Publisher's Weekly Review
In López's enticing debut novel, a man examines his childhood with his mother in hopes of better understanding her later disappearance in the charged political atmosphere of Buenos Aires in what appears to be the late 1970s following the military coup. The unnamed narrator combs short scenes for meaning in a voice that is sultry, longing, and defined by the abandonment that later fractures him: as he recalls, "I tried to push myself toward a childhood without deceit, without suspicions, but the truth is that I didn't want to be there." Furtive phone calls and his mother's habit of leaving him alone with near-strangers lend further mystery to her entanglements and her life beyond her son. The narrator is simultaneously the young boy, frightened and alone, and the grown man, haunted by what he can neither remember nor explain. This is a detailed, moving meditation on a mother's imperfect love, and an attempt to understand both her disappearance and who she was before disappearing. Though delicately written, it's compulsive in its quest, never trying to neaten the messiness of grief. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In this evocative debut novel, López depicts the swift, turbulent rise of his native Argentina's infamous military dictatorship in the late 1970s. Instead of focusing intently on political figures or militant activists, López takes refuge in the intimate gaze of his young narrator, a boy absolutely enraptured by his captivating mother. Early scenes of domestic bliss, of secret sips from the nanny's peppermint liqueur, and snacks of little radishes preserved in oil and salt that she served from a little jar, begin to unravel as his mother leaves home in the evenings, often staying away for the entire night, slipping dangerously closer to sharing a fate with the thousands of people who were kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the brutal junta. A poet and an actor, López relishes small moments of clarity (such as mandarin-flavored heart-shaped candies) and big dramatic turns, as when a bomb threat interrupts a school play. He delivers a delicately textured, discomfiting first novel, a fitting tribute to mark 40 years of courageous, peaceful marches conducted by mothers of the disappeared in Buenos Aires.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Julián lópez's debut novel, "A Beautiful Young Woman" (translated from the Spanish by Samuel Rutter), begins as a rapturous portrait of a young woman in 1970s Argentina as seen through the eyes of her son, remembering back to when he was 7. His evocation of her is poetic, but ringed by menace: A military dictatorship rules the country, the school day is disrupted by bomb threats, and the mysterious phone calls she keeps taking in a neighbor's apartment suggest her involvement in a resistance movement. Given the violent ends met by so many who opposed the junta, the sense of dread surrounding mother and son grows with each chapter. López's book can be seen as a kind of counterpart to Patricio Pron's 2011 novel, "My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain," in which a son uncovers his father's role in a leftist group during the same dark period in Argentina's history. But where Pron is forensic in his approach, López is sensual. The narrator's descriptions of his mother are longing, even erotic at times, and the most moving passages describe his small, often futile attempts at intimacy, like taking a breath after she walks by "as a way of embracing her." While López's narrator is effusive about his mother (the phrase "my mother was a beautiful young woman" recurs as a songlike refrain), the book leaves much unanswered. The political situation is only obliquely described, and we never discover precisely what role this young woman was performing, or what happened to her. If this is frustrating, then it is appropriately so: a fitting enactment of the ghostly silence into which so many of the desaparecidos - the disappeared - fell. As readers we must share the mysteries that still haunt the narrator, a disillusioned adult, in the book's final pages. More problematically, his fascination with his mother is not always conveyed with the urgency presumably intended: This is a short book, but it could be shorter still. It is difficult to judge the book's quality, however, when there are such significant problems with its translation. In many cases the Spanish has been translated literally, without any restructuring, which leads to awkward phrasings like "he moved forward in complete slowness" rather than (say) "he crept toward me." Elsewhere the meaning is more seriously compromised, and sometimes lost entirely. For example, a boy's face becomes "more and more concentrated," when the intention seems to be that his concentration becomes more pronounced. Similarly, López nicely evokes the narrator staring at his sleeping mother's face, drawing so close that her features distort - and disturb him - like a Picasso portrait; the translation, which renders this as "she was so close that she was as unsettling as a Picasso," loses much of its impact. At one point temeroso is confused with temeridad, so we read "brazen uncertainty" when López probably intends "fearful uncertainty"; at another the adjective acerado ("steely") is mistaken for encerado ("waxed"), leaving us puzzling at the waxy smells of airports; and so on. The closing section of the book describes the narrator's adult life with three women he loves in different ways, each of them an inadequate surrogate for the one he loves most of all, "a beautiful young woman lost forever in horror." There are some memorable scenes, in particular two lovers sharing a last, silent breakfast as dawn breaks, and the surreal image of a concrete staircase ending in a cliff's edge: an arresting visual metaphor for the lives cut short by the Dirty War. But doubts about the translation continue to distract, as does uncertainty about how much better a writer López might be than the one presented here. Chris POWER'S short story collection, "Mothers," will be published in early 2019.
