The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Nanny and the Iceberg by Ariel Dorfman
Sophia A. McClennen

Ariel Dorfman. The Nanny and the Iceberg. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999. 358pp. $25.00.

The Chilean Pavilion at the 1992 World Expo in Seville featured an Antarctic iceberg as its main attraction. This surreal effort at highlighting Chile’s emergence from dictatorship serves as the historical backdrop for Dorfman’s new novel. Yet, unlike Dorfman’s play, Death and the Maiden, which also addressed Chile’s transition to democracy, The Nanny and the Iceberg places a traditional treatment of history in relief and accords it no more importance than cybersex. In fact, the novel is framed as an extraordinarily long E-mail message/suicide note to an Internet girlfriend.

Dorfman is a writer who excels at creating narrative worlds where previously unimaginable, unthinkable, or merely unlikely events collide. His latest novel pushes this strategy to a level which wavers on the absurd in a fantastic portrayal of the dark underbelly of contemporary Chilean culture. The narrator, aptly named Gabriel, is a twenty-five-year-old virgin with a child’s face who returns to Chile from exile. Upon his arrival he is thrust into a bizarre male triangle between his father, his uncle, and his father’s friend. A bet made a day after Gabriel was conceived is due to be settled. The vanity and egocentrism of the bet is shown to be symptomatic of post-Pinochet Chilean society: Gabriel’s father would have sex every day, his friend would become the most powerful man in Chile, and Gabriel’s uncle would see socialism rule the continent. Gabriel, representing a displaced and disenfranchised youth, is left to search for—or to annihilate—his identity in the shadow of these men and with the guidance of his nanny. [Sophia A. McClennen]