Departing at Dawn
A Novel of Argentina's Dirty War
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“[A] quiet, powerful novel” of a young woman caught in the chaos of Argentina in the mid-1970s, when speaking against the government could mean death (Publishers Weekly).
March 23, 1976. Berta watches horrified as her lover, a union organizer named Atilio, is thrown from a window to his death by soldiers. The next day, Colonel Jorge Rafael Videla stages a coup d’état and a military dictatorship takes control of Argentina. And even though she was never a part of Atilio’s union efforts, Berta is on a list to be “disappeared.”
Fleeing to relatives in the countryside, she becomes part of the family she knows only from old photographs: Aunt Avelina, who blasts music from an old record player; Uncle Nepomuceno, who watches slugs slither in the garden every afternoon; and Uncle Javier, who sits in his tiny grocery store day and night. But soon enough, Berta realizes she must run even further to save her life—and those she has come to love.
With a prose that is light yet penetrating, Gloria Lisé has written “a beautifully simple, poetic story of solidarity and love, with memorable characters painted in the tender strokes of a watercolor” (Luisa Valenzuela, author of Black Novel with Argentines).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This quiet, powerful novel from Argentinian author Lis is told by a young woman caught up in the country's March 1976 coup d'etat. As General Videla's thugs prepare to overturn the government of General Peron's widow, 20-year-old medical student Berta witnesses her Peronist lover thrown off a balcony. Fearing for her safety as the province of Tucuman succumbs to chaos, Berta flees to her mother's sister, then to the family's hardscrabble farm at Olpa to live with her uncle. Nearly two years pass at this idyllic outpost, with time spent among a happily mixed community descended from original Spaniards and native Indians, where Berta uses her medical training to aid the local, aging midwife, before danger encroaches again. Avoiding ponderous political allegory with graceful writing, lawyer and professor Lis sketches Berta's quest for autonomy and self against the vivid, violent backdrop of a country seeking the same: "Argentina was like an unfinished poem somebody was keeping in a bottle, for later."
