“A book—in the broadest and most Argentine sense of the word—that is bestial. A book with sharp fangs that doesn’t only have the power to tear, but is also heartbreaking. By maintaining a close distance—a distant closeness, as it should be—with La llamada, Leila Guerriero has written her In Cold Blood or, rather, ‘In Warm Blood.’”

“Good journalism and good literature are one and the same, and Leila Guerriero knows how to write this (whatever you want to call it) like no other contemporary Latin American journalist.”

“Leila Guerriero’s journalism is that of the New Yorker’s best editors: it requires rigorous work, exhaustive investigations, and a style of mathematical precision.”

“Without saying anything, without pronouncing itself, this book illuminates the abysmal distance of historical experiences through a formidable immersion in the life of a woman, her family, and her environment. Readers have no respite and feel an admiration for her—her hedonism, her freedom, her temperance—and towards the tireless shadow that followed her for two and a half years.”

“The power of this story is in the strength of a voice. A voice that exists and whose existence is held together by an almost mythological strength. The tracking down of information does not sound overwhelming, but is shockingly detailed. It is well gathered and gives meaning to the facts.

Guerriero gives a place and shape to the context of friendship, storms, demons, contradictions, cities of flight and shelter, open wounds, unexpected appearances in the last leg of the trip that help restore yesterday’s losses. And she does so with mastery, with an embroiderer’s hand, pulling from dozens of testimonies that hang in the clandestine nature of memory and the fullness of stories. The narration is formidable. The stitching, masterful.

On one side, the crónica reverberates. On the other, biography. On every page, there is is journalism. And in every paragraph, the brilliance of words, a story well told.”

“A portrait that is a story, a chronicle that morphs into a biography. Journalism and literature come together to construct a life in La llamada...Leila Guerriero never relents. Her agenda is also a story, and her multifaceted, real protagonist is revealed with a constant unraveling and knotting together of the political and the private, the human and the endless questions hoping to merge together a book and a life.”

“Do not miss reading this portrait, this epilogue, this testament, this dialogue, this descent into hell in a country that is once again approaching the abyss, Argentina. There is excellent journalism and excellent literature in La llamada. Leila Guerriero reconstructs the story of Silvia Labayru, a woman who was brutally tortured and humiliated by the military dictatorship in Argentina and later repudiated by many of her peers. Throughout the course of almost two years, Guerriero spoke with her friends, her exes, her current partner, her children, and her companions in captivity and militancy. The result is the portrait of a woman with a complex story where love, sex, violence, humor, children, parents, infidelity, politics, and more come together...An imposing book that demands to be read, highlighted, and digested with patience, because it contains a slice of History that destroys your esophagus as you swallow it.”

“She turns any topic she comes across into a literary challenge...A great chronicler.”

“There are books you never abandon. You leave them behind because you reach the end. You also know that you’ll return to them at any moment and they will be a refuge. Of phrases, endings, a style that is so defined and particular that it doesn’t let you go, one that invites you in like the best possible awakening. That’s what La llamada is about....Guerriero, the best contemporary journalist writing in Spanish—the best at chronicles, profiles, articles, interviews, and she would be at writing fiction too if she did, but she isn’t interested in writing novels. The book offers clues about Leila Guerriero’s creative process as well. ”

“Envy is the only deadly sin I don’t cultivate, but I believe I recognize some traces of it in the admiration I feel for Leila...I envy that sharp distance, that calm. I envy her truly while thoroughly enjoying her. Leila’s stories are made out of patience and the silences between phrases. What she has just published is some of her best work, if not the best. She is superb.”

“The Argentine journalist masterfully draws a portrait of an ex-militant of a terrorist group who was tortured in the 70s and later repudiated by her colleagues...In La llamada, memory is historical and personal, crossed by memories between people who appared in Silvia Labayru’s life...Guerriero must be attributed with filling this book with political and private stimuli. She has happened upon a truly polyhedral character and has known how to draw a portrait of her in motion, almost running. She does so in a detailed way, while also integrating the production process of the book itself....In summary, La llamada is an outstanding book about the crevices and shadowy spots of a life, which are always the most interesting parts. About those details in which the devil nests, and that make things harder to label than stupid people would like.”

“An exhaustive exploration of survival through care, desire, and humor. Friendship and love provide the structure of La llamada...the Argentine journalist’s work has been characterized by an aesthetic of resistance and and the ethics of exhaustion. If Georges Perec formulated them in a spatial key in An Attempt of Exhausting a Place in Paris, Guerriero works in a personal key in Una historia sencilla, Opus Gelber, and now in La llamada...The interviews continue until all of the defenses raised by the character’s psychology have been overcome and the final detail of an existence have been extracted. The opposite of Karl Ove Knausgård: instead of exhausting her own life, she examines a contemporary’s....We aren’t faced with a biography, but rather a profile with a profusion of dialogues. With a chorus of voices countered by the narrator’s discrete point of view, so that readers can extract their own views of the character.”

“Leila Guerriero is more interested in the search for a human being than in the story itself. The reader is too. Therefore, the book becomes addictive—you neither are able to nor want to stop reading. Guerriero, in order to bring us closer to Silvia’s story—but above all to her personality, which is as complex as anyone’s—traces a choral story where, interview by interview, a great number of characters are given a voice: people who met her, friends, family members, husbands, lovers, children...Through all of these voices, picture—the portrait—of a woman who was able to survive the horror of torture and the contempt of many of her ‘peers’ who, once they were able to escape the hell they were living, were suspicious of her and had the terrible doubt of, ‘What did you do in order to survive?’ (...) For those who think journalism is dead, read Leila Guerriero. ”

“Life is a mixture of feelings, losses, and hope; a story full of chapters that make up intimacy itself. I read Leila’s book as if it spoke of my own country, as if it spoke about me, my past and my future. The winds traversing Argentina and Europe today want to force us to forget, but it’s convenient that memory demands our attention and explains to us everything that fits into a card or a phone call in the face of the temptation of indifference or cynicism.”

“This book is read breathlessly because it doesn’t relent. The wonder doesn’t stop.”