THE SONG OF THE DISTANT ROOT

In this oppressively magical-realist novella, Salustio, a self-styled Utopian visionary, “dreams” a village where freedom and equality flourish, and—rather like St.-Exupéry’s Little Prince—goes in search of it, meeting en route many self-consciously symbolic figures (including, wouldn’t you know it, a priest who converses with birds). The only rational voice to be heard amid this whimsy is the earthy, sardonic one of Salustio’s clear-eyed wife Clarisa. One finds oneself wishing, metafictionally, that she—rather than the earnest Elizabeth Subercaseaux—had written this book.