EPITAPH FOR SORROWS

An Argentinian journalist pursues what may be the story of a lifetime in Sanderson’s novel.

On a chilly night in Buenos Aires in 1956, a man hands an infant girl over to a young nun at an orphanage. Fifty-two years later, in 2006, journalist Andrés Carriego, an outspoken critic of the corrupt Peronist movement, makes a living writing under the pen name Funes—a reference to a story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who makes a cameo later on. Carriego is in possession of 30 years’ worth of writings by a mysterious woman who claims to be the daughter of politician Juan Perón and a 13-year-old girl named Nélida Haydeé Rivas. Days after Perón's reburial in San Vincente sparked bloody protests, Carriego received a journal from a woman who was killed in the violence. In a note, she identifies herself as Dolores Perón Rivas and asks Carriego to share her story. Through Dolores’ journal, Sanderson describes, in intricate detail, the orderly but loveless convent from which she escaped at 15, the cigarette smoke and raised voices of her bohemian apartment, and the wretchedness of a jail cell. Dolores is also shown to be a victim of assault and other atrocities committed during a 1976 military dictatorship. Sanderson, a Fulbright scholar who’s published extensive work on Latin America, challenges readers to solve the story’s mysteries, perhaps knowing that historical questions become boring the moment they’re answered. Along the way, he manages to spin an almost mystical tale, full of visions, sacrifice, and wandering, out of Perón and Rivas’ story. Alongside the political tumult and bloodshed, he effectively explores themes involving motherhood and sexist attitudes toward women. Nuns repeatedly tell Delores that her mother was a “whore,” for example, but she still wants desperately to meet her; this longing manifests in fixations on maternal figures, which bleed into attraction in the case of Sister Fabula, the only kind nun at the convent, and Blanca, a university student. It all leads to a devastating, inevitable confrontation between Dolores and Rivas in the book’s second half.

A well-researched historical tale that illuminates and transcends Argentinian politics.