Novela negra con argentinos (Black Novel with Argentines).

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Luisa Valenzuela's new novel is something of a cross between a police thriller and a treatise on torture. Set in New York, the story involves two not-so-charming Argentine writers, Roberta Aguilar and Agustin Palant. Roberta holds that a writer must "write with his body," by which she means, presumably, that one must live intensely in order to create. Following her advice, Agustin ventures into a sleazy neighborhood in search of adventure. There, he accepts a free theater ticket from an unknown man for an off-off Broadway performance. After the show, Agustin goes backstage, strikes up a conversation with one of the actresses, and accompanies her to her apartment. Once inside, he pulls out a gun and shoots her.

The rest of the novel chronicles the two writer's search to explain this apparently gratuitous crime. Agustin himself has no idea why he committed it. Fraught with guilt and fear, he probes his own psyche, but to no avail. Roberta feels both intrigued and trapped. She hides Agustin, attempts to transform him into someone unidentifiable, and winds up as altered by the crime as he. Her efforts to protect him and to solve the mystery bring her into contact with Ava Taurel, who runs a torture chamber for people who enjoy experiencing the pleasure of pain, and a black man named Bill, who sells vintage clothes, and with whom she has an affair.

Ava argues that she fulfills a social need. Her customers--men and women from all walks of life--delight in pain. Her studio is a theater of torture in which the clients play the roles. At some of these sessions Roberta is a spectator, and is aghast at her own fascination with horror. Her experience raises still more questions: Is torture basic to the human experience? Why do some people need to play at torture, when others are being tortured in reality and against their wills? What is it that human beings find fascinating and exciting about torture? Are we all potential torturers? Are we all potential victims? Valenzuela's nightmarish vision raises a plethora of unsettling specters.

Images of the Argentina of the seventies and early eighties loom in the background. Parallels between the reign of terror back home and writers' present situation raise certain fundamental...