No Place for Heroes

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From one of the most accomplished writers to emerge from Latin America, No Place for Heroes is a darkly comic novel about a mother and son who return to Buenos Aires in search of her former lover, whom she met during Argentina’s Dirty War. During Argentina’s “Dirty War” of the late ’70s and early ’80s, Lorenza and Ramon, two passionate militants opposing Videla’s dictatorship, met and fell in love. Now, Lorenza and her son, Mateo, have come to Buenos Aires to find Ramon, Mateo’s father. Holed up in the same hotel room, mother and son share a common goal, yet are worlds apart on how they perceive it. For Lorenza, who came of age in the political ferment of the ’60s, it is intertwined with her past ideological and emotional anchors (or were they illusions?), while her postmodernist son, a child of the ’90s who couldn’t care less about politics or ideology, is looking for his actual father—not the idea of a father, but the Ramon of flesh and blood. Anything goes as this volatile pair battle it out: hilarious misunderstandings, unsettling cruelty, and even a temptation to murder. In the end, they begin to come to a more truthful understanding of each other and their human condition. No Place for Heroes is an addition to that long tradition of the eternal odd couple—in works ranging from Waiting for Godot to Kiss of the Spider Woman—waiting for their fortunes to change, written by one of the most talented and internationally celebrated authors at work today.From the Hardcover edition.From Publishers WeeklyFrom Restrepo (Delirium) comes a surprisingly plain-faced novel of parenthood set in the aftermath of the Argentine Dirty War. A journalist and one-time revolutionary, Lorenza is returning to Buenos Aires in the late 1990s with her teenage son, Mateo. Both are looking for RamoÌün Iribarren, a shadowy resistance leader and Mateo's father, with whom Lorenza spent the years of General Videla's junta distributing underground newspapers and frequenting apartment safe houses with toothpaste tubes filled with microfilm. As their search takes them deep into Argentina's recent past, Lorenza fills her impressionable son's head with tales of his troubled nativity, but Mateo has been brought up a member of a generation that may ultimately be beyond Lorenza's understanding. Restrepo is surefooted when it comes to depicting life during wartime, but the authenticity of that world is so starkly juxtaposed with her fumbling grasp of Mateo and youth culture that readers may wish that Restrepo had set the novel in the fascinating times that the characters seem largely content to relive. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review"Luminous and delightful"—San Francisco ChroniclePraise for Laura Restrepo’s *Delirium“Stunning, dense, complex, mind-blowing . . . This novel goes far above politics, right up into high art.” —Washington Post Book World“One of the finest novels written in recent memory.” —José Saramago“Masterful . . . Literary dynamite.” —Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel “Every word in Delirium is perfectly chosen, painfully honest and brutally effective. Restrepo chooses her words like a poet, with infinite care.” —Philadelphia Inquirer“A disconcertingly lovely book, and its depiction of Colombian society at an awful moment in its history is sharp, vivid, utterly persuasive.” —New York Times Book ReviewFrom the Hardcover edition.