“The way I tell this story may be ter-
rifying, Professor Gómez begins. And he
adds: How can you narrate terror?” And so
begins 77 , a novel ostensibly about one of
the darkest periods of Argentine history, the
so-called Dirty War, waged by the military
dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla against
anyone who challenged the dictatorship’s
social, political, and religious order. “A ter-
rorist,” Videla wrote, “is not just someone
with a revolver or a bomb, but also whoever
spreads ideas contrary to Western, Christian
civilization.” Between 1976 and 1983, from
fifteen thousand to thirty thousand Argen-
tine citizens, including secondary and uni-
versity students, were forcibly disappeared,
tortured, and murdered. 77 , then, is named
for the year 1977, during which the events
take place and which many consider to be
the most brutal year of the Dirty War.
Structurally, 77 is arranged in four parts:
a prologue, parts 1 and 2, and an epilogue.
The epilogue, which takes place in the
present, functions to establish the novel’s
flashback structure, introducing readers to
Gómez, a gay man in his eighties, who
taught high school literature during the dic-
tatorship. “I’m an old man who repeats him-
self. I’m over eighty. And I have nothing to
lose anymore except my papers. But papers,
like words, blow away in the wind,” he tells
us. Words, it seems, the act of telling, cannot
compensate for his former silence, which he
considers a form of complicity during that
fateful year that saw the arrest and disap-
pearance of his favorite student, Esteban.
Earlier, I said that 77 is ostensibly a
novel about Argentina’s Dirty War; it is
also a book about reconciling inaction with
survival. To survive, Gómez remains silent
in the face of brutality and resorts to sex
to cope with his lack of courage, including
with a straight cop with ties to the dictator-
ship’s campaign of terror. Ultimately, how-
ever, 77 is about healing the wounds of thepast. “We struggle to find the exact words to
explain what hurts us most,” Gómez tells us,
“as if by naming them our suffering might
diminish. In our urgency to name it, we’re
distracted from pain.”
At times, Saccomanno’s telegraphic
prose doesn’t come through in the English.
In sentences like “Era un muchacho más
que flaco, espigado,” which Labinger ren-
ders as “He was beyond skinny; he looked
emaciated,” the addition of “he was,” absent
in the original, changes the cadence of
Saccomanno’s syntax. Elsewhere, one won-
ders why words like cagazo (from cagar,
the Spanish verb for “to shit,” suggesting
something is so frightening as to cause
one to crap one’s pants) and mishiadura, a
Lunfardism that is etymologically related to
“misery,” were reduced to mere “fear” and
“poverty.” These, of course, to some may be
little more than cavils.
On her website, Labinger asks, “For
what is translation after all but a kind of
eavesdropping?” In translation, just as in
eavesdropping, things may be added and
omitted without affecting the outcome. This
translator, then, is convinced that Labinger
has heard Saccomanno’s voice clearly and,
in doing so, has done an admirable job of
translating this gripping novel.
George Henson
Middlebury Institute of
International StudiesAny residue of a disappearance must be
destroyed. “If it’s a physical object that has
been disappeared, we gather the remnants
up to burn or bury or toss in the river....
Soon things are back to normal, as though
nothing has happened, and no one can even
recall what it was that disappeared.”
Meanwhile, man-made structures are
deteriorating, victims of neglect and entro-
pic decay. At one point snow begins to fall
and does not stop. Gradually, distinctions
between objects, the stuff of meaning, are
obliterated by the white and the quiet. Thus
does landscape externalize processes under-
way in the narrator’s psyche. But no matter
what is disappeared, the islanders adapt
quietly and without complaint, for they fear
the Memory Police.
Distinguishable only by indecipher-
able geometric badges, the Memory Police
wear “dark green uniforms, with heavy belts
and black boots... leather gloves [with]
guns half-hidden in holsters at their hips.”
They can enter any dwelling, arrest anyone,search anywhere without warning or justifi-
cation. Terrifyingly efficient, they work “in
silence, their eyes fixed, making no unnec-
essary movements.” Their primary duty is
to enforce disappearances by obliterating
anything and anyone connected to what has
been disappeared.
Although the Memory Police could
become the stuff of cheap Orwellian hor-
ror, Ogawa avoids this trap by consistent-
ly presenting them with a calm, chilling
understatement that repeatedly catches usWORLDLIT.ORG 85