The best books on Chile

Before we get to the books you’ve chosen about Chile, can you tell us what you like about it and how you ended up living here?

I’ve always been in love with South America. I met the father of my sons in Guatemala, in Central America, and that’s where we lived, before they were born. Then we went to England and lived there for 15 years. With children, it was much harder to figure out where would be the best place to go in Latin America—in terms of bringing up a family, schools, hospitals and all those things you need.

We chose Chile because of the children. We weren’t looking for adventure—we were looking for a safe place. At the time, in 2006, Chile was one of the most highly developed countries in Latin America. It seemed politically and economically stable and so it was the best option as a family. It certainly wouldn’t have been our first choice without children. We’d have gone somewhere a little bit more culturally exciting, like Colombia or Brazil. But if you like the outdoor life – the ocean and the mountains, outdoor sports and hiking – Chile really lives up to its reputation as the California of South America.

It is an extraordinary country. There are enormous variations in terms of climate and landscape. It’s a country of extremes and as a storyteller, Chile is absolutely irresistible because the history, especially recent history, is very dramatic.

Also, Chile is a land of survivors. I find that very inspiring. The Chilean people are incredibly resilient, and I admire that hugely. I’ve come to love Chile over the 19 years that I’ve been based here, and I am especially in love with the landscape: that really does it for me.

How did you set about choosing books about Chile for this list?

I wanted to suggest some books that people probably haven’t heard of or that have been forgotten, that help you understand this very odd country. It really is very strange. The reason I chose Rosie Swale’s book is, firstly, because she’s a woman after my own heart. She’s a free spirit. She’s an incredible traveller, very brave and some would say foolhardy—but then people could say the same about me! So I forgive her that.

Her book is called Back to Cape Horn. What’s it about?

Her story is about riding a horse from the Atacama Desert to Cape Horn, which is a distance of about 4,300 kilometres (or nearly 3,000 miles). That gives you an idea of the extraordinary length of this country that is Chile. Rosie Swale naively thought, ‘Oh, I’ll do that in four months’, but it took a year-and-a-half.

It’s a story of endurance, which is crucial if you want to live in Chile. And you really get the sense of how crazy long this country is and how diverse, because she starts off in the driest desert in the world, and she ends up in the ice fields of Patagonia. It’s a very evocative story and I think it’s my favourite travel book on Chile.

She got into quite a bit of trouble at some point, didn’t she?

Regularly! For a start, she was riding horses in the world’s driest desert where there is no food and no water. It’s completely mad. She had trouble there, including sandstorms.

She also had some incredibly moving experiences. For example, at one point she was camping, and she heard some cries in the bushes. There was a woman giving birth in the middle of nowhere and Rosie Swale helped give birth to this child. It was an amazing, completely random experience.

Much later on in the journey, in Patagonia, she had a really terrifying experience. At the time she was traveling, there was great poverty in Chile. In Patagonia, she found herself in danger of losing one of her horses because someone wanted to eat it. That horse came very close to having its throat cut. She managed to save it, just out of sheer force of personality, because this man was desperate. It was a shocking experience. But that is also part of living in this part of the world—that things can get terrifying very quickly.

She was making the journey in 1983 or so?

That’s right. It was an amazing achievement. I think she was lucky to survive—and her poor horses were also lucky to survive.

Next up, you’ve chosen another travel book for your list. Tell me about Between Extremes, by Brian Keenan and John McCarthy, who were both held hostage in Beirut for many years.

Chile does inspire extremes—extremes of landscape and also of experience and emotion. I thought it was fascinating that these two men who had been hostages in Lebanon and lived one of the most extreme experiences that humans can endure, came here. Apparently, while they were in Lebanon, they used to fantasize about having a farm in Patagonia. It was a random dream at the time, but they decided to make it real and to come to this part of the world and see what would happen.

As when they were hostages, they get on each other’s nerves, they argue, but they are also absolutely mesmerized by the Andes mountains, the desert and Patagonia, and by the very complex history of Chile.

There was a military coup in 1973 by Augusto Pinochet, which was dreadful and cruel and had awful repercussions. That clearly resonated with them, given their experience in Lebanon. Brian Keenan came up with a phrase I think is brilliant, which is ‘the disease of hatred.’ So the disease of hatred is wreaking havoc in the Middle East, but it’s also wrought havoc in Chile. The legacy of the cruelty of the military dictatorship is still something that is impacting people’s lives today, 50 years later.

So their journey to Chile was, as much as anything, a search for humanity. And my experience of living here and as a storyteller, and the reason I was inspired to write my own book, was definitely also that search for humanity, for answers to questions like, ‘How is it possible that people can be so cruel to each other?’ It’s an eternal mystery and Brian Keenan and John McCarthy were also really interested in it.

Keenan is also a big fan of Pablo Neruda’s poetry, the Nobel Prize-winning poet of Chile. I personally dislike his poetry and much prefer the song lyrics of his compatriot Violeta Parra, but I’ll forgive Brian Keenan for that, because it’s just such fun reading their story and their response to this extreme country.

Did they end up setting up a yak farm as they planned?

No, they didn’t. I think they were glad to get rid of each other again once they finished their journey.

And did they travel the whole length of Chile like Rosie Swale?

They didn’t travel all the way from the north to the south. They flew north and experienced the desert. They did a horse trekking journey out of Santiago in central Chile. Then they flew to Patagonia. So they cherry picked different experiences, different extremes of the country.

That’s what most tourists do, because you can’t possibly explore Chile in a couple of weeks. People fly into Santiago, which is in the middle of the country, and then they fly north for a week, and they fly south for a week. So they get a taste of the country, but you really have to be here for a long time to get a feeling of the immensity of it.

Let’s go on to your next book, An Unfinished Song, which is a biography of Victor Jara by his widow, Joan. For those of us who don’t know him, could you tell us who Victor Jara was and why this book is a good one to read about Chile?

Victor Jara was one of the most famous musicians to come out of Chile in the 1970s. He was also one of the most famous victims of the military coup. He was arrested, taken to the notorious football stadium in Santiago and tortured in the most horrible way. He was a musician known for playing the guitar and they broke every single finger and his arms before they killed him. It was absolutely horrible.

Joan Jara was a British woman—she died recently—who came to Chile in the 1950s, long before the military coup and married a different Chilean. She was a professional dancer and came to Chile for work.

I chose her book partly because she came here such a long time ago. Reading her story, you get a sense of what Chile was like before the military coup. It’s also a great love story, with the tragedy of her husband’s death. Joan Jara became a survivor—one of the great survivors of the Chilean experience, if you will.

Although she went into exile after the coup, she came back in 1984 and fought for justice for her husband. It took a long, long time. Not until 2012 was the person who was held responsible for Victor Jara’s murder found guilty and extradited to Chile to face justice. That was a huge achievement.

Her story is one of incredible endurance and courage and it’s also very moving. I admire Joan Jara enormously.

If you don’t know much about the history and the military coup, does this biography fill you in on that as well, so you understand what happened?

Absolutely. It’s a personal story so rather than just reading the history or articles in the newspaper, you get a sense of how the military coup impacted people’s individual lives, the shock and the horror and the cruelty as it was lived through. This couple is representative of thousands of other people and their experience. It’s a very good way of experiencing how awful it was, how terrifying it was for many, many individuals, not just the famous ones.

For your next book you’ve chosen a novel, The House of the Spirits by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende. For anybody who isn’t familiar with it, do you want to say who she is and what the novel is about?

Isabel Allende is a very successful novelist and one of the great storytellers of the world. The House of the Spirits was her first book. It made her world famous and, still today, I think it’s fundamental to read for anyone who wants to understand Chile and Chilean society. Because even though it’s a novel, it spans several generations of a Chilean family, and so you get a fictionalized version of the history of Chile through their story. Their quirks and foibles as individuals, as humans, are typical of Chilean society even today. So if you read this novel, you have a good foundation in the strangeness or the unique character of Chilean society.

For example, travellers to Chile will agree that it is almost impossible to get a Chilean to tell you what they’re really thinking. If you’re driving around and ask for directions, rather than tell you that they have no idea, they’ll give you a long, involved story. It’s the cultural impossibility of saying, ‘I don’t know.’ If you understand this idiosyncratic behaviour, you can relax and just ask someone else for directions. If you ask five people, you’ll get five different answers, but the mystery of that is easier to bear if you’re expecting it.

And that comes through in this novel?

Yes, and other things. For example, the matriarch doesn’t like to name problems, because then they become real. That sounds like a bizarre thing to do, but similarly, if you ask someone, ‘Is a trek up that mountain a good idea?’ a classic response would be, ‘Oh, that’s complicated.’ Complicated means it’s a really bad idea and not possible. Those subtleties of interaction are all in this novel.

So apart from the fact that The House of the Spirits is a great story and a great read, if you pay attention, you really do learn a lot about how Chilean society works. It also covers the dictatorship and the betrayals that occurred at that time. And it gives you a really strong sense of the role of women in society in Chile—how strong they need to be to survive. Chile is a country of strong women and that is also key to the novel.

Is the fact that Isabel Allende is related via her father to Salvador Allende, the president Pinochet overthrew, relevant to the story?

The Allende name is famous in Chile. Isabel Allende herself was in danger and had to leave and go and live in Venezuela for eight years and she now lives in the United States. But it doesn’t really make a difference to the novel, no.

So your book, Tales from the Sharp End: A Portrait of Chile, is a mixture of your own story and stories about Chile. What was your aim with the book?

The truth is, I never meant to write the book. After a long time in this country, and my sons grown up, I was actually thinking of going back to England and doing something else. But then we had an uprising in 2019, immediately followed by the COVID pandemic. So I was trapped: I couldn’t leave Chile. I was stuck all alone in my house, and I needed to do something constructive to not go mad.

Many of the stories I had in my head for years, but I hadn’t intended to write them down. But because of the strange circumstances, I sat down and I wrote them. I really enjoyed fleshing out stories that I vaguely knew about: like the story of Javiera Carrera, the independence activist, and the role of women in society. I looked much closer at key events since I have lived here, like the 2010 earthquake, and shared some of the unique travel experiences my sons and I have had, like climbing a volcano, kayaking in Patagonia, or discovering the Atacama Desert in bloom after rare rains.

It’s not a book about me. I wanted to write a portrait of Chile, and I wanted to write stories that would illustrate different aspects of the country. I also wanted it to be fun to read. So each chapter is a story on its own. It could be history, it could be music, it could be art, but each is based on a combination of my own experiences and many years of research. Of course, there is also a little bit about why we ended up in our particular Chilean valley, but my main intention was to paint a picture of the country as a whole, warts and all, the good bits, the bad bits, the joy and the sorrow.

In the book, you write about being able to go up a mountain near the valley where you live and seeing both the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.

Yes, it’s unique because Chile is about 4000 miles long, but it’s rarely more than 120 miles wide. So there are places—and specifically at the end of my valley, there’s a mountain called La Campana—where, on a clear day, you can see both the Andes the Pacific Ocean at the same time, which is just amazing. You can see mountains in Argentina, because the Andean mountains are the border with Argentina. It’s an extraordinary sight. In fact, Charles Darwin wrote about it. He came here and climbed that same mountain. So that’s a fun thought as well.

Why did you choose to live in that particular valley?

Again, it was sheer chance. When we arrived in Santiago, we knew we wouldn’t live there because it’s very polluted, and my younger son had asthma. So we travelled north, we travelled south, we went on excursions. One excursion led us inland from Valparaiso, because there’s a metro train. It’s a winegrowing region. We went to the end of the line, and then we carried on. We just found ourselves in this lovely valley, with a national park at the end of it. The quality of life is just fantastic. And we found a great school. So it sort of snowballed from there.

We’d better get to your last book. This is a collection of short stories: Cape Horn and Other Stories from the End of the World by Francisco Coloane (1910-2022). What’s this about?

I’ve included him because his short stories are absolutely brilliant. It’s a terrible shame that Anglophone readers have mostly never heard of him because he deserves to be a lot better known in the English-speaking world. It’s this old problem of translation. He’s been translated much more into French and German and Italian, so he’s much better known in continental Europe.

He’s been referred to as the Jack London of South America. Or the Herman Melville. His father was a ship’s captain in a whaling station. He grew up on the island of Chiloé, in a very remote place. In his 20s, instead of going to university or college, he worked on a sheep station in Patagonia. So he really knows what he’s talking about.

If you want to get a sense of the harsh life in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego at the end of the South American continent, then his stories really hit home. They’re not just about the harshness of the environment, but also the extraordinary human characters who come to a place like that and find a way to survive.

Also, he really gives you an idea of what it’s like to live with that extreme loneliness and isolation. It’s probably similar to living on a sheep station in Australia. You’re in the middle of absolutely nowhere. There’s nothing, and you have to rely on yourself and not go insane. But often people do go completely mad down there, from the loneliness or from being stuck with someone else that they can’t stand.  Emotions get magnified in those extreme places and his stories are brilliant at characterizing that.

Do you have a favourite story in the book?

I was just rereading one that is not in the book called “La voz del viento”, which in English would probably be “The Call of the Wind”. It’s about a guy who is so lonely on his sheep station—there are almost no women down there—that he decides to go to the nearest town and buy a prostitute’s freedom and bring her back with him.

At first, it’s fantastic. She’s grateful to have a life and they’re absolutely thrilled with each other. But very soon they start getting on each other’s nerves, and he starts missing the peace and the solitude that at one point he thought he couldn’t bear. He ends up slitting her throat. Of course he’s sorry once he’s done it, but it’s too late.

It’s that kind of a place. It’s a land of extremes and violence can appear at any moment. It’s a tragic story, but it’s also brilliant. A really moving story that is in the translated tales is called “Cururo,” which is about the intensely close relationship between a farmhand and his dog on a remote Fuegian sheep station.

When was he writing these stories>?

Mainly in the 1940s and 1950s, so a long time ago. But to this day, there are still sheep stations and incredibly lonely places down there. There are hermits living in the Patagonian ice fields for whatever reason. That loneliness and extreme survival mode, and people getting on each other’s nerves in that situation: those are still experiences that you can have today. I’ve travelled there with my sons, and it’s tough when you’re all alone, 1,000 miles from the nearest comfortable bed. Tempers flare.

Thanks so much, Natascha, for recommending these books.

It’s a pleasure. I hope people will be inspired to look for these books, because they’re not necessarily recently published or that easy to find, but they’re really worth looking for, and they will give you a lot about Chile.