A Beautiful Young Woman
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“A moving story . . . powerful, celebratory, and loving.” —Laura Cardona, La Nación
Set in the midst of Argentina's military dictatorship, a poignant and evocative debut novel about family, political violence, and the consequences of dissidence
As political violence escalates around them, a young boy and his single mother live together in an apartment in Buenos Aires—which has recently been taken over by Argentina’s military dictatorship. When the boy returns home one day to find his mother missing (or “disappeared”), the story fractures, and the reader encounters him fully grown, consumed by the burden of his loss, attempting to reconstruct the memory of his mother.
By leaping forward in time, the boy—now a man—subtly gives shape to his mother’s activism, and in the process recasts the memories from his childhood. The result is a stylistically masterful and deeply moving novel marking the English-language debut of one of Argentina's most promising writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In L pez's enticing debut novel, a man examines his childhood with his mother in hopes of better understanding her later disappearance in the charged political atmosphere of Buenos Aires in what appears to be the late 1970s following the military coup. The unnamed narrator combs short scenes for meaning in a voice that is sultry, longing, and defined by the abandonment that later fractures him: as he recalls, "I tried to push myself toward a childhood without deceit, without suspicions, but the truth is that I didn't want to be there." Furtive phone calls and his mother's habit of leaving him alone with near-strangers lend further mystery to her entanglements and her life beyond her son. The narrator is simultaneously the young boy, frightened and alone, and the grown man, haunted by what he can neither remember nor explain. This is a detailed, moving meditation on a mother's imperfect love, and an attempt to understand both her disappearance and who she was before disappearing. Though delicately written, it's compulsive in its quest, never trying to neaten the messiness of grief.
