Memory and commitment in the Enrique Valdés’ literature. Approaches to ventana al sur and Calafate

Abstract

The narrative approach on the Chilean South as it appears in the novels of Enrique Valdés starts with a research on the personal memory and with the recovery of the personal past as well. This start implies at the same time the consciousness of the lack of roots and the recovery of both a territory and a reality very remote from a modernizer and urban project. But that start evolves and ends up in a social and political compromise with such a reality. In Valdés’ novels Ventana al Sur and Calafate we can discover the author’s techniques in order to depict such realities without falsifying them, avoiding the presence of only a narrator, and choosing fragmentation and polyphony as tools required to achieve his goals.