No Place For Heroes

May 24, 2010
From Restrepo (Delirium) comes a surprisingly plain-faced novel of parenthood set in the aftermath of the Argentine Dirty War. A journalist and one-time revolutionary, Lorenza is returning to Buenos Aires in the late 1990s with her teenage son, Mateo. Both are looking for Ramón Iribarren, a shadowy resistance leader and Mateo's father, with whom Lorenza spent the years of General Videla's junta distributing underground newspapers and frequenting apartment safe houses with toothpaste tubes filled with microfilm. As their search takes them deep into Argentina's recent past, Lorenza fills her impressionable son's head with tales of his troubled nativity, but Mateo has been brought up a member of a generation that may ultimately be beyond Lorenza's understanding. Restrepo is surefooted when it comes to depicting life during wartime, but the authenticity of that world is so starkly juxtaposed with her fumbling grasp of Mateo and youth culture that readers may wish that Restrepo had set the novel in the fascinating times that the characters seem largely content to relive.

July 1, 2010
Set during the Dirty War in Argentina (1976–83), this latest effort from the Colombian political activist, journalist, and novelist combines three stories in one. The bulk of the novel is a sustained dialog between Lorenza Iribarren, herself a journalist, and her adolescent son, Mateo, apparently on a trip from Colombia to Argentina to reunite with Ramón, Lorenza's long-absent husband. During this conversation, the important second plot emerges: how Ramón kidnapped Mateo when the latter was two years old and how Lorenza finagled to get him back. The final and weakest thread deals with the underground resistance in which Lorenza and Ramón were intimately involved. VERDICTDespite the potentially compelling situations, the novel fails to convey any sense of danger or immediacy. The conversation between mother and son is stilted, used mostly as a forced means to develop the plot. The author misses the opportunity to expose the nasty politics of the military junta; its heinous deeds are mentioned but never witnessed, which seems odd in light of the author's strong political commitment and experience in that arena. Not the best example of this popular author's work.—Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH

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