GLAXO

Argentine novelist Ronsino’s debut in English, a brief, brooding novel set on the windswept edge of the pampas.

Not much happens in Chivilcoy, which, though in the province of Buenos Aires, might as well be on the moon. The story opens ominously, in 1973, when workers come without notice and dig up the town’s rail link to the outside, leaving the massive Glaxo factory an island out on the grassland. The narrator is one of four figures who, in this gloomy place, play a part in a killing whose motives are obscure, recapitulated, in a way, by a finger-shooting game in which bored kids re-enact a gunfight from a Western film. Jealousy plays its part as the Dulcinea of the piece, the lovely La Negra Miranda, provokes the requisite deadly sins while pretty much minding her own business. All these years later, and she has gone, and, as the second narrator, now speaking from a vantage point a quarter-century after the events, says, “Here, in the Don Pedrín, Lucio Montes tells me about a ghost, because to name La Negra Miranda is like naming a ghost.” She is not the only specter, not the only secret the little town seeks to hide as it tries to forget the killing of an innocent—and, at the same time, the involvement of some of its inhabitants in the murderous dictatorship of the 1970s and the punishment of some who committed no crime; jealousy is one thing, but wanton and casual violence is quite another. Allusive and reserved, as if peeking out at the scene of the crime from behind drawn curtains, Ronsino’s short novel has an almost claustrophobic feel to it; if the only way to escape the place is to be imprisoned or drafted, the only way to get out of the narrative is to see people at their indifferent worst.

An atmospheric mystery that is never obvious.