секунду. С другой стороны, это как бы мистика - главный герой постоянно повторяет, что этот его "посетитель" разрушает его жизнь, что он демон, что он убил его мать и подверг опасности его жену. Ничего демонического (кроме самих фото) при этом не происходит, к экстрасенсу или шаману никто не обращается - большое упущение, на мой взгляд! С третьей стороны, это как бы метафора "неудобного прошлого", которое все равно тебя настигнет, но от бесконечного обмусоливания она теряет свою художественную силу, загадочность и красоту. Пока читала, не могла не сравнивать с "Рифом" и "Кадаврами" Алексея Поляринова, который прежде всего воздействует на читателя именно художественно, гипнотизирует своими образами, а не разжёвывает ("Риф", увы, этим грешит, но всё-таки не до такой степени) то, что было понятно уже странице на 30ой ещё на 350 страниц. Кстати, о "неудобном прошлом": что действительно захотелось сделать после прочтения - это найти хорошее исследование, как у Николая Эппле, про историческую память и ужасы колониализма.
Ещё одним страшный недостаток, которым страдает эта книга - это неинтересные герои. Фицрой инфантилен, первое активное действие, которое он совершает без чьей-то наводки, запечатлено на 264 странице, а дальше он буквально "плывет по течению" (как же меня бесило постоянное упоминание плавания, когда речь шла об их отношениях с Кэм! То, что вы ходили в одну секцию в школе, не может служить основой отношений!) - его похищают, увозят и весь конфликт разрешается без его участия, и удается избежать опасности не благодаря его мозгам. Сюжет в этой книге двигается только благодаря Кэм - местной manic pixie dream girl, которая с 14 до 21 года хранила верность Фицрою (отдельно подчеркивается, что она не мастурбировала - извините, но у автора какая-то гиперфиксация на этом), за это время стала гением биологии и химии (сам Фицрой, естественно, компьютерный гений - честно, в фанфиках бывает правдоподобнее) и все ради того, чтобы "излечить" своего подросткового краша от его болезни. Личной жизни у Кэм нет, характера тоже, она существует только для того, чтобы быть с Фицроем.
Но!
Я бы так не плевалась, если бы роман был написан другим языком. Я люблю триллеры и пазлы и мне хотелось узнать, чем там все кончится (не буду спойлерить, но концовка разочаровывающая), но где-то к середине книги я начала пробегать текст по диагонали и пропускать по нескольку страниц, потому что это кондовая беллетристика. "Ее взгляд затуманился от воспоминаний", "бутон груди", "ее потаённые глубины" (да, секс описан в духе бульварных романов) - понятно, что тут может быть дело и в переводе (в какой-то момент я устала сличать с оригиналом). Но вы просто прочитайте этот абзац:

"... Она села за свой компьютер и двумя пальчиками, словно маленькая птичка, набрала какое-то сексуальное сообщение, а я ответил чем-то ещё более непристойным, и мы визжали, как поросята, катающиеся в грязи. Жизнь казалась спортивным состязанием, мы оба такие молодые, Земля - шарик на верёвочке, и весь мир у наших ног..."

Друзья, это кринж.

[Майя Ставитская · Rating 3 out of 5]

Troubles and misfortunes in the serene life of the hero of "Darwin's Ghosts" come in 1981, when on the fourteenth birthday of a boy with a talking name Fitzroy (literally "royal son", "heir" and this is not accidental), his father takes pictures with a polaroid camera. A picture for a family album, everything came out perfectly, except for the hero of the day: an ugly head of a shaggy dark-skinned man with a flattened nose and small black eyes is impaled on the body of a teenager dressed in his suit. Puzzled and cursing, the father redoes the picture. The result is the same. All attempts to restore the authenticity of the photos with the help of other cameras end in nothing. And they have the opportunity to try different options, the father working in the Polaroid company has access to a variety of optics. The family is faced with a choice: to go further and make their son an object of experiments (as they said in my Soviet childhood, "to submit to experiments) or to silence a strange phenomenon, henceforth avoiding photographing him by all means.

They choose the latter, and whoever condemns them is not me, but a previously sociable, cheerful teenager is cut off from the world, from opportunities, from the future. Have you ever thought about the role of photography in modern life? Not selfies and the ability to click everything in a row, but photos on documents as a way to identify an individual. Student ID, pass, driver's license. passport - there will be nothing of this in the guy's life, and he himself is doomed to the life of an anchorite. So the story in the spirit of King's "Sunny Dog" makes a U-turn towards social drama and chronicles of loneliness, to which the hero is now doomed, He is forced to give up intimacy with his beloved girl Cam, before they moved through life synchronously, and this is not a figure of speech - the swimming coach who put two teenagers in a pair swim was amazed by the absolute the coherence of their movements and the fact that they came to the finish line at the same time. So it was in everything. Now Fitz is homeschooled and Camilla is moving further out of his life.

However, "One Hundred Years of Solitude", kind to the Latin American heart, will not become the main theme of the novel by the Chilean-American poet and novelist Ariel Dorfman. In this story, the multiplicity of seven plays a role, and at 21, Cam will return to his life. She is a promising biologist, graduated from the Sorbonne, Fitzroy will tell her everything, and the girl will not recoil in fright, but will light up his life with her sunny cheerfulness, become a bride, and then a wife. And it is Cam who will explain that hiding from the problem is not an option, you need to find the root of evil, fix it, and then everything will be fine. Now there are two of them and they will cope.

The novel is transformed again, this time into a historical and ethnographic detective story, and the details that will be revealed during the investigation will not please either the characters or the reader. The practice of the human zoo, which was widespread until the beginning of the twentieth century, when "savages" in skins were shown to the European public for money, is terrible. But this is our cool: a nightmare", "inhumanly" correlates with reality in about no way. People were taken out of their lives, taken to a strange and alien vast, incomprehensible world, where they were doomed to die without ever seeing their homeland, often in agony from diseases to which they had no immunity, without hearing the sounds of their native speech, without hope of completing the earthly path and being buried in accordance with the faith and customs of their ancestors.

When we talk about today's excesses in the struggle for racial equality, it is worth remembering from what its necessity arose. However, I will return to history, it will make more than one unexpected turn, catching Victor Hugo, Charles Darwin, Photoshop and the scrapping of the Berlin Wall, an almost serial story with amnesia and an absolutely fantastic abduction of quite American citizens by American special services. And, frankly speaking, at some stage it will seem somewhat absurd, not to mention that it will smack of Lamarckism in terms of inheritance of acquired traits.

But it will not lose the pathos of recognizing historical guilt and the need to correct, as much as possible, the damage caused. It was an interesting reading experience for me, thanks to Polyandria for translating the book.

Обыкновенный расизм
"Фотографировать людей значит насиловать их.
Сьюзен Зонтаг
Беды и несчастья в безмятежную жизнь героя "Призраков Дарвина" приходят в 1981 году, когда в четырнадцатый день рождения мальчика с говорящим именем Фицрой (буквально "королевский сын", "наследник" и это не случайно) фотографирует полароидной камерой отец. Снимок для семейного альбома, все вышли отлично, кроме героя дня: на тело подростка, одетое в его костюм, насажена уродливая голова косматого темнокожего человека с приплюснутым носом и маленькими черными глазами. Недоумевая и ругаясь, отец переделывает снимок. Результат тот же. Все попытки вернуть фотографии достоверность при помощи других камер оканчиваются ничем. А возможности попробовать разные варианты у них есть, отец работающий в компании Полароид, имеет доступ к разнообразной оптике. Семья оказывается перед выбором: пойти дальше и сделать сына объектом экспериментов (как говорили в моем советском детстве "сдать на опыты) или замолчать странный феномен, отныне всеми способами избегая его фотографирования.

Они выбирают второе и кто их осудит, тот не я, но прежде общительный жизнерадостный подросток оказывается отсечен от мира, от возможностей, от будущего. Вы когда-нибудь задумывались о роли фотографии в современной жизни? Не селфи и возможности щелкать все подряд, но фото на документы, как способа идентификации личности. Студенческий билет, пропуск, водительское удостоверение. паспорт - ничего этого в жизни парня не будет, а сам он обречен на жизнь анахорета. Так история в духе кингова "Солнечного пса" делает разворот в сторону социальной драмы и хроники одиночества, на которое теперь обречен герой Он вынужден отказаться от близости с любимой девочкой Кэм, прежде они двигались по жизни синхронно, и это не фигура речи - тренер по плаванию, поставивший двух подростков в парный заплыв, поразился абсолютной слаженности их движений и тому, что пришли к финишу одновременно. Так было во всем. Теперь Фиц на домашнем обучении и Камилла все дальше уходит из его жизни.

Однако любезные латиноамериканскому сердцу "Сто лет одиночества" не станут главной темой романа чилийско-американского поэта и прозаика Ариэля Дорфмана. В этой истории кратность семи играет определенную роль, и в 21 год Кэм вернется в его жизнь. Она многообещающий биолог, окончила Сорбонну, Фицрой расскажет ей все, и девушка не отшатнется в испуге, но осветит своей солнечной жизнерадостностью его жизнь, станет невестой, а потом женой. И это именно Кэм объяснит, что прятаться от проблемы не выход, нужно найти корень зла, исправить, и тогда все будет хорошо. Теперь их двое и они справятся.

Роман снова трансформируется, на сей раз в историко-этнографический детектив, и подробности, которые вскроются в ходе расследования, не порадуют ни героев, ни читателя. Распространенная вплоть до начала ХХ века практика человеческого зоопарка, когда "дикарей" в шкурах демонстрировали европейской публике за деньги ужасна. Но это наше прохладное: кошмар", "бесчеловечно" соотносится с реальностью примерно никак. Людей вынимали из их жизни, увозили в чужой и чуждый огромный, непонятный мир, где они были обречены умереть, никогда не увидев родины, часто в мучениях от болезней, к которым не имел иммунитета, не слыша звуков родной речи, без надежды завершить земной путь и быть погребенными в соответствии с верой и обычаями предков.

Когда мы говорим о сегодняшних перегибах в борьбе за расовое равноправие, стоит помнить, из чего возникла ее необходимость. Однако вернусь к истории, она сделает еще не один неожиданный виток зацепив по касательной Виктора Гюго, Чарльза Дарвина, фотошоп и слом Берлинской стены, почти сериальную историю с амнезией и уж совершенно фантастическое похищение вполне американских граждан американскими же спецслужбами. И, говоря откровенно, на каком-то этапе покажется несколько абсурдной, не говоря уж о том, что станет отдавать ламаркизмом в части наследования приобретенных признаков.

Но не утратит пафоса признания исторической вины и необходимости исправить, сколько возможно, причиненный вред. Для меня это было интересным читательским опытом, спасибо Поляндрии за то, что перевели книгу.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked the writing style/prose but the point seemed muddled at times-- didn't seem thoroughly thought out

[Ani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Darwin's Ghosts has a nearly Kafkaesque quality, as young Fitzroy Foster finds that as of the morning of his 14th birthday, the camera records a distinctly different face on his body. Startled by the face of an indigenous man staring back at them from pictures, instead of the face of their son, his family make immediate decisions limit their own horror and shame.

When Fitzroy's childhood sweetheart returns to him as an adult, they set about to discover whose face is haunting Fritz' pictures, and invading his head.

The protagonists feel a little flat to me, as though they existed to share their research with one another, giving the author, Ariel Dorfman, the opportunity to detail the abhorrent practices of European colonization. Once of those practices was to steal people from their villages and towns, bringing them to so-called "Human Zoos"

Through the fairly contrived plot, we find many examples of people stolen from their families and lands to be put on display for the entertainment of spectators. The personal erasure for people who were captured and displayed is just mind-boggling.

The dialogue is fairly wooden- the characters speak in the same voice, which always seems a bit mature for their ages. Doing the math, I realize that the protagonists are about 1 year younger than myself, and they are 14 - 25 years old, yet they stayed quite formal with each other-- not a slang word, nor swears.

I absolutely recommend Darwin's Ghosts, even if the dialogue is stiff. This book guides readers to ask all of the important questions, like:
What does it mean to be from a "so-called" advanced culture?
How to atone for the sins of our forebears?
The entire concept of Human Zoos, freak shows; and the like.
Who are we, really?

[Ava Jaunzems · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is highly unlikely that I would have picked up this book if I had known that it was about ghosts and the evils colonialism. The unexplained is fascinating in real life, but as a plot device it disengages me. It is too facile and distances the book from my human experience. Colonialism was stage in the history of the West, mixed in its impact, not unadulterated evil. That said (too much probably), this is an excellent book---the ghost seems to stand for the way traumas, even perhaps those that are unknown and lost in the past, can impact one's present, which is a controversial bit of genetics but certainly not impossible. The author's apparent conviction that we are responsible for them and must personally atone in some way is less convincing to me, but probably less a prescription than an imaginative way of embodying our connection to our ancestors. It's not exactly a page-turner, but the writing is solid and original, and the author's mind is worth our time spent with it.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really interesting premise regarding colonialism. I don't even know how to summarize it and although it's not a long book, it gets lost in the weeds a lot. There are so many fictional genealogical trees! 

Sometimes I imagine the writer of any given book just writing super fast (with pen and paper!) because the urgency to get the story out is so intense. That's how this felt-- urgent! But also bogged down.

3.5 stars.

[Catch U Later · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dnf. Even as the plot rambled along it suffered from an irritating sameness. Made it difficult to care.

[Ine · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 1/2