“The past that has not been tamed with words is not memory, only a sort of spying.” So writes Laura Restrepo in her ninth novel, “No Place for Heroes,” and one can almost see her wrangling the unbroken beast of history, daring it to show its horns. Long considered one of the foremost Latin American writers of our time, the Colombian author shifts her attention south to Argentina in this luminous and delightful novel.
Lorenza, a Colombian woman who spent her youth as a leftist activist under the Argentine dictatorship of the ’70s and ’80s, has returned to Buenos Aires with her 18-year-old son, Mateo. They are searching for Mateo’s father, Ramon, whom Lorenza met when they were both clandestine organizers against the regime.
Locating this mysterious, lost father is almost absurdly easy: After much conjecture about what sophisticated guerrilla tactics they might have to use, they find his name in the phone book. He is not, after all, one of the “disappeared.” He left Lorenza after a harrowing incident she calls the “dark episode,” during which he abducted their infant son across national borders.
The more complicated challenge lies in deciding how to approach Ramon, and, even more important, coming to understand him by shedding light on the convoluted past. It is this quixotic endeavor that occupies the protagonists for most of the book.
Holed up in their hotel room, mother and son exchange tales, memories, secrets, hopes. Lorenza retells her love affair with Ramon, their political struggles and the terrifying journey she took to get Mateo back.
Her accounts are wry and often humorous in tone, though the repressive regime is ever- present, woven inescapably into daily life: “It was not only political oppression,” she says at one point, “but also moral, like putrid water that slowly seeped into everything, even the most private folds of life.”
The intricately fraught relationship between mother and son is just as vibrant as the recounted past. Mateo wants no part of the idealism and intense political engagement of his mother’s generation. A child of the 21st century, he escapes into his PlayStation, makes comparisons to “Star Wars” and, in exasperation, accuses his mother of conflating her memories with a movie.
As Lorenza continues to weave her stories like a maternal Scheherazade, he finds himself starved for her narratives and yet repelled by them at the same time, precisely because they come from his mother and not from him. Restrepo masterfully portrays the ferocious dance between a mother desperate to protect her son and a son desperate to establish his own strength.
Ultimately, this coming-of-age dance, the winding stories of Lorenza’s past and the search for Ramon, all converge in a climax as unexpected as it is moving.
All great literature is intertextual; the best writing always carries echoes of the giants on whose shoulders the author stands.
Not only is Restrepo no stranger to this truth, she revels in it, embedding direct references to other works within her own, like signposts that point toward deeper meaning.
In “No Place for Heroes,” Lorenza recalls attending a performance of “Waiting for Godot.” The evocation of a play is most apt for this novel, which is composed mainly of dialogue. In addition, the presence of “Godot” heightens the sense that our protagonists are yoked together by hopes as absurd as they are poignant, reaching for a mythic figure who may ultimately be unknowable, wondering what the devil to do with all the life they have inside them.
And there is another buried key: A sleepless Lorenza reaches for a Bernhard Schlink novel, reads a passage and finds herself plagued by its questions. Though the novel is not mentioned by name, one thinks immediately of “The Reader,” which explores the ghosts of the Holocaust, the moral blur between perpetrators and ordinary people, and the complex, often shocking ways that intimacy can lash you to historical events.
The Holocaust, like the events that have occurred under South American dictatorships, is an atrocity, and atrocities are unquantifiable by their very nature. Yes, one can count bodies and number the crimes, but the intimate effects of such events are ultimately beyond measure. They ripple out in endless rings. They cannot be encapsulated, cannot ever be fully tamed.
And yet, for the sake of our humanity, it is urgent that we try — and, as “No Place for Heroes” brilliantly reminds us, there is beauty in that very act of taming, of hurling verbal lassos at the past.
Carolina De Robertis is the author of the novel “The Invisible Mountain.”
FICTION
“No Place for Heroes,”
by Laura Restrepo, $25.95
