A Beautiful Young Woman

October 1, 2017
The son of one of Argentina's thousands of dissidents who vanished and were presumed murdered during the so-called Dirty War uses his fertile memory to bring his lost mother back to life.The "disappeared"--those deemed left-wing enemies of the vicious military dictatorship that ruled Argentina during the 1970s and early '80s--still haunt the country's collective memory, especially the surviving family members who don't know what happened to their absent loved ones. This first novel by Lopez, a poet, actor, and director of the literary group Ciclo Carne Argentina, paints an intensely evocative portrait of one such missing person: a woman whose name is one of the few things her son doesn't disclose about her from the memories he carries from childhood. As the book's title implies, it is her physical magnetism that the son most wishes to convey from the beginning: "Her skin was pale and opaque; I could almost say it was bluish, and it had a luster that made it unique, of a natural aristocracy, removed from trivialities." She was, clearly, a single mother, though it isn't altogether clear how or why she became single. The son, who likewise isn't named, doesn't know much about who and where his father is (though in a dream, he thinks he sees his red hair passing by one Christmas Eve). Otherwise it's just him and his "beautiful young" mother who do everything together--except at those times when she leaves him with their neighbor and heads off "with a worried expression on her face" for whole evenings. Where she goes and what she does isn't specified, because the little boy knows nothing except the pleasure he gets whenever they go to the movies or when she allows him to have some candy (which she otherwise forbids) after a bomb scare interrupts his school play. The sweet details of the intimate times between mother and son are delicately woven with shadows of impending menace that, as they're viewed from a child's perspective, are at best vaguely defined beyond his mother's odd silences and occasional tearful outbursts. Still, both he and we are kept in the dark as to the nature of her unease, and even the day when the boy's life changes forever reveals little except physical and emotional ruin. The process of recovering from that ruin, one suspects, culminates with this heartbreaking and moving reverie.It's been said that memory is a poet--if so, this novel represents some of its most gorgeous and incandescent work.

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November 6, 2017
In López’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.

November 15, 2017
In this evocative debut novel, Lopez depicts the swift, turbulent rise of his native Argentina's infamous military dictatorship in the late 1970s. Instead of focusing intently on political figures or militant activists, Lopez takes refuge in the intimate gaze of his young narrator, a boy absolutely enraptured by his captivating mother. Early scenes of domestic bliss, of secret sips from the nanny's peppermint liqueur, and snacks of little radishes preserved in oil and salt that she served from a little jar, begin to unravel as his mother leaves home in the evenings, often staying away for the entire night, slipping dangerously closer to sharing a fate with the thousands of people who were kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the brutal junta. A poet and an actor, Lopez relishes small moments of clarity (such as mandarin-flavored heart-shaped candies ) and big dramatic turns, as when a bomb threat interrupts a school play. He delivers a delicately textured, discomfiting first novel, a fitting tribute to mark 40 years of courageous, peaceful marches conducted by mothers of the disappeared in Buenos Aires.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)