Los suicidas del fin del mundo
Leila Guerriero
NON FICTION | 2006 | 232 pages
Between 1997 and 1999, a wave of suicides rocked the small oil town Las Heras, located practically in the middle of nowhere in the Argentine province of Santa Cruz in Patagonia. Most of the suicides were by people around the age of 25 who grew up in modest families native to the region. Journalist Leila Guerriero traveled to that desolate Patagonian location, interrogated the friends and families of those who died, traversed the same, always-deserted streets, and visited every corner of that town. She interviewed the neighbors, asked questions to everyone who had an answer or a theory that could explain the tragedy.
The result is a brutal story that reconstructs the tragic episodes of those years while at the same time painting an expressive picture of everyday life in a community that is far from large cities. Las Heras, with its high rate of unemployment due to the oscillating nature of the oil industry and because of the lack of future for its youth, brings up an question that is still unanswered: suicides, as ill-fated destinies, still occur today. Los suicidas del fin del mundo is, then, an unsettling tale that can be read with the fascination of a novel and the horror that is caused by a reality marked by the indifference of those who aren’t involved, prejudice, and weariness.
RIGHTS: spanish TUSQUETS/PLANETA | french RIVAGES | italian MARCOS Y MARCOS | polish WYDAWNICTWO W.A.B. | portuguese (portugal) QUETZAL | swedish PROZAC | german VOLDEMEER | catalan SALDONAR
“A master of the chronicle, Guerriero uses words like a rigid wind: she penetrates, inquires, into lives without detours, adjectives, or literature. She uses words like life. All we have left is wonder.”
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