1 of 1 copy available
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).
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
August 1, 2009 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781558616479
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781558616479
- File size: 1405 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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June 15, 2009
This quiet, powerful novel from Argentinian author Lisé 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 Lisé 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.” -
August 15, 2009
Relatively new to the literary scene, Argentine lawyer and professor Lisé sets her novel early in General Videla's repressive regime, a seven-year era following Isabel Perón's overthrow in 1976 that became known as the Dirty War, when thousands of political victims were imprisoned or killed or simply disappeared. Berta Rojas watches helplessly as her boyfriend, Atilio, is hurled from a Tucumán balcony to his death for his outlawed union activities and immediately realizes that her own life is in danger. She hides out first with her uncle and aunt in La Rioja and then at her Uncle Tristán's farm in Olpa, eventually heading for Buenos Aires, determined to leave the country. Lisé's thinly veiled work of fiction reads like a personal diary, as we eavesdrop on Berta, who at any moment risks being denounced. Ultimately, Berta, who risks everything, symbolizes how a national crisis affects innocent citizens at the individual level. VERDICT A well-written and engaging story of one person's escape from tyranny whose appeal goes beyond the implicitly narrow focus of the publisher's name, extending to a wider audience of Latin American historians and buffs of historical fiction.Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OHCopyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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