SOURCE: France, Miranda. “Sad Shaggy Dog Story.” Spectator 282, no. 8907 (24 April 1999): 38.

In the following review, France laments Dorfman's unfocused narrative in The Nanny and the Iceberg, calling the novel “confused, over-long and often clumsy.”

Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean writer and was a cultural adviser to Salvador Allende's government at the time of General Pinochet's coup in 1973. Since then he has lived in the United States, lecturing and writing about Chileans' experience of the dictatorship in novels, poems and plays. His famous play, Death and the Maiden, describes the agony of life in a country where one-time torturers still walk freely among the tortured.

Dorfman feels and writes passionately about Chile. His recent autobiography, Heading South, Looking North, describes particularly well the pain of voluntary exile. Although Dorfman had good reason to believe that his life was in danger if he stayed in Chile after the coup, he never...