60 WLT SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015 Elizé thinks of his family, the death of his only daughter, the suffering of his wife. He meditates on the relationship between Jews and blacks, deciding that he was “neither Jew nor Christian, nor Polish nor Russian . I was black, therefore alone.” Buchenwald is like a slave ship. Revolt is in attitudes, when no action is possible. God is no help, but poetry is a refuge. Elizé quotes Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Baudelaire . His wife sends him a letter with quotations from Chateaubriand. He joins a group of prisoners, who call themselves the Mohicans, and starts a one-page journal, which consists often of cartoons of Hitler. Almost all prisoners, including Elizé, are killed during the Allied air attacks in 1945. Effa gives his narrator a rather pretentious style: “I am intimately persuaded that everything which happens in our present life prefigures . . . what we will have to find in our internal life.” The events are dramatic , the narration less so. Adele King Paris Carlos Gamerro. The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón. Ian Barnett, tr. London. And Other Stories. 2015. isbn 9781908276506 Argentine political history is replete with truths stranger than most fictions. From the almost-religious populism of Perón, to a military government with the power to make citizens “disappear,” to the present controversy over a lawyer murdered after writing a request for the president’s arrest, the country has lived through no shortage of disturbing twists and turns. In a novel that is at once amusing and depressing, Carlos Gamerro addresses the people and the politics of his home country with The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón. His protagonist is the hapless Ernesto Marroné, the clean-cut and constipated head of procurement at a construction company whose imposing CEO is kidnapped by the Montoneros (Perónist guerillas and the scourge of the big-business establishment in 1970s Argentina). One demand for his release is that a bust of Eva Perón be placed in all ninety-two of the company’s offices; naturally, it falls to Marroné to round up the statues. From that point on, the reader follows Marron é down a picaresque rabbit hole as he makes himself a feigned labor leader, explores the dilapidated shacks of lowerclass Buenos Aires, and comes to identify Evita herself as the shining light that will lead his quest to its hopefully triumphant conclusion. The comparison to a knight’s quest is appropriate, as Marroné undertakes his journey according to handy tips from Don Quixote: The Executive-Errant as well as a host of other self-help texts that lend clarity to his endearingly tragic existence. Trapped in a life marked by crushed ambitions , sexual frustration, and a rough home life, Marroné uses his mission for the busts as a pursuit of purpose, seeking the new life that only his own “17th October”—or perhaps a promotion—could provide. Like most examples of the picaresque, The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón serves as both a rousing human story and a critique of an irrevocably flawed society . Apathy and passion coexist such that change seems impossible; heroic hopes for revolution tend to become ridiculous. In Gamerro’s fiction as in reality, it is hard to come to grips with Argentina. Finally, the novel’s translation deserves high praise. The collaborative effort between the bilingual Gamerro and Ian Barnett turns colorful Spanish prose into funny, distinctly British English that evokes the novel’s working-class bruisers and prim-and-proper business sharks with equal aptitude. At a moment when Argentina is as confusing as ever for an outsider, English readers will learn from and enjoy accompanying Gamerro and Barnett on The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón. Arthur Dixon University of Oklahoma Marjana Gaponenko. Who Is Martha? Arabella Spencer, tr. New York. New Vessel Press. 2014. isbn 9781939931139 In an interview about her most recent novel, Ukrainian-born German-language World Literature in Review author Marjana Gaponenko explained her authorial intentions, stating: “I am looking for my own romanticism and find it in the midst of reality, in irony.” Although initially confounding, this statement is a particularly apt...