Hades, Argentina

A Novel

By: Daniel Loedel

Narrated by: Christian Barillas

Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's summary

VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD FINALIST

CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE LONGLIST

“A debut novel as impressive as they come. Tough, wily, dreamlike.” —Seattle Times

A decade after fleeing for his life, a man is pulled back to Argentina by an undying love.

In 1976, Tomás Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he has moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of the insurgency fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. Tomás has always been willing to follow her anywhere, to do anything to prove himself. Yet what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both?

It will be years before a summons back arrives for Tomás, now living as Thomas Shore in New York. It isn’t a homecoming that awaits him, however, so much as an odyssey into the past, an encounter with the ghosts that lurk there, and a reckoning with the fatal gap between who he has become and who he once aspired to be. Raising profound questions about the sometimes impossible choices we make in the name of love, Hades, Argentina is a gripping, ingeniously narrated literary debut.

©2021 Daniel Loedel (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“It is not always ‘us versus them.’ It is the ‘me versus me’ that plays out in individuals as they wrestle with what it means to do the right thing.... Loedel draws the line of complicity ever closer...asking readers to consider at what point the witness becomes victimizer.... [He] continually works to erase the notion that only the evil commit evil acts, which adds to the horror. How do ‘ordinary men’ become instruments of a repressive state?” (Los Angeles Times)

“This haunting historical novel...weaves betrayal and sacrifice so intricately that one cannot be disentangled from the other” (The New Yorker)

“Elegant, searching.... Amid echoes of the Orpheus myth and swirls of magic...a descent into an underworld of memory and brutality.” (O, The Oprah Magazine)

The Dirty War

This is a story of love and hope told in he voice of an unwilling participant in the disappearance of thousands. The junta of '76-'83 rounded up suspected political dissidents who were never tried, but were murdered. The author writes of love with a sensitivity seldom realized by male writers. The women are complex and lovingly brought to life by Loedel. He weaves in and out of reality, seeing and hearing ghosts. This style is reminiscent of two great writers: Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Juno Diaz. Loebel brings his own, fresh perspective to a dark place in Argentine history. I look forward to his second book.

Multiple layers of reality, multiple layers of grief

This is a book about remorse, regret, and guilt. A young man survives a Civil War by going abroad after being discovered to be a spy for the Resistance. When he returns to Argentina, he relives his experiences and imagines what might have been. The book is an exercise in how you might process your past trauma and what the limits of this healing might be.

Can be overly neurotic without advances.story much

Rather like Argentina itself, there's no alternative presented as to how to move on from trauma. The flashbacks to earlier times
can be confusing, but that does demonstrates Argentina's dilemma.

Weird and intriguing

Amazing writing, but I think I would have enjoyed it more with a different narrator- perhaps someone with an accent in English. I am a fluent Spanish speaker, and/but found the very strong accent used to pronounce the words in porteño Spanish a little distracting, coming out of nowhere. Didn’t seem authentic.