Hades, Argentina
A Novel
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD FINALIST
CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE LONGLIST
“A debut novel as impressive as they come. Tough, wily, dreamlike.” —Seattle Times
A decade after fleeing for his life, a man is pulled back to Argentina by an undying love.
In 1976, Tomás Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he has moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of the insurgency fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. Tomás has always been willing to follow her anywhere, to do anything to prove himself. Yet what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both?
It will be years before a summons back arrives for Tomás, now living as Thomas Shore in New York. It isn’t a homecoming that awaits him, however, so much as an odyssey into the past, an encounter with the ghosts that lurk there, and a reckoning with the fatal gap between who he has become and who he once aspired to be. Raising profound questions about the sometimes impossible choices we make in the name of love, Hades, Argentina is a gripping, ingeniously narrated literary debut.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An Argentinian American unspools his dark memories of the Dirty War in Loedel's mesmerizing debut. Tom s Orilla, a naive medical student, was drawn into Argentina's dangerous political miasma in 1976 to impress his first love, the left-wing activist Isabel. The reader first meets Tom s in 1986 in New York City, where Tom s had fled 10 years earlier with a forged passport. Now married to an American woman, he shares with her a conveniently selective version of his story ("the full, fleshed-out story still wasn't one I was eager to examine, much less hand over"). Tom s returns to Buenos Aires after receiving a call from Isabel's mother, who is terminally ill with cancer. There, he encounters what appears to be the ghost of a former mentor who takes him to a crypt underneath an old detention center, where he relives a series of horrifying events, some of which he was party to in the lead-up to a difficult choice he made for his own survival. The theme of ghosts is bent a few ways ghosts appear in memories, the crypt, and on the street and it becomes an apt, poignant descriptor for the people who were disappeared and the agony of their loved ones who had to carry on without knowing what happened to them. Loedel's unflinching look at human frailty adds a revelatory new chapter to South American Cold War literature.
