Purgatorio Book

This book, chillingly, doesn't feel untimely. It's a little too close to home in regards to a government leaning toward nationalism, fascism, gaslighting, etc.

The book deals with the reality, the unreality, the dreams (hoped for, crushed, never lost), the almost-unimaginable life around Argentina's Dirty War. There is a magical element here, but not really magical realism -- it is all too real to think that if your loved one was "disappeared", you would endlessly search, believe, hope that somehow, some way you would find your loved one again. If you do see them years later, is it a break with reality? Has the stress of decades caused hallucinations, alternate realities of the mind? Dementia? Or is it an against-all-odds reunion?

It's not an easy book to read or to follow. Partly it focuses on a woman whose husband becomes a "disappeared" soon after they are married. She never gives up hope, she never stops searching. But her trials are compounded by her family life as her father is a mouthpiece, the master of PR for the regime. She's torn between the harsh reality of knowing what her father does, what the regime does, but also not wanting to believe those truths of her father, not wanting to believe what happened to her husband, not wanting to know the things her country is doing. Her life is in this state of purgatory always. Another element comes into play partway through: the author (the real author or a fictitious version of the real author who himself lived in exile during the military dictatorship?) striking up a relationship/friendship with the main character, their histories overlapping as exiles from Argentina. Is the author telling her story? Is she telling her story to the author? Or is the author creating her reality? Her unreality? It's a bit of a mind-bending, post-modern style of storytelling & an effective way to delve some of the realities of this terrifying, alarming period of Argentine history & the long, murky shadows it has cast for decades.

Not an easy read stylistically or content-wise. But effective at creating the never-ending unease, fear, waiting, loss, anxiety, & societal amnesia that often surrounds the horrific, both on a personal & national level.