First Hand December 1983

Set in Argentina during the time of generals and the Falklands War, Richard Garay is forced to hide his sexuality and professional desires, yet as things in his country begin to settle, he starts taking greater risks to find his own happiness.

A brooding, resonant novel set in Argentina. Irish writer T¢ib¡n (The Heather Blazing, 1993; the nonfiction The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe, 1995; etc.) is fascinated with the ways that suppressed feelings can shape and deform character, and the often destructive and always disruptive manner in which long repressed emotions can emerge. Here, Richard Garay, a closeted gay man who lives in Buenos Aires and works as an English teacher, practices a painful politics of self-repression aptly matching that of his nation in and after the grip of dictatorship: fear and silence give his life an anonymous quality and his city a sense of unhappy monotony, emptied of freedom, justice, possibility, community. The narrative follows Richard's mostly tragic awakening to himself. T¢ib¡n's tone is cool, unsqueamish, and discreet; his fondness for understatement when describing emotional turbulence is admirable and quite effective. Richard tells his own story: how he ekes out a life of lies with his aging British mother in a shabby downtown apartment, estranged from the rest of the family; how he survives her death, then is recruited and lucratively rewarded by a CIA-like US diplomatic organization as a translator and advance man to help protect and promote American economic and political interests in Argentina; how he sleeps around before finding love with Pablo Canetto, a younger man. Richard keeps trying to trade up in every respect, but the costs are unexpectedly steep. He surrenders his sense of fairness as an Argentinean to American moneymen, betrays his mother's memory, himself, and, finally, his lover--all quietly, remotely, with devastating ease. Eventually, he finds that he has lost, through long repression, the ability to feel, to respond, to trust, and only after a tragic discovery does he begin to regain those qualities. A memorably hard-headed, well paced and plotted reverie on loss. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Toibin (The Heather Blazing, LJ 2/1/93) lives in Ireland, but his newest novel successfully re-creates the turmoil and confusion of the postmilitary regime in Argentina in the early 1980s as if he had been witness. Richard Garay is an Argentinean, bored by his job as an English tutor and frustrated by his hidden homosexuality. His fluency with language attracts the attention of Claudio Canetto, who hires him as a liaison to foreign investors in his campaign for president of Argentina. Though the campaing is unsuccessful, it draws Garay into an uneasy alliance with a pair of powerful Americans who hope to influence the next election. Toibin flirts with the exploration of a tainted political process, but the heart of the book details the secret relationship between Garay and Canetto's son Pablo; as the country recovers from the Falklands War and the oppression of military leadership, their pairing grows from lust to love as the new threat of AIDS looms. Toibin's simple but eloquent telling of this personal story is sometimes explicit, often moving, and always vivid in its portrayal of Argentina and its people. Highly recommended.?Marc A. Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., Indiana, Pa.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Questions of identity haunt this novel by Irish writer Toibin. Only child of an Argentinian father and an English mother, Richard never feels quite at home in Buenos Aires. His sense of dislocation is intensified by a string of events that mark his adolescence: his father's death, his mother's impoverishment, his growing awareness of his own homosexuality. A trip to Spain with Jorge, the wealthy young man whom he tutors in English, further exacerbates Richard's isolation. His mother's death, which coincides with the Falklands War, is the catalyst that finally allows Richard to shed some of his Britishness. In the heady, dangerous times that follow, he becomes involved with an American couple, who probably work for the CIA and have been sent to Argentina to help protect U.S. interests. Richard's ability to negotiate both the Latin and Anglo worlds is useful, and he finds himself taking on another identity as a player in the new political and economic environment. Privately, Richard continues to explore his sexuality. The author's careful prose works well with Richard's dispassionate way of conveying his life story. Mary Ellen Quinn