With Dreaming of the Delta, Perla Suez joins the ranks of other prominent Argentine writers who have incorporated the horrors of the violent period of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional. Highly experimental, this novel is a tale of secrecy, betrayal, and violence that reflects on a personal scale the national struggle for power and control at the height of the dictatorship of 1976 to 1983. And though violence takes center stage, it is played out in a private drama that unfolds in a mansion on the shores of the Paraná River in the province of Entre Ríos.

Like the timeless river itself, Suez’s words ebb and flow across the pages, leaving in their wake volatile voids that suggest to the reader that what is not disclosed is as powerful as what is revealed. With a skeletal prose that blurs the line between novel, theatre, and film, Suez condenses decades of cruelty and longing into a few brief hours.

Translated by: Rhonda Dahl Buchanan