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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Jan 2021, 304 pages
Paperback:
Jan 2022, 304 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Kim Kovacs
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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.
One
I'd spent eight years officially disappeared. At least as far as I knew; I hadn't been back to Argentina since '76, and even after the ostensible resumption of democracy in '83, no one from the government ever managed to confirm my existence. Only in the ninth year, when I married an American and had to get certain papers in order for my green card, did Tomás Orilla return to documented being.
But the interval in between wasn't merely a bureaucratic absence. I'd shut myself off completely until I met my wife, and even then—by our first anniversary, I was already sleeping on the couch. The affair was hers, but the fault, I acknowledged tacitly, was mine. I'd never been truly present. Kind and available, yes. Committed too. Even making plans for the long term—a joint savings account, my citizenship application, and, most recently, conversations about children. But it was always an effort, a mask I put on. If I blamed Claire for anything, it was that she saw it for ...
Hades, Argentina isn't a fast read, but that's partly because Loedel's prose is often so achingly beautiful that one must pause to simply appreciate his gorgeous writing. It's one of those rare books that gets under your skin and haunts you for a long time after you turn the last page. It's one of the best novels I've read in recent years, and one I recommend highly for those who feel they can comfortably engage with the subject matter...continued
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(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).
Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and Nora Webster
An astonishingly powerful novel about the complex nature of guilt. Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names
A remarkable novel, personal and political, elegiac and intimate, with a tenderness and wisdom evident in every passage. A beautiful book. Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes A River
A stunning descent into the haze of memory and history. In his interrogation of complicity and violence, Loedel explores how institutionalized evil disappears humans not only from the physical world, but from their own souls as well. Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling
Loedel writes in the venerable Argentinian tradition of mixing the political and the supernatural, but his novel comes from a different language and a new sensibility. It took me to places I had never visited before. R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
Strange, gorgeous, and terrifying—a book for the grievers, and for those of us who wish we could turn back time to remedy past mistakes—and so, for all of us.
The action in Daniel Loedel's debut novel, Hades, Argentina, is propelled by a clandestine South American military campaign known as Operation Condor.
Operation Condor's roots can be traced back to the mid-1960s, when Che Guevara left Cuba to spread socialist doctrine throughout South America, advocating the violent overthrow of the continent's corrupt, U.S.-backed anti-communist dictatorships. Although Guevara was killed in Bolivia in 1967, his ideas had gained a foothold, resulting in a period of unrest. Across the continent, dictators were replaced by socialist-leaning leaders, some via coup, some through democratic election. The U.S. government wished to prevent the spread of communism (and was not scrupulous about differentiating ...
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