The Secret Holy War of Santiago de Chile

A bestseller for several months after its 1989 publication in Chile, this novel sends an unwitting director of television commercials into a labyrinth of political intrigue. Unsure whether he is being persecuted or canonized by a host of vaguely defined political factions, Tito Livio Trivino stumbles trough the Chilean capital of Santiago. At El Limbo, an underground night club, he encounters Latin American visionaries: Sigmund Freud Romero, Pedro Nietzsche and ``Marcelito Aceituno, the Proust of Las Condes, who discovered that memory only serves to remember what's useless... and he wrote infinite tomes which no one ever wanted to publish in this isolated country, buried by envy, captured by copying, plagiarism and innuendo.'' De la Parra's self-aware narrative invokes sources as seemingly divergent as the Beatles' Yellow Submarine and Jorge Luis Borges. Although the narrative drive is hampered by its under-developed characters, this Kakfaesque psycho-political anatomy of Santiago is long on ideas and stylish prose. A psychiatrist and playwright whose The Raw, the Cooked and the Rotten was banned under Pinochet, de la Parra is one of Chile's ``new generation'' of writers, whose work, one hopes, will become more widely available in the United States. (Sept.)