“There is not only the hope that millions of living Chileans will vote in the upcoming elections not to go back to an authoritarian past, but also, perhaps, that the dead will inspire those they left behind not to betray their pain and memory. Perhaps those guardians of my country’s dignity, the ghosts of those that Pinochet banished from this world, will protect their compatriots as we decide the fate of our beloved and besieged land.”

“Ariel Dorfman describes his fascinating novella-cum-parable, The Compensation Bureau, as ‘love in the time of Apocalypse.’ The High Commission that controls the universe needs to do something to deal with that little rock in space, the Earth, whose unruly inhabitants have descended into a plague of self-destructive violence.

One of the Actuaries whose task involves compensating those multi-millions who throughout human history have been deprived of their full lives through physical deprivation or savagery, unfortunately falls in love with one of the victims he seeks to award with a digitally researched afterlife.

A fantasy, yes. But when the Commission decide to call time on this troubled world – a decision Dorfman fears may be at hand – who, with our daily news diet of largely self- inflicted crises, can dismiss this as fanciful self-indulgence?”

“I can only hope that my country of origin offers the world a lesson in how to conquer the phantoms of fear, finding the courage, when our hard-earned democracy is in peril, to build a better and more just social order, rather than retreat to the shadows of authoritarianism.”

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“A firsthand witness to the 1973 execution of the Chilean vision to a kinder world, Dorfman has pondered the nature of human brutality and the nature of true justice throughout a long and distinguished career. The country’s victims and victimizers coexisted in the country (and sometimes even within the same person), and this tension has lessons with relevance far beyond its borders.

Dorfman has been instrumental in demonstrating the universality of Chile’s plight… Bearing witness for decades has undoubtedly led to some compassionate fatigue along the way. By taking a step out of this world, Dorfman finds new reasons for hope. The Compensation Bureau is an abstract, late-career addition to a notable body of work.”

“As world crises accumulate daily and mankind’s political leaders appear incapable of understanding let alone acting to work together for species survival, The Compensation Bureau reads as anything but a fanciful entertainment.”

“It is the mobilization today of young people… from Hong-Kong to Belarus and Nicaragua, from Iran and Sudan to Honduras and Colombia, that give us hope that the world can be a better place. This is particularly so in Chile… because today, inside the building in Santiago that once housed the Chilean Congress, a Constitutional Convention has assembled, with the express purpose of writing a new Constitution that will replace the one that Pinochet fraudulently pushed through in 1980…

The Convention is discussing how to inscribe in the new Magna Carta a series of rights, all of them so central to the struggles in Chile, in the United States, in the whole world: water and ecological rights, LGBTQ rights, health care and education and pensions that are meant to lift the majority and not enrich a small group of profiteers, the establishment of a pluri-national, multilingual republic, the end to police brutality, especially against the young, because it is always the young who get beaten and always the young who rise and rebel.”