Perla

In a young girl's ingenuous voice, author-narrator Carolina De Robertis recounts 21-year-old Perla's awakening to the atrocities of Argentina's dirty war of the 1970s, her military father's role in the junta's brutality, and the grim specifics of what happened to thousands of Argentines who "disappeared." The ghostly appearance of a wet, naked man in her apartment disrupts Perla's tidy life, and as they exchange remembrances, Perla discovers disturbing truths about her past. De Robertis's reading is convincing as Perla hears the ghost-man's painful stream-of-consciousness telling of beatings, rape, and torture. As the shocking details of inhumanity register, Perla's family memories take on new significance. De Robertis's lyrical writing and understated performance make the unimaginable both horrific and poetic. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

Starred review from January 30, 2012
Following her successful fiction debut, Invisible Mountain, De Robertis tackles the lingering repercussions of the state-sponsored disappearances of political dissidents that characterized Argentina’s late-1970s dirty war. In March 2001, while 22-year-old Perla Correa’s parents are on vacation, a naked man, smelling like “fish and copper and rotting apples,” materializes in her living room in an affluent Buenos Aires suburb, and Perla finds herself drawn to him. Over several days, he recalls the life he shared with his pregnant wife—a life that ended when he was abducted more than two decades earlier. As she listens, Perla laments her recent breakup with a kindhearted journalist who suspected that she herself might have been stolen from disappeared parents, a possibility that Perla has never wondered about, or “more accurately, I had, but the wondering barely left an imprint on my conscious memory, it had been as rapid as a blink.” Perla neglects her friends and studies to spend time with the stranger, whose stories speak to her long dormant search for identity. She struggles for truth as she sorts through the shards of Argentina’s shattered history, piecing together the painful fragments that may rightfully be hers. This ambitious narrative, largely told in flashbacks, is propulsive and emotionally gripping. De Robertis’s lyrical flights are grounded in the fulfillment of the most desperate wishes of disappeared parents and their children, culminating in a wrenching catharsis about rebirth and healing.