No Return Address

And with this book Aurora Posada De Gregorio comes to testify to us—we say update us—on the tattered condition of those who are forced to wander, in her status as an exile. She has left her Ithaca with its Government Palace in flames, a lacerated president, a completely wounded, fragmented, dispersed people. Letters are written and pile up, sent to Chile from exile; they pass from hand to hand, get lost in the midst of those human bridges, in the midst of each gentle touch they recover, in brushes of solidarity. The letters wander the immense and intertwining paths of life, weaving those who stayed with those who had to leave, the beloved ones who were driven out. The reader encounters here a cluster of letters belonging to another time, a time in the recent history of Chile. They are letters written from exile, a book that comes to join the testimo- nial canon of post civic-military dictatorship literature of Chile. No Return Address forms part of a literature whose initial urgent objective was to disseminate testimony to make visible a tragedy that people were suffering. Gradually, the impetus folded in more literary concerns: the stylistic deployment of words, of narrative syntax, the burgeoning of text, revitalizing our literature and carving out its space as a genre.