77
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Buenos Aires, 1977. In the darkest days of the Videla dictatorship, Gómez, a gay high-school literature teacher, tries to keep a low profile as one-by-one, his friends and students begin to disappear. When Esteban, one of Gómez’s favorite students, is taken away in a classroom raid, Gómez realizes that no one is safe anymore, and that asking too many questions can have lethal consequences. His life gradually becomes a paranoid, insomniac nightmare that not even his nightly forays into bars and bathhouses in search of anonymous sex can relieve. Things get even more complicated when he takes in two dissidents, putting his life at risk—especially since he’s been having an affair with a homophobic, sadistic cop with ties to the military government. Told mostly in flashbacks thirty years later, 77 is rich in descriptive detail, dream sequences, and even elements of the occult, which build into a haunting novel about absence and the clash between morality and survival when living under a dictatorship.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This suspenseful and claustrophobic novel from Saccomanno (Gesell Dome) follows the dangers and paranoia faced by a middle-aged high school literature teacher in Argentina under dictator Jorge Rafael Videla in 1977. G mez, a teacher and closeted gay man living in Buenos Aires, lives in fear, and every green Ford Falcon that goes by fills him with terror: maybe he will be the next one taken by government goons. G mez and his friends try to ignore the arbitrary arrests, but after a favorite student, Esteban, is taken from his class by the secret police, G mez's fears ramp up. A series of incidents increase his paranoia: he's monitored by his landlord, Ram n; his phone is tapped after he starts an affair with Walter, a homophobic police officer; frogs are nailed to doors in his apartment complex. The story picks up when Diana, a pregnant dissident and lover of one of G mez's old friends, goes into hiding in G mez's apartment. They develop an unusual father/daughter relationship that gives his life new meaning, but also gives him more to lose. This dense novel is rife with intersecting sequences and unrelated subplots, but its rewards are substantial and the prose is excellent.
