Black Novel with Argentines

This highly provocative novel infuses S & M titillation into a slow-moving, psychoanalytical plot about two lovers who are irrevocably changed by a murder that one of them commits. In the opening pages, Agustin, an Argentine writer living in New York City, picks up an actress, accompanies her home, draws a gun from his pocket and kills her. Later, Agustin confesses his crime to his girlfriend, Roberta, also an expatriate writer. Responding with a bizarre mixture of the maternal and predatory, Roberta relishes Agustin's anguished breakdown as she hides the murder weapon, disguises him and herself in theatrical costumes and taunts him by having a love affair with another man. The banal, repetitive experiences of the two writers are punctuated by horrifying dreamlike sequences in which the pair spend time in a shelter for the homeless and are drawn to a sadomasochistic pleasure club that is eerily reminiscent of the torture chambers of Argentina's recent history. Agustin finds peace only after a night-long conversation with a South American doctor who may or may not have been a torturer in the past. Valenzuela's ( Open Door ) expertly paced novel blurs the distinctions between victim and tormenter and between torture indulged in for pleasure and torture for political reasons. The result is powerful, unusual and unsettling. (May)