Argentinian author Pron, who now lives in Madrid, travels east to Italy to find his latest story. It opens in 1978, the period of the Pink Brigades, however instantly seems to be again to the tip of World Battle II, with a one-time fascist author recalling the dying of a comrade: “After we discovered Luca Borrello’s corpse, his eyes had been open and he was trying up on the sky, as if a second earlier Borrello too had been appreciating that it was a splendid day.” Borrello had been participating in a convention of fascist writers at the same time as Mussolini’s Nazi-backed Republic of Salò was collapsing—says one other participant, “We wished new ruins we might dedicate our poems to”—and he was hiding a secret: He’d been sheltering a member of the resistance from roving bands of SS troops. A technology later, the son of the rescued fighter seeks to understand the attraction of fascism by interviewing survivors of that literary technology, a narrative whose denouement reaches into the current. Pron reveals every element intentionally, letting the thriller construct, and he populates his pages with actual historic figures and occasions starting from the delivery of futurism at yet one more writers convention to the killing of the conservative politician Aldo Moro by the Pink Brigades. His story is an element suspense novel, one which explores a number of puzzles: Why would Borrello have saved a putative enemy, and who killed him in flip? What occurred to the texts of a poet who enlisted in Mussolini’s military, and the way did he die? It is usually half historic investigation, paying homage to the current work of the Spanish author Javier Cercas in its insistence on getting at hidden truths.
