SOURCE: France, Miranda. “Loyalty and Betrayal.” Spectator 280, no. 8860 (30 May 1998): 31.

In the following review, France regards Heading South, Looking North as an autobiographical reflection “on the nature of language and identity.”

Ariel Dorfman's new autobiography shows how political upheaval has forced nomadism on the people of this century. Dorfman, best known for his play Death and the Maiden, was born in Buenos Aires, in 1942, to a mother and father whose parents had fled revolution in eastern Europe. In 1945 Perón forced his communist father to remove the family to the United States. Later McCarthyism moved them on again, this time to Chile. Dorfman's own exile from Chile came with Pinochet's coup in 1973, and occupies the heart of this book.

Dorfman has experienced more than his fair share of identity crises. His father named him ‘Vladimiro’, in honour of Lenin. As a boy in the United States, he opted for...