Scan barcode
A review by carlosernesto
No Place For Heroes by Laura Restrepo
3.0
This is a story about two Colombians, a mother and a son, who are visiting Buenos Aires. The mother is an ex-Trostkyite who lived in Buenos Aires for several years during the Dirty War, where she fell in love with and married the man who became the boy's father. After the son's birth, the fear of being hauled away proves too great and the family flees back to Colombia. There the marriage fell apart, and the couple separated. The boy grew up without the father, and so they have come back to Argentina to find him.
It's a potentially rich concept, and the execution provides some very interesting themes and moments, but it has its flaws. On the positive side, it's an interesting look at the way narrative is part of how we make sense of our lives. The mother spends a good part of the time telling the boy the story of how he and his father met, fell in love, then came apart. This provides opportunity for a degree of back and forth between them on how the story is told, what facts are important, how is the narrative being dressed up, etc.
However, the novel sometimes feels a little false. The son, in particular, spoke in a way that didn't seem very plausible for an 18-year-old. Also, Restrepo sometimes attempts to underline her themes in ways that felt heavy-handed. One of the back cover blurbs compares the novel to Kiss of the Spider Woman or Waiting for Godot, but it lacks either of those works' confidence in letting the dialogue speak for itself without having to lay everything out for us.
It's a potentially rich concept, and the execution provides some very interesting themes and moments, but it has its flaws. On the positive side, it's an interesting look at the way narrative is part of how we make sense of our lives. The mother spends a good part of the time telling the boy the story of how he and his father met, fell in love, then came apart. This provides opportunity for a degree of back and forth between them on how the story is told, what facts are important, how is the narrative being dressed up, etc.
However, the novel sometimes feels a little false. The son, in particular, spoke in a way that didn't seem very plausible for an 18-year-old. Also, Restrepo sometimes attempts to underline her themes in ways that felt heavy-handed. One of the back cover blurbs compares the novel to Kiss of the Spider Woman or Waiting for Godot, but it lacks either of those works' confidence in letting the dialogue speak for itself without having to lay everything out for us.