Please Cry For Me, Argentina
My Definitive Ranking of Anglophone Argentine Dictatorship Fiction
Note: Apologies for the unintentional hiatus—I’ve been busy with personal stuff coupled with making tremendous progress on the novel draft, which I’m hoping to finish by the end of August/early September (wish me luck). I’ll try to return to my previous activity of one post a month (more or less), because the last thing I want is for this place to end up in the Substack graveyard.
Argentina’s last military dictatorship (known by many names including but not limited to the official and banally-evil name National Reorganization Process, the much-maligned problematic moniker “Dirty War,” and “the [everything bad in society that was the bedrock of ruling ideology at the time] dictatorship”1) is a terrain that contemporary Argentine novelists have largely left behind, or at least approach in less straightforward and obvious ways,2 but one far less frequently explored in fiction written and published in the Anglophone world.
While not as flashy or popular of a topic as say, World War II or (until now, I suppose) 20th century Russian and Soviet history,3 the topic of the Argentine dictatorship of the 1970s-1980s is one that should tick all the boxes for compelling fiction with Anglophone publishing appeal, at least as much as stories of struggle against Nazism or Soviet oppression do. It’s a topic that, like any, comes ready-made with its own set of archetypes and popular themes, some more cliche than others—the idealistic, beautiful students whose young lives are tragically cut short, the animalistic, trigger-happy, intellectually incurious military (natural enemies of the students, you see?), and lots and lots of generational pain and trauma. Naturally, stories of the stolen grandchildren frequently pop up, as these are some of the most heart-wrenching from the time. All of this is to say that it will not surprise me if this topic becomes more of a mainstay in the Anglophone publishing world, especially given contemporary concerns about the rise of the authoritarian right in much of the Western world and said right-wing’s relativization if not outright praise of figures such as former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Some authors (Loedel, Yaryura Clark; De Robertis is Uruguayan) are in fact Argentine themselves, but their work is included here as it was a) originally written in English (not released in English as a translation from the original Spanish) and b) published and marketed, at least initially, to an Anglophone public (as opposed to an Argentine or Latin American public). Finally, this is not an exhaustive list: I have only included works originally written and published in English (as opposed to other languages that aren’t Spanish4), and while I like to think I’ve read every bit of English-language fiction on this topic, I’m sure some works have fallen through the proverbial cracks.
So without further ado, here’s my ranking (via star system):
5 Stars
Hades, Argentina by Daniel Loedel
I’ve reviewed Loedel’s novel before here, and don’t really have much to add, except that it still reigns supreme as the best novel on this topic originally published in English. It’s nuanced, layered, and realistic and if you read one book on this list, make it this one.
4 Stars
Perla by Carolina De Robertis
This was, before the release of Hades, the top contender for the Argentine dictatorship fiction prize. When I read Perla shortly after its release in 2012, I was quite literally brought to tears by its beauty—the book actually made me cry—but upon re-reading it last year, I found that same prose and narration too overwrought and a few details to be misplaced (for example, Perla’s father— “father”—is a Navy “colonel”5). Perhaps tastes change with age—I’m almost certain they do—but nevertheless, Perla still wins something, if not second prize then first for best English-language story about the topic of the stolen grandchildren specifically.
3 Stars
The Memory Stones by Caroline Brothers
The Memory Stones is part family saga, part stolen grandchildren story, and one that, like Perla above, is full of the sort of overwrought prose befitting such a tale of generational trauma and pain. However, unlike Perla, which almost solely focuses on the experience of its titular character, The Memory Stones bites off far more than it can narratively chew (there’s an entire subplot about archeology and archeological sites in Greece coupled with the Kadareian6 technique of incorporating Greek mythology and ancient history as a metaphor for the literary present that I feel could’ve been cut without incident) before it abruptly and jarringly ends. Not the worst, but not the best, and certainly worth checking out with these caveats in mind.
On a Night of a Thousand Stars by Andrea Yaryura Clark
Unlike The Memory Stones and Perla, On a Night of a Thousand Stars tells its stolen grandchild story in simple, straightforward prose, a style that was both simultaneously refreshing and left me wanting just a little bit of the flowery, emotional language of the former two. The most recent release on this list, On a Night of a Thousand Stars is an upmarket book club novel par excellence7, a novel that is similar to the film Argentina 1985 with its tailoring of Argentine history to the needs of non-local audiences. If you ever wanted a beach read about the Argentine dictatorship, this is it, as the novel is compulsively readable (I finished it in 2 days), even if you, like me, have solved its central mystery early on. Just don’t go in expecting Literary fiction with a capital L.
The Dutch Wife by Ellen Keith
The Dutch Wife is an ambitious story that makes a flimsy and ultimately failed attempt at linking the horrors of World War II to the horrors of the Argentine dictatorship decades later. While the World War II story is solid, the Argentine story is largely an afterthought and employed more or less as a karmic plot device. I won’t give anything away but it involves fleeing Nazis (of course). The Argentina parts exclusively take place in what I presume to be the ESMA,8 and they are a painful chronicle of never-ending torture and degradation without any true insight into what made the Argentine experience specifically evil (lots of generic “student protestors”9 getting arrested by military sadists). Read for the World War II story, I suppose, and wish the author had given the Argentina storyline the space it deserves.
2 Stars
Imagining Argentina by Lawrence Thornton
This is the oldest work on the list and the first in an unremarkable trilogy that’s not even worth mentioning here. It was also made into a particularly cringe-worthy 2003 film starring Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson (who speaks in fake accented English). Basically, this book is “I See Dead People” but applied to the Argentine context, its clumsy attempts at magical realism likely novel at the time of its publication in 1987 but that have since aged quite badly. Generic characters (husband is a theater director, wife is a fearless journalist…see where we’re going here?), generic plot, save for the speculative twist. Watch the film for a few unintentional laughs, but otherwise, skip this one.
The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander
It should not take me two months to finish a book about the Argentine dictatorship, but it took me around two and a half to finish The Ministry of Special Cases. I should’ve loved everything about this, as the novel promises an exploration of the impact of a son’s forced disappearance on his family and of broader Argentine Jewish life and culture (a whole fascinating topic in and of itself). But much of it fell largely flat to me. The disappeared son is—you guessed it—another generic humanities student, the symbolism was forced while clothed in a certain whimsical quirkiness that didn’t quite gel well with the rest of the story (e.g. the son is forced to work with his father digging graves at night), and the story itself was largely episodic, not really building up to anything big or revelatory. But perhaps my biggest issue was the absolutely glacial pacing of it all. Everything just moved so slowly, too slowly for my taste, which explains why I, too, was slow to finish it.
e.g. “the civilian-military-ecclesiastical-patriarchal-homophobic-ad infinitum dictatorship;” there’s been a bit of debate over the utility of the shortened version of this term (“civic-military dictatorship”) by local academics, with one side arguing that “military dictatorship” alone tends to imply civilian collaboration (what military dictatorship hasn’t counted on civilian collaborators?) while the other argues for visibility and naming names; personally I tend to come down in favor of the former as visibility can be achieved in other, less unwieldy ways.
Mariana Enriquez’s Nuestra parte de noche (Our Share of Night, translated by Megan McDowell and released last year by Hogarth) is an example of the indirect approach to this topic taken by many contemporary Argentine writers.
The origin of many a Communism Bad story.
Beyond Babylon by Igiaba Scego (translated from the Italian by Aaron Robertson in perhaps the most stylistically stunning translation I’ve read) is my favorite non-English, non-Spanish work that deals with this era.
This is a very small symptom of a larger problem, not just in fiction but in general discourse, the conflation of all branches of the Armed Forces into one collective whole. In reality, the Armed Forces tended to exhibit an infighting that almost rivals that of the political left (usually Army vs. Navy, with the Air Force just basking in its irrelevance).
I’m sure other people have done this but I will just never not associate it with Kadare.
For some reason, I find myself comparing it to the Chanel Cleeton Cuba series, and wonder why Reese Witherspoon hasn’t chosen it for her bookclub.
In fiction, it is always the ESMA; see Brothers, Englander, De Robertis and Yaryura Clark’s novels.
Not to be pedantic, but they wouldn’t have been protesting after ‘76, as public gatherings in stationary groups were made illegal (hence why the Mothers had to walk around the Plaza de Mayo).