A woman travels to Paris to meet her lover. When she arrives at her hotel, however, she receives a call from a mysterious stranger claiming to be his friend, who somehow possesses intimate knowledge of their lives and why she fled her homeland. Over the course of nine hours, this man will draw her in, revealing details about her lover’s work, which could put him in grave danger, and the growing conflict that has ensnared them all.
A challenge even to a reader familiar with Ariel Dorfman’s highly charged work ... Sophisticated and complex ... The sense of menace increases with each inconclusive sentence ... The bleak message of the novel will seem both inevitable and inescapable.
A fog of evasions, deceptions and lies gradually dissolves the outlines of characters and frays the plot of Konfidenz into free-floating questions that are never answered ... Builds a harrowing, chilly, erotic tension ... He frequently interrupts the novel with italicized ruminations about the ambiguous events unfolding, as if he were as helpless as the characters to predict or control the outcome. But his efforts leave readers perplexedly suspended in an allegorical limbo, befuddled rather than engaged ... His hopeful ending is a fantastical leap of faith, and too late.
Tantalizing ... Posing as a World War II story, Dorfman’s novel is best characterized as a finely tuned investigation into obsession and trust during major worldwide political instability.
