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![]() ![]() But it didn’t feel true to me, to my emotional experience. I tried for a while to write a realist version of Tomás’s year in 1976: falling in love with Isabel, then being asked to join the resistance, then being asked to spy for her at Automotores Orletti, this torture center. Did you consciously choose this approach, or did it just come to you as you wrote? This novel is infused with ghosts and magical realism. We sat down with Loedel to discuss detention centers, chasing the ghost of his half-sister, Buenos Aires history, and much more. The mysterious appearance of Tomás’s first love, Isabel items connected to his past popping up unexpectedly and finally and most obviously, his mentor and friend, the Colonel, appearing in the Recoleta Cemetery speaking “as he had in life.” A ghost of sorts, one who will take Tomás on a journey to the Underworld-and offer an opportunity to undo the wrongs of his past. The novel traces the brutal events of those years-and was inspired by Loedel’s own half-sister, Isabel, “a Montonera who was disappeared on January 17, 1978, at the age of twenty-two,” writes Loedel.įollowing grand South American literary tradition, Loedel quickly drops in hints of the surrealism to come. Also included were those who identified as Montoneros, a left-wing guerilla group. During that time, as many as 30,000 people were held and tortured in detention centers and ultimately “disappeared,” the word used for those killed during that time. The novel-our April AFAReads selection -is set in the Buenos Aires of the late 1970s and early ’80s, during Argentina’s so-called Dirty War, the grisly seven years following the military coup that ousted president Isabel Perón. “I must have had at least a hunch that the borders I’d cross on this journey weren’t the standard ones,” he reveals. But within three pages, it becomes clear that Tomás’s return will stretch far beyond the physical realm. Hades, Argentina reads almost like a dream-or, rather, a nightmare: It opens with translator Tomás Orilla traveling back home to Argentina, eight years after hiding out in the United States.
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