Dirty War

In photography, balance, whether radial, conceptual or symmetrical, is critical to the success of a composition. An unbalanced photograph can confuse, obfuscate or otherwise diminish an image. It is the same for a literary writer (Nicholas Shakespeare has twice been Booker-longlisted) taking on the thriller genre. Finding an equilibrium between prose styling and fine plotting requires considerable skill and a gentle touch. In his second outing for the former journalist John Dyer, Shakespeare treads this tightrope nimbly. Following the events of The Sandpit (2020), Dyer is in Tasmania, engaged in research for a book on the Tupian peoples of the Amazon. He is soon interrupted by a voice from the past, that of Miguel Girondo de Belew, an Argentinian photo-journalist.

The NYRB logo is now something my eye leaps to when browsing, and the publisher’s eclectic range has proved consistently rewarding. The Argentine writer Antonio di Benedetto was praised by Borges, Bolaño, Cortázar and Coetzee. He was born in 1922, on 2 November, the Day of the Dead – which he made much of – and was imprisoned and tortured in 1976-77, during Argentina’s Dirty War. His eerie fables of paranoia, impending threat and incomprehension pre-empted his experience of them. Esther Allen deserves great credit for introducing the author to an Anglophone readership. Having read her translation of Benedetto’s Zama, followed by The Silentiary, I foundthe wait for The Suicides excruciating. But it was worth it.