Departing at Dawn

June 15, 2009
This quiet, powerful novel from Argentinian author Lisé is told by a young woman caught up in the country's March 1976 coup d'etat. As General Videla's thugs prepare to overturn the government of General Peron's widow, 20-year-old medical student Berta witnesses her Peronist lover thrown off a balcony. Fearing for her safety as the province of Tucuman succumbs to chaos, Berta flees to her mother's sister, then to the family's hardscrabble farm at Olpa to live with her uncle. Nearly two years pass at this idyllic outpost, with time spent among a happily mixed community descended from original Spaniards and native Indians, where Berta uses her medical training to aid the local, aging midwife, before danger encroaches again. Avoiding ponderous political allegory with graceful writing, lawyer and professor Lisé sketches Berta's quest for autonomy and self against the vivid, violent backdrop of a country seeking the same: “Argentina was like an unfinished poem somebody was keeping in a bottle, for later.”

August 15, 2009
Relatively new to the literary scene, Argentine lawyer and professor Lisé sets her novel early in General Videla's repressive regime, a seven-year era following Isabel Perón's overthrow in 1976 that became known as the Dirty War, when thousands of political victims were imprisoned or killed or simply disappeared. Berta Rojas watches helplessly as her boyfriend, Atilio, is hurled from a Tucumán balcony to his death for his outlawed union activities and immediately realizes that her own life is in danger. She hides out first with her uncle and aunt in La Rioja and then at her Uncle Tristán's farm in Olpa, eventually heading for Buenos Aires, determined to leave the country. Lisé's thinly veiled work of fiction reads like a personal diary, as we eavesdrop on Berta, who at any moment risks being denounced. Ultimately, Berta, who risks everything, symbolizes how a national crisis affects innocent citizens at the individual level. VERDICT A well-written and engaging story of one person's escape from tyranny whose appeal goes beyond the implicitly narrow focus of the publisher's name, extending to a wider audience of Latin American historians and buffs of historical fiction.Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.