#Blogtour #Review - Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case by Elsa Drucaroff

Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case
Author Elsa Drucaroff, translated by Slava Faybysh

Corylus Books, 5 March 2024
Available as: PB, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781739298937

There's a war outside still raging

You say it ain't ours anymore to win...,

- Bruce Springsteen, No Surrender

I'm grateful to Corylus Books for sending me a copy of Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case to consider for review, and to Ewa for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

This really was something new for me - an intense thriller, based on real events and featuring as its central character a real person. Rodolfo Walsh was an Argentinian author, who in the 1950s and 60s wrote classic mysteries. He also originated the true crime genre with an account of a massacre carried out by the country's dictatorship in the 1950s. 

Set in the 70s under another military regime, Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case sees Walsh, who was also a political radical, forced to investigate his own daughter's disappearance - or perhaps she survived? - at the hands of the military. For fellow UK readers, this is the same dictatorship with which the UK ended up at war over the Falkland Islands/ Islas Malvinas in the 1980s. While that was towards the end of their rule, in this book they have only recently come to power and are busy disappearing their opponents, their imagined opponents and basically anyone (hair too long perhaps? Studying something suspicious at uni?) who even looks as though they might be an opponent. It is a scar that Argentina still carries, and here we see the wound inflicted: Walsh's experiences here act as something of a microcosm of the suffering that took place.

It's a busy novel, following, first, the military, then, Walsh and the opposition organisation of which he's part, but also a retired colonel with whom he's acquainted. In the gaps, as it were, we see individuals' stories, both of horror - the pregnant woman dragged off to a secret prison - and heroism - the conscript who spies for the rebels. One can't say too much here, because Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case deals in ambiguity. In a truly tense thriller, we are aware of the possibility of double and triple crosses, of ruses and - a nod to the mystery writer at the centre of things - of red herrings.

It would be wrong though to see this is simply a thriller. There is plenty of action, and there are tense scenes with lives hanging by a thread, but at its centre Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case has a truly human perspective. It focuses on the dreams and nightmares (sometimes they are blurred), the lost hopes and the very present fears, and the passions of a group of very believable and empathetic characters.

Aside from Walsh himself, his wife Lila and his daughter Vicki we see army conscripts becoming aware of the horrors being carried out by the regime, and the moral choices they're forced to make - collaborate? Look the other way and try to forget? Resist? We see young people forced to flee the country, and older ones finding their own loyalties divided. There's the dilemma faced by an opposition out of its depth. Everywhere, there is the military, dragging young people away, raging at a political, cultural opposition it can't understand, an opposition that is less about armed resistance than simply about being something else.

In the time period of this story, that rage at the modern world carries the day, despite heroic, desperate but totemic acts of defiance. In the longer run, as we know, it did not, does not and will not triumph. We don't see it but the dictators fall, while the writings of figures like Walsh are still available to speak to us - and their lives and stories can be told by writers like Drucaroff.

All in all, this is a marvellous book, both tense and beautiful, full of hope but so sad. 

The transition by Slava Faybysh is vivid and readable, taking one immediately to the centre of things and capturing the vivid pace of events.

Elsa Drucaroff was born and raised in Buenos Aires. She is the author of four novels and two short story collections, in addition to being a prolific essayist. She has published numerous articles on Argentine literature, literary criticism and feminism.

Her work has been widely translated, but Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case is Elsa Drucaroff’s first novel to be translated into English.

Slava Faybysh translates from Spanish and Russian.

For more information about Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.