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What it argues
Benjamin Chaparro is a recently retired clerk from the Buenos Aires criminal courts. He has spent his career watching justice function, fail, and be corrupted, and he is haunted by one case in particular: the brutal murder of a young woman named Liliana Colotto in 1974, a case he worked on as a young man and never fully resolved. The killer was identified, confessed, and then released when Perón's return to power transformed the political landscape. Chaparro decides in retirement to write the story as a novel, which is the book we are reading — a manuscript that forces him to confront what he chose not to see, what he missed, and what he still doesn't understand.
Sacheri's novel is doing something more complex than a standard crime procedural. The investigation in 1974 and Chaparro's reconstruction of it decades later run in counterpoint, and the gap between them is where the novel's real inquiry lives. What does it mean to pursue justice in a country that periodically renders justice meaningless? How do you write honestly about the past when you were complicit in its failures? The novel is set against Argentina's political instability — the transitions between military rule, Peronism, and the dictatorship of the late 1970s — without requiring the reader to have detailed knowledge of that history.
What it gets right
- 1.
The frame of Chaparro writing the story as a novel is not a gimmick but the novel's central argument: the act of narration is an attempt to settle accounts with the past.
- 2.
Argentina's political instability is not background but the mechanism that made the original injustice possible — the killer's release is a direct consequence of who held power.
- 3.
Irene and Chaparro's relationship is the emotional core: their mutual refusal to act on their feelings is both a personal tragedy and a symptom of a culture that defers what it should confront.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Eduardo Sacheri is an Argentine writer and history teacher. He is the author of several novels and short story collections, and he co-wrote the screenplay for Juan José Campanella's film adaptation of The Secret in Their Eyes, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2010. Sacheri's work is deeply grounded in Argentine social and political history, particularly the period of military dictatorship and its aftermath. He is one of the most significant voices in contemporary Argentine popular fiction. He lives in Buenos Aires.
