The horror of the Junta rule in Argentina is the subject of this novel which combines reality and fiction. The author uses an imaginary character, Carlos Rueda who has a gift for storytelling and an ability to forsee future happenings with unerring precision. People come to Carlos's garden on the Calle Cordova where he tells the stories of the "disappeared" - the innocents snatched away in green Ford Falcons to be raped, tortured, or worse. In the Plaza de Mayo, mothers bear placards with photographs of the "disappeared" in view of General Guzman at his window, who claims their grievances are imagined. Carlos however, supports them in their vigil, for his wife, too, is missing. The combination of this vigil and the storyteller in Calle Cordova whose imagination wages war with the General's is the major factor that the author puts forward as being so dangerous to the regime: imagination which the Generals could not violate and which allowed Argentina to survive.
Industry Reviews
This ambitious first novel focuses on the peaceable citizen confronted by totalitarian power; the context is the reign of terror of the Argentinian generals after their 1976 seizure of power. Historically, the most visible opponents of the regime were the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires; their silent vigils protested the "disappearances." Thornton has interwoven with their protests a supernatural element; his protagonist, Carlos Rueda, a prominent children's playwright, acquires a specific clairvoyance: the ability to see the circumstances of the "disappeared." After his wife Cecilia, an opposition journalist, is "disappeared," Carlos joins the mothers' vigils, and they attend meetings at his home to hear his stories of their loved ones: in some cases, the stories are of torture and death; in others, of miraculous escapes. The reader soon accepts (through his surrogate, the initially skeptical narrator Martin Benn, retired journalist and friend of the Ruedas) the authenticity of Carlos' visions, which form the heart of this overly static novel, though Carlos does more than just talk. In his unwavering faith in Cecilia's survival, he tries once to locate her, guided by a bird. (Birds are a recurrent motif; they serve both as agents of good and metaphors for freedom.) On another occasion he tracks and is about to shoot the General supervising the "disappearances" when he remembers his supreme insight: "the real war is between our imagination and theirs. . .so long as we do not let them violate our imagination we will survive." The repression intensifies (Carlos' daughter Teresa is seized and killed, his Children's Theater is closed), but the novel ends with the ebbing of the Generals' power and Carlos' reunion with his wife. This well-intentioned work has its graceful moments, but the hard truth is that more pain is communicated in one page of Jacobo Timerman's firsthand testimony (in Prisoner Without a Name, the preeminent account of the period) than in all the stories filtered through Carlos. All that Thornton does with these visions is repeat them; it's like watching a magic show with only one trick. (Kirkus Reviews)
