A somber tale of murder and a kind of resurrection from the country
that made "to disappear" a transitive verb. Eric Stener Carlson
went to Argentina as a member of a forensics team that identified
the remains of some of the 30,000 victims of the military
dictatorship of the 1970s and early '80s. In one of the country's
estimated 340 death camps, in a graveyard "covered by years of
garbage tossed over the cemetery wall by neighbors," he found a
skeleton whose skull had been shattered by a shotgun blast. Thanks
to the fact that her orthodontist had presciently kept records of
all patients who had disappeared during the so-called Dirty War,
"Skeleton #17" eventually became "Julia," who had been murdered in
1977. In Carlson's hands, Julia is at once a real person - a
medical student, as it happens, seemingly destined for a brilliant
career - and a composite, "an opinion, an idea that lives in
people's minds," as much as a much-missed member of the young
intelligentsia who unwisely expressed leftist views to the wrong
audience. She and her peers come to life in oral remembrances
gathered from schoolmates, relatives, civil-rights activists, and
even members of the military; their recollections range from the
prosaic to the profound. The conversations he records touch on but
do not deeply delve into the atmosphere of terror that once
pervaded Argentina, and the silences often outweigh what is spoken;
"we were afraid," one survivor of the time says with elegant
simplicity. By giving voice to that terrible era, Carlson offers a
touching memorial to a ravaged generation whose murderers have
recently been pardoned by presidential decree. One hopes that
Julia's child - she was pregnant at the time of her disappearence,
and the forensics indicate that she gave birth before being
murdered - will one day learn something of her mother through these
pages. (Kirkus Reviews)
In 1977 "Julia" became one of the 30,000 victims of Argentina's
most recent military dictatorship. Julia was a young physician and
mother-to-be kidnapped from a medical clinic and found years later
in a clandestine grave along with 334 other corpses. Who were those
thousands of victims? Who was Julia? By reconstructing Julia's
life, Eric Stener Carlson gives voice to the thousands of citizens
who were "disappeared". In doing so, he must use the pseudonym
"Julia" to protect the people she left behind. Julia's poignant
story is told through the emotional memories of childhood friends
and family, classmates and colleagues, an ex-lover, and fellow
prisoners whose lives intersected with hers in the government
torture centers. Interspersed between the personal testimonies are
the commentaries of a military general, a priest, a politician, a
human rights activist, and a prosecuting attorney in the war crimes
tribunal, giving her story a political and social context.
General
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