Casas tomadas: Leopoldo Brizuela’s Una misma noche

Abstract

This essay considers Leopoldo Brizuela’s 2012 novel Una misma noche’s contribution to existing fiction about Argentina’s dictatorship. Focusing on the novel’s engagement with Argentina’s then (2010) Kirchnerist leadership, this analysis argues that the novel offers a consideration of the present as much as the past. The analysis focuses on the contemporary political commentary suggested by the novel’s consideration of Kirchnerist politics as its narrator attempts to pen a novel about the victims, perpetrators, and unwilling accomplices in the atrocities that characterised the military dictatorship. Specifically, this novel en abyme seeks to recount the narrator’s possible complicity in the break-in into his own home and the kidnapping of his next-door neighbour at the beginning of the military dictatorship in 1976. This reading of the novel engages with cultural and political commentary on the country’s Kirchnerist leadership as well as with the canonical Argentine short story “Casa tomada” in order to consider Brizuela’s creation of a new aesthetic for thinking through the past and present.