Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Glaxo
WORK NOTES: trans by Samuel Rutter
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1975
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Argentine
http://irenebarki.com/category/hernan-ronsino/ *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1975, in Chivilcoy, Argentina.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author, anthropologist, and sociologist. Professor, University of Buenos Aires.
WRITINGS
Co-publisher of Carapachay. Also author of Bicicleta, 2013, and the novels Lumbre and La Descomposición. Contributor to periodicals, including Excursiones, Ilmor, and Libris.
Author’s works have been translated into Portuguese, French, Italian, and German.
SIDELIGHTS
Hernán Ronsino has spent his life in Argentina, where he still resides and works as a professor and anthropologist. He is affiliated with the University of Buenos Aires, where he leads courses in his field of study. In addition to his academic work, Ronsino has also authored several novels. His work has earned the praise of the Fondo Nacional de las Artes and Guadalajara International Book Fair, and received translated releases throughout the Portuguese-, French-, Italian-, and German-speaking worlds.
Glaxo serves as Ronsino’s introduction to English-speaking audiences. It is actually part of a series of three, nestled between Ronsino’s two other novels, Lumbre and La Descomposición. Glaxo starts off in the early 1970s in the tiny town, Glaxo, which is also revealed to be the novel’s namesake. The town itself is based on the real-life town of Chivilcoy, Ronsino’s birthplace. There in Glaxo, an old rail line is discovered and destroyed. This act serves to only isolate Glaxo even further from the rest of the country. However, its citizens may have reason to be hidden from others around them. The novel frames itself from the perspectives of four leading characters: an ex-soldier, a barber, a rail line employee, and a butcher. All four of them participated in a horrific crime, the burden of which they carry for the whole of the novel. Glaxo cycles through their individual points of view, revealing what they know and how much they’re willing to relate about what happened. All four characters try to parse their feelings about the event in their own ways. The murder in the book is meant to serve as a mirror of a real-life massacre that occurred within Argentinian history, providing a digestible glimpse into the horror that occurred and the ways in which it still deeply affects those left behind in the aftermath. One Kirkus Reviews contributor called Glaxo “an atmospheric mystery that is never obvious.” Carlos Fonseca, a reviewer on the Bomb website, remarked: “Full of stirring images, the novel brilliantly portrays the painful isolation of a world where the possibility of justice has been replaced by the senseless circulation of vengeance.” Globe and Mail Online contributor Jade Colbert wrote: “Glaxo is evocative and full, yet suspenseful – it breathes.” On the Propeller website, Thea Prieto commented: “Ronsino replaces the dread his characters feel with another type of horror, a reoccurring wound inflicted by domestic unrest and political upheaval, the real and extensive violations in Argentina’s recent history.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2016, review of Glaxo.
ONLINE
Bomb, http://bombmagazine.org/ (February 20, 2017), Carlos Fonseca, “After the Bomb,” review of Glaxo.
Globe and Mail Online, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/ (March 24, 2017), Jade Colbert, “Daniel Grenier’s The Longest Year, Yoojin Grace Wuertz’s Everything Belongs to Us and Hernan Ronsino’s Glaxo, reviewed,” review of Glaxo.
Literarische Agentur Mertin, http://www.mertin-litag.de/ (July 26, 2017), author profile.
Propeller, http://www.propellermag.com/ (March 1, 2017), Thea Prieto, “A Knot Tightening: An Argentinian novel’s characters Brood Over Traumas Personal and Political,” review of Glaxo.*
Hernán Ronsino
Argentina
© Vito Rivelli
Hernán Ronsino was born in Chivilcoy in 1975. Since 1994 he has lived in Buenos Aires. He is a sociologist and professor at the University of Buenos Aires. He co-publishes the culture magazine Carapachay. In 2011, the Guadalajara International Book Fair selected him as one of the new leading authors in Latin America. His work has been translated into French, German, Italian and Portuguese.
His novel Lumbre (“Firelight”) is included in the HOTLIST 2016 of the independent German-language publishers.
Lumbre (“Firelight”) takes places during three days in March in 2002. It tells the story of Federico Souza who returns to his hometown because a close friend, Pajarito Lernú, has died. A stolen cow is the inheritance that Souza receives from him. Lumbre is structured from a present that constantly triggers evocations. It explores the personal memories of the narrator as well as the historical memory of a town and its myths. The scenery is often reminiscent of a Coen Brothers movie setting. Ronsino describes the brutality of the countryside with a striking light and clear narrative voice. Lumbre is an exceptional novel that confirms Ronsino’s narrative as one of the finest and most outstanding in current Argentinean literature.
Lumbre, is a finely wrought narrative work in the best Latin American tradition.
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Anyone who has read Lumbre understands why Hernán Ronsino is counted among the most important Latin American writers.
Der Freitag
What is most striking in the novel by Hernán Ronsino, one of the most interesting writers of his generation, is the way in which memories and time spent become one with a scenery which is itself memory: To remember is to build a path that, by dint of insisting, remains imprinted on the land.
Il Manifesto
In a derelict town in Argentina's pampas, a decades-old betrayal simmers among a group of friends. One returns from serving time for a crime he didn't commit; another, a policeman with ties to the military regime, discovers his wife's infidelity; a third lies dying. And an American missionary has been killed. But what happened among these men? Spinning through a series of voices and timelines, Glaxo (“Last Train to Buenos Aires”) reveals a chilling story of four boys who grow up breaking-in horses and idolizing John Wayne, only to become adults embroiled in illicit romances, government death squads, and, ultimately, murder. Around them, the city falls apart. Both an austere drama and a suspense-filled whodunit, Glaxo crackles with tension and mystery.
Melville House
Glaxo by Hernán Ronsino is a novel pervaded with extreme tension.
Le Monde
Rights
Novels:
Lumbre
Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia (world rights) 2013, 288 p.
France: Gallimard, forthcoming 2017• Germany: Bilger Verlag 2016 • Italy: Gran Via 2015
Glaxo
Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia (world rights) 2009, 96 p.
Brazil: Editora 34 • Chile: Cuneta Editora 2013 • France: Liana Levi 2010 • Germany: Bilger Verlag 2012 • Greece: Opera • Italy: Meridiano Zero 2013 • USA: Melville House 2017
La descomposición
Buenos Aires: Interzona 2007, Eterna Cadencia (world rights) 2014, 144 p.
Stories:
Te vomitaré de mi boca
Buenos Aires: Libris 2003, 96 p.
Received an honourable mention from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes in 2002
Essays:
Notas de campo
Buenos Aires: Excursiones 2017, 100 p.
Children’s books:
Bicicleta
Montevideo: Topito Ediciones 2013, 50 p.
Hernán Ronsino was born in Chivilcoy, a small town in Argentina's pampa, in 1975, and moved to Buenos Aires for his studies. The author of three novels and one short story collection, Ronsino is also an anthropologist and professor at the University of Buenos Aires.
HERNÁN RONSINO was born in Chivilcoy, a small town in Argentina’s pampa, in 1975, and moved to Buenos Aires for his studies. The author of three novels and one short story collection, Ronsino is also an anthropologist and professor at the University of Buenos Aires.
Hernan Ronsino, Samuel Rutter: GLAXO
(Oct. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Hernan Ronsino, Samuel Rutter GLAXO Melville House (Adult Fiction) 15.99 ISBN: 978-1-61219-567-4
Argentine novelist Ronsino’s debut in English, a brief, brooding novel set on the windswept edge of the pampas.Not much happens in Chivilcoy, which, though in the province of Buenos Aires, might as well be on the moon. The story opens ominously, in 1973, when workers come without notice and dig up the town’s rail link to the outside, leaving the massive Glaxo factory an island out on the grassland. The narrator is one of four figures who, in this gloomy place, play a part in a killing whose motives are obscure, recapitulated, in a way, by a finger-shooting game in which bored kids re-enact a gunfight from a Western film. Jealousy plays its part as the Dulcinea of the piece, the lovely La Negra Miranda, provokes the requisite deadly sins while pretty much minding her own business. All these years later, and she has gone, and, as the second narrator, now speaking from a vantage point a quarter-century after the events, says, “Here, in the Don Pedrin, Lucio Montes tells me about a ghost, because to name La Negra Miranda is like naming a ghost.” She is not the only specter, not the only secret the little town seeks to hide as it tries to forget the killing of an innocent—and, at the same time, the involvement of some of its inhabitants in the murderous dictatorship of the 1970s and the punishment of some who committed no crime; jealousy is one thing, but wanton and casual violence is quite another. Allusive and reserved, as if peeking out at the scene of the crime from behind drawn curtains, Ronsino’s short novel has an almost claustrophobic feel to it; if the only way to escape the place is to be imprisoned or drafted, the only way to get out of the narrative is to see people at their indifferent worst. An atmospheric mystery that is never obvious.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hernan Ronsino, Samuel Rutter: GLAXO." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466551456&it=r&asid=d6a286c95989087e56aa4e15e6f75c63. Accessed 1 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466551456
After the Massacre
by Carlos Fonseca
Staging historical justice in Hernán Ronsino's Glaxo
Sometimes history looks to fiction in order to bury its specters. Latin American literature seems to agree: from Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo to Valeria Luiselli's Faces in the Crowd, it would appear that Latin American fiction is the last ground where the battle for historical justice can be staged. Hernán Ronsino's arresting Glaxo (Melville House, 2017), brilliantly translated by Samuel Rutter, revives this powerful tradition by immersing us in a world where the possibility of justice and forgiveness is always tainted by remorse and vengeance. In one of the four monologues that compose this short but delightfully structured novella, Vardemann—the town's barber—catches the sight of a kid playing outside as he gazes through his window:
Then I see Bicho Souza’s son, alone, moving through the rain with a green shotgun, made of plastic, playing at war and facing up at long last to those endless ghosts in the cane field.
The scene condenses, in the poignancy of its imagery, the novel's capacity to stage violence as something inherited, repeated, and displaced. Like Bicho Souza's son, we are all kids ignorant of the dangerous games we play. Like Vardemann's painful witnessing of a kid playing war, we readers are asked to face up to the endless ghosts of Argentina's history. In doing so, Glaxo sketches a spectral crime story where history, far from something abstract, is embodied within a terribly tangible landscape plagued by memory and guilt.
Originally published in 2009 as part of a trilogy that includes his 2007 debut novel La Descomposición and the 2013 Lumbre, Ronsino's Glaxo is a novel about making latency palpable: the secret and yet impossible wish of its protagonists is to give a body to their painful memories. In the tradition of Juan Carlos Onetti's Santa María, William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, and Juan Rulfo's Comala, Ronsino reimagines his native town of Chilvilcoy as a landscape haunted by the secret history of a crime. Narrated through four formidable non-chronological monologues—that of the town's barber, the butcher, a railroad worker, and a retired military man—the novel is constructed as an expressionist mosaic of voices that explore the aftershocks of an event that left an open wound.
With poetic precision kept intact throughout Rutter's translation, Ronsino imagines the aftermath of the 1956 José León Suárez Massacre, which left five dead and seven fugitive Peronists running for their lives. Accounts of the event were silenced by the military dictatorship until Rodolfo Walsh's 1957 Operación Masacre, which retraced the infamous night and, in turn, exposed the atrocities committed by the Argentine authorities. Literature, as Ricardo Piglia used to say, plots both against oblivion and State silence.
In a gesture that portrays his prodigious capacity to subtly fold political history into literary history, Ronsino begins Glaxo by quoting an epigraph from Walsh's Operación Masacre. If Walsh claimed that what had led him to write the book was a paradoxical expression that he heard six months after the event—"One of the executed men is alive."—Ronsino begins his novel by tracing the blood-stained silhouette of the guard who mistakes this man for dead. Around this scene of misreading and survival, where literature and politics coincide to a point of eerie accuracy, he constructs a subtle crime narrative that remains profoundly literary at every point. In the four monologues of its main characters, the reader can almost hear the white noise that beats behind the soundtrack of official history.
Full of stirring images, the novel brilliantly portrays the painful isolation of a world where the possibility of justice has been replaced by the senseless circulation of vengeance. In its pages we find the tragedy that hides behind so many of our present-day crimes: the impossibility of closing the circle of violence. Instead, we find a landscape haunted by the possibility of survival and the impossibility of forgiveness:
The cane field no longer exists, they’ve cleared it completely, and where the tracks once were, now there’s a new road, a link road, which looks more like a closed wound. It’s a road that looks like the memory of a wound in the earth that won’t heal.
Like a surgeon operating upon this wound, Ronsino has fictionally reimagined Operación Masacre—a book which famously foreshadowed the rise of the non-fiction investigative novel. Rewriting Walsh was, indeed, not an easy task. No wonder it took Ronsino, one of the great stylists of the present generation of Latin American writers, to conjure the impressions that remained latent within Operación Masacre.
In the age of Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby and Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, Faulkner drove us south, to the countryside, across that other open wound delimited by the Mason-Dixon line, into a landscape where the specters of the Civil War still resided. He knew that it was there that he could find the unredeemed phantoms of those men and women who had constructed the nation, and then danced in Manhattan. Ronsino is a great reader and inheritor of Faulkner, whose epic As I Lay Dying inevitably comes to mind when reading Glaxo.
In an age where Buenos Aires seems to run the risk of becoming synonymous with Argentine literature, Ronsino drives us away from the capital and into the Argentine pampa. In a manner that remits to authors like Juan José Saer, Carlos Busqued, Selva Almada, or even to the works of film director Lucrecia Martel, he finds, in the remote town of Chilvilcoy, the spectral violence beneath Argentina's political as well as literary foundation. As Vardamann, the barber and indirect victim of the town's violence states:
That’s when I begin to dream about trains. About trains that run off the tracks. They sway from side to side before they fall. They destroy the tracks. Sparks fly. And then comes that noise, so shrill, just before they halt. So shrill it hurts your teeth. It moves you.
As Joyce knew so well and as Ronsino's characters always seem to intuit in their monologues: history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake, a nightmare populated by unredeemed voices that Glaxo finally gestures toward. And we, the readers, can't avoid but agreeing: "It moves you."
Carlos Fonseca Suárez was born in Costa Rica in 1987 and grew up in Puerto Rico. His work has appeared in The Guardian, BOMB, The White Review and Art Flash. He currently teaches at the University of Cambridge and lives in London. Colonel Lágrimas (Restless Books, 2016) is his first novel.
Daniel Grenier's The Longest Year, Yoojin Grace Wuertz's Everything Belongs to Us and Hernan Ronsino's Glaxo, reviewed
JADE COLBERT
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Mar. 24, 2017 9:35AM EDT
Last updated Friday, Mar. 24, 2017 10:00AM EDT
0 Comments
Print
The Longest Year
By Daniel Grenier, translated by Pablo Strauss
Arachnide, 384 pages, $22.95
Last year, Catherine Leroux’s The Party Wall arrived like a revelation: a French-Canadian novel with a continent-sized imagination, about connections between people over borders and across time. Leroux is among the three epigraphs introducing Daniel Grenier’s novel – appropriate, since in The Longest Year Grenier engages a similar continental imaginary. The novel’s magic realist conceit – that a person born on Feb. 29 might age one year for every four – allows an epic swath of history with sweeping geography to match: the Appalachian mountain system, that long suture curving eastern North America, from the Great Smoky Mountains bordering Tennessee from North Carolina, to the Alleghenies running Virginia through Pennsylvania, to the Chic-Chocs of the Gaspé. The Longest Year brings to consciousness a story freed from the straitjacket of our present circumstances, a history in which the Plains of Abraham, for instance, bears on the U.S. Civil War. The conclusion doesn’t quite live up to the driving power of the rest of the book, but not for lack of ambition.
Everything Belongs to Us
By Yoojin Grace Wuertz
Random House, 368 pages, $36
At first glance, Yoojin Grace Wuertz’s debut about three students at the prestigious Seoul National University might appear to fit the college-novel mould, but make no mistake: Although set in late-1970s South Korea, Everything Belongs to Us earns comparisons to the Victorian novels of George Eliot, as Wuertz’s characters come of age buffeted by social forces beyond their control. Everything Belongs to Us is a multilayered title, its meaning both enthusiastically literal and sardonic. With admission to SNU, students gain entry into the elite echelon of society. Their future assured, they need only grasp what has been promised them: everything Korea has to offer and beyond. But this rapaciousness, possible only through state repression, comes at an obvious cost to the people. As Jisun, Namin and Sunam – three of this generation born after the Korean War, from very different circumstances – navigate this system, the system in turn weighs on them. Everything belonging to us loses its optimistic sheen.
Glaxo
By Hernan Ronsino, translated by Samuel Rutter
Melville House, 112 pages, $21.99
Everything broods in Hernan Ronsino’s novella, the first work by the acclaimed Latin American writer to be translated into English. A story of lost innocence and betrayal set against Argentina’s plains, Glaxo owes its aesthetic to the Western film: running throughout are references to 1959’s Last Train from Gun Hill. (Glaxo’s first line: “One day the trains stop coming.”) We open in 1973. Glaxo is a remote town on the Argentine Pampas, the kind of place one goes to escape attention. The town barber considers how his clients shudder as his blade scrapes the backs of their necks. A work crew arrives without warning to tear up the train tracks. Glaxo is evocative and full, yet suspenseful – it breathes. Ronsino does this in 112 pages by building tension through structure, making abrupt shifts in time and perspective that turn a story about infidelity and murder into something larger, about the backdrop of Argentine politics (hint: Look up the Jose Leon Suarez massacre of 1956).
A Knot Tightening
An Argentinian novel's characters Brood Over Traumas Personal and Political
Argentinian writer Hernan RonsinoArgentinian writer Hernán Ronsino. “Glaxo” is the first of his books to be translated into English.
Glaxo
by Hernán Ronsino
Translated by Samuel Rutter
Melville House
Review by Thea Prieto
here’s a new road, a link road, which looks more like a closed wound,” says Vardemann, scanning the cleared cane fields of Argentina’s pampas. “It’s a road that looks like the memory of a wound in the earth that won’t heal.”
There are wounds betrayed in Hernán Ronsino’s Glaxo, injuries divulged even as the characters wish to conceal them. Ronsino writes of four friends—Vardemann, Bicho Souza, Miguelito Barrios, and Ramón Folcada—who once shared a love of breaking horses and American Western films. Disloyalty, though, has confused the virtue of the John Waynes and the Kirk Douglasses. At some point the mock gunfights acquired live ammunition, the crimes and vengeances were no longer pretend, and each character’s testimony, whether defined by avoidance, nostalgia, denial, or even reenactment, generates a twenty-year recursion, a chronic betrayal. Argentina’s La Nación describes Glaxo, Ronsino’s first novel to be translated into English, as “a machine with perfect gears,” and surely Glaxo is the road, the link road, through a landscape of individual and cultural trauma.
cover of the novel Glaxo by Hernan RonsinoWhich is not to say testimonial writing is the same as confessional writing. Ronsino’s characters actually confess very little of their paramount concerns, often revealing more through circumvention. The excerpt from Rodolfo Walsh’s Operación Masacre, which serves as Glaxo’s epigraph, not only calls forward the sufferings of Argentina’s Revolución Libertadora, it carries with it the literary tradition of testimonial fiction. Operación Masacre, a book about the José León Suárez massacre of 1956, in which Buenos Aires police rounded up and shot a group of men they suspected of having been involved in a political uprising, is considered by some critics to be the first “nonfiction novel,” predating Capote’s In Cold Blood by nine years. Ronsino’s Glaxo uses similar “testimonial” strategies: it is fiction about tension that arises from half-buried injustices, but fiction with crucial ties to Argentina’s recent political history. The novel’s path is not dictated by a single character (there are four points of view divided into four sections) and is not delineated by time (the sections are non-chronological). The path instead defines itself via a mounting dread, psychological steps that force the characters, no matter how close to or far from the novel’s unspoken ground-zero trauma they may be, to implicate themselves in that trauma again.
ardemann’s testimonial begins the novel in the fall of 1973, when the wounds become irrevocable. Glaxo is a town with Vardemann’s barber shop at the end of the street and Souza’s butcher shop on the corner—opposite the Glaxo factory, the Barrios household, and the remains of the Ace of Spades bar. At times, the repetition in Vardemann’s narrative seems the small talk of a poky town, facts repeated word-for-word because of a lack of new information: “This is the second time it has rained since the work team has been pulling up the tracks.” But these daily observations also reveal the unsaid, observations that threaten to trigger a corrosive memory: “the smell of grilling meat enters the barbershop, coming from over in the clearing of the cane field, and it awakens in me a decrepit, sharp anguish.” There is not only familiarity in Vardemann’s repetition, but also evasion. The same factory machines of the last generation still hum, punctuated by “the blackened metal drums, burning with fires that never seemed to exist by day, with the fires burning that don’t seem to be there during the day.” A deep disruption has replicated itself within Vardemann’s waking and nighttime hours, and as the dismantled trains and their obsolete tracks become a part of the town’s past, so does the unspoken become more unstoppable and recovery more distant for the town’s citizens. Isolation and denial, in other words, simmer under the “primitive quiet” of Glaxo.
poster for Last Train from Gun HillBicho Souza’s narrative, told from the year 1984, is no less recursive—more so, as over twenty years have passed since the unspeakable incident the novel circles around. There’s a duplicity throughout Souza’s narrative, his nostalgia forced to redefine itself amidst the ugliness of fact: Lucio Montes, a friend from the old days, becomes an “invasion”; La Negra Miranda, Folcada’s wife, inspires fond memories of the Ace of Spades bar, but also “to name La Negra Miranda is like naming a ghost”; a waiter at the bar is at once a character from a film Souza enjoys and a killer. Last Train from Gun Hill, the American Western film Souza has recently rewatched, reminds Souza of the pretend gunfights from his youth, but the film also carries layers of betrayal and loss, reminders of old wounds that won’t heal.
Souza’s repetition of the line “You’re no more than the reflection of the toes on your feet” is a symptom of this disturbed nostalgia. The first time he thinks the words, Souza is “moved.” The second time, he thinks the line “obsessively,” he holds onto its goodness, and the third forces Souza to recall ugliness—an image of Folcada. Souza mentally bargains over a loss from twenty years prior, suggesting a truly unsettling trauma—he grieves strongly enough that he must bargain obliquely, by way of the film: “if that woman, who is traveling to visit her family, if she hadn’t attacked Anthony Quinn’s son by beating his face with a whip, perhaps none of what happened next would have occurred.” Even as Glaxo moves away from this unspoken event, further forward in time, the tension accelerates the dread of testimonies to come: “he captures me again, the bastard, with his story.”
Miguelito’s narrative begins in the summer of 1966, closer to the event, yet still seven years after the fact. His testimony could fall directly into the “B” criterion of the DSM-5 criteria for diagnosing Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Vardemann has returned from prison, which triggers Miguelito’s various self-defenses. Immediately upon seeing Vardemann at the train station, Miguelito prioritizes certain thoughts over others. He victimizes himself by seeing his own death in Vardemann’s arrival, which leads to other thoughts of death—he admires himself for looking at the deaths of others, for that kind of bravery. Miguelito also reasons away his silence: “That’s why I prefer not to go around saying such things…you know that no one will believe you…People are shallow.” The premise is repeated by Folcada later in the section, and allows Miguelito to foreground memories of the good times (his father, his boyhood friendships, La Negra Miranda), while veering away from certain dangerous topics. Miguelito might see himself as “summoning the courage to explain,” but what is conveyed is deep-reaching regret and a dread of vengeance, the fantasy of a Western showdown coming awfully to fruition.
Which leads to the final testimony: Folcada’s narrative, written in the form of one unbroken paragraph, told from 1959, the time of the incident. The expectation is that here we will finally find the “A” criterion from the PTSD DSM: the point of origin, the catastrophic event, the witnessing. It is what the novel has been developing towards, and what the characters’ dread over the ensuing years has been built on. But when Glaxo might deliver the characters from the mist of dread and denial, allowing confrontation and perhaps even acceptance, more crimes come to light. “Betrayal is the foundation of war,” says Folcada, and Ronsino is writing to that very foundation. Even as Folcada freely admits violence, more dreadful wrongs are alluded to. He mentions the “Suárez business” in relation to his past work as a Buenos Aires police officer, and with an epigraph quoting Walsh’s Operación Masacre, the character can only be referencing involvement in the José León Suárez massacre of 1956. Rather than exposure therapy, Folcada’s narrative instead reenacts the trauma—not only the trauma that occurred in Glaxo, which the other three characters have referred to throughout the novel, but also the trauma of the José León Suárez massacre. In this way, Glaxo withholds while it testifies, like a knot tightening. Ronsino replaces the dread his characters feel with another type of horror, a reoccurring wound inflicted by domestic unrest and political upheaval, the real and extensive violations in Argentina’s recent history.
Thea Prieto’s short fiction has appeared at The Masters Review, NAILED Magazine, and in other publications, and she was a finalist for Glimmer Train Press’ Short Story Award for New Writers. Between writing and editing, she teaches at Portland State University.