November 16, 2020
An Argentinian American unspools his dark memories of the Dirty War in Loedel’s mesmerizing debut. Tomás Orilla, a naive medical student, was drawn into Argentina’s dangerous political miasma in 1976 to impress his first love, the left-wing activist Isabel. The reader first meets Tomás in 1986 in New York City, where Tomás had fled 10 years earlier with a forged passport. Now married to an American woman, he shares with her a conveniently selective version of his story (“the full, fleshed-out story still wasn’t one I was eager to examine, much less hand over”). Tomás returns to Buenos Aires after receiving a call from Isabel’s mother, who is terminally ill with cancer. There, he encounters what appears to be the ghost of a former mentor who takes him to a crypt underneath an old detention center, where he relives a series of horrifying events, some of which he was party to in the lead-up to a difficult choice he made for his own survival. The theme of ghosts is bent a few ways—ghosts appear in memories, the crypt, and on the street—and it becomes an apt, poignant descriptor for the people who were disappeared and the agony of their loved ones who had to carry on without knowing what happened to them. Loedel’s unflinching look at human frailty adds a revelatory new chapter to South American Cold War literature.
Starred review from November 15, 2020
After a decade abroad, a refugee of Argentina's Dirty War returns to Buenos Aires, where ghosts of his past guide him through a nightmarish labyrinth of memory, guilt, and loss. In 1976, Tom�s Orilla disappeared from Argentina without a trace, smuggled out by his childhood mentor, the Colonel, after coming dangerously close to death at the hands of the oppressive military junta. Now, 10 years later, he is Thomas Shore, a translator in New York City who is haunted by the traumas of the past and contending with a failing marriage. The impending death of Pichuca, an old family friend, occasions his return to Buenos Aires, where he moved as a teenager under the pretense of attending medical school, though his true motive was to be closer to Pichuca's daughter, Isabel, a spirited and fiery young woman whom he loved since childhood. But the city Tom�s returns to is riddled with ghosts: the ghosts of Isabel and the Colonel, the ghosts of the disappeared and the ghosts of their captors, the ghost of the young man he once was. With the Colonel's spirit as his guide, Tom�s returns to the sites containing all his darkest memories and his most profound regrets, and the boundary between the present and the past becomes increasingly indistinct. Back in 1976, Isabel, who is involved with a leftist insurgent group, exploits Tom�s' devotion to her and requests that he work for her as a double agent, launching a sequence of events that compromises his life: spying on the Colonel and finding employment at a concentration camp for dissidents. However, this is less a tour through memory than a reckoning, as Tom�s struggles to identify the discrete choices he would need to undo to prevent Isabel's disappearance and to save himself from the nightmare of his past. A complex and intimate meditation on love, guilt, and the decisions that haunt us forever.
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Starred review from November 1, 2020
Married to an American and living in New York, Tom�s Orilla has been trying to escape his past for 10 years. But a phone call informing him that his beloved Pichuca is dying brings him back to Buenos Aires. Inexorably drawn to the city that hollowed him out, Tom�s is visited by ghosts from his past, literally. Flashbacks abound. Blinded by love for the volatile Isabel Aroztegui, Tom�s, a medical student, had been drawn into the guerilla political group, the Montoneros, to which Isabel belongs. She convinces Tom�s that he needs to work at a local detention center, the infamous ESMA, so that he can deliver intelligence from within enemy lines. Here, Tom�s witnesses and tacitly endorses the torture that was meted out to Argentina's disappeared during the country's Dirty Wars. He ends up as a puppet, manipulated by Isabel and the torturers. Loedel borrows from his family's history--Isabel is modeled after his half-sister--to weave a haunting story about repression and the vulnerability of youth. With touches of magical realism, the debut swings back and forth between the netherworld populated by Tom�s' nemeses and his lived reality. A devastating reminder of the tragic costs of politics made personal.
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