The queen of hearts attended the presentation of ‘I will never return to Berlin’, the latest book by Roberto Ampuero, the Chilean liberal, in the front row.
We knew from Mario Vargas Llosa that Isabel Preysler was a great reader. A novel, basically. That’s why it wasn’t so strange to see her very attentive and in the front row last Tuesday at the presentation of the latest one that the writer and former Chilean ambassador in Madrid has just published in Spain. Roberto Ampuero. Liberal politician and former chancellor of the last Government of Sebastian Piñera, Ampuero and Isabel Preysler They met a few years ago precisely thanks to Vargas Llosaa friend of the Chilean novelist, with whom he shares, in addition to his passion for literature, a similar political and ideological trajectory.
Although 17 years younger than the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner, Ampuero also had a communist past. Born in Valparaíso in 1953, at just 19 years old, after the triumph of General Pinochet’s coup d’état, he began an exile that kept him separated from his country for more than two decades and that took him to Germany (he lived on both sides of the Wall) and to Cuba, where he got to know the Padilla case and the incipient repression of the Havana regime against intellectuals who refused to follow Fidel Castro’s guidelines. From that experience the autobiographical text was born Our olive green yearsand his devastating stay in communist Germany, Behind the wall.
I will never go back to Berlin, the novel that was presented at Casa América by the former Secretary of State for Culture José María Lasalle, and to which Isabel Preysler attended accompanied by the Amusáteguis (the banker José María and Amalia, his wife), is not exactly autobiographical but it is includes recognizable elements of his life path. In the story, which includes a love story thwarted by the communist dictatorship, The last weeks of the life of GDR dictator Erich Honecker are fictionalizedwho died 30 years ago in Santiago de Chile, without regretting anything and proud of having implemented real socialism in East Germany.
Of undoubted anti-communist character, the novel, which can be read as a thriller political that has the Cold War as a backdrop, it is also a reflection on the emotional tear caused by totalitarian regimes such as that of the GDR, which convert their citizens, who are victims of a regime of terror, into collaborators of the dictatorship itself through an intricate network of espionage among members of their own families.
However, the Ampuero novels that Preysler likes the most, according to the author himself, who despite the breakup of the relationship between the socialite and the Peruvian writer, he and his wife continue to maintain a good friendship with her, They are part of a saga of eight novels so far starring Cayetano Brulé, a Cuban detective. emigrated to Florida who has become a global success and one of the best-known fictional characters in Chile.
Sebastian Piñera’s sister, Magdalena, also attended the event. who was with the Chilean president in the crashed helicopter in which he lost his life last February. She, however, was unable to accompany the author and some of the guests, including Preysler, to a dinner that took place at the end of the event.
