NovelWorld

They’re called dillos, these nineteen-year-old deserters from the doomed Argentine army, because they live hidden underground in the tunnels of the Warren.

The Four Kings are in charge, raiding and trading, deciding how much the dillos get to eat and drink each day, deciding who gets to stay below and who are left outside – the sick, the wounded, the unfaithful – to freeze to death in the snow.

Originally titled Los Pichiciegos (small Argentine armadillos, an endangered species) and first published in 1982 as one of the first literary accounts of the Falklands War, the novel has been newly translated as Malvinas Requiem (the Argentines don’t call the islands the Falklands, they call them the Malvinas).

It’s a punchy, startling, thrilling little book. In a spare, elliptical style, as though his lean prose has no time to waste and barely survived the hardships of the war, Rodolpho Fogwill sketches the daily terrors of that deadly June winter, the secret transactions with the Brits, the sheep blown up by landmines, the murderous swarms of helicopters, the spectral nuns haunting the mountainside at night.

Fogwill assumes you know that the Argentine generals were ruthless tyrants, the islands were populated almost exclusively by British shepherds with their flocks, and that these deserters are bartering with the Brits to betray their own Argie army.

Tortured and killed if caught by their own, subject to the whim of British mercy or brutality, Fogwill shows you battered Argentine soldiers with promise-filled leaflets in hand being napalmed as they stand in line to surrender.

Not until halfway through the third-person narrative does a mysterious “I” begin to appear, writing down notes, interrogating one of the dillos. Then a window is mentioned – an odd detail very much out of place in an underground burrow. Slowly out of these clues a narrator surfaces in his hotel room, recording the testimony of one angry survivor.

It’s a dazzling little tour de force that sounds like it was thrown together as fast as it reads, another brilliantly-written, heartbreaking human document of how we slaughter our children.

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)