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Ariel needed money, and Joseph Hortha had it. Bound by gratitude for the former Chilean president and a persistent need to know whether murder or suicide ended his life during the 1973 coup, the two men embark on an investigation that will take them from Washington, DC, and New York, to Santiago and Valparaso, and finally to London. As Ariel interviews fascinating if not always credible sources, witnesses a midnight gravedigging, and is stalked by shadowy pursuers, he unravels another enigma - the creation of Joseph's Suicide Museum, and how it might change history. Before they can resolve their quest, these two friends must help each other come to terms with their own guilt and trauma, their personal catastrophes hidden in the deep past. What begins as an intriguing literary caper unfolds into a propulsive, philosophical saga about what we owe the world, one another, and ourselves. By boldly mixing fiction and reality, imagination and history, confession and chronicle, truth and lies, The Suicide Museum explores the limits of the novelistic genre and extends that genre in an unsuspected and exceptional way.
Ariel needed money, and Joseph Hortha had it. Bound by gratitude for the former Chilean president and a persistent need to know whether murder or suicide ended his life during the 1973 coup, the two men embark on an investigation that will take them from Washington, DC, and New York, to Santiago and Valparaso, and finally to London. As Ariel interviews fascinating if not always credible sources, witnesses a midnight gravedigging, and is stalked by shadowy pursuers, he unravels another enigma - the creation of Joseph's Suicide Museum, and how it might change history. Before they can resolve their quest, these two friends must help each other come to terms with their own guilt and trauma, their personal catastrophes hidden in the deep past. What begins as an intriguing literary caper unfolds into a propulsive, philosophical saga about what we owe the world, one another, and ourselves. By boldly mixing fiction and reality, imagination and history, confession and chronicle, truth and lies, The Suicide Museum explores the limits of the novelistic genre and extends that genre in an unsuspected and exceptional way.