CALL ME MAGDALENA

Steimberg's simple and evocative prose distinguishes this 1992 Planeta Prize-winning novel about the quest of a young Argentine woman to understand her history and her heritage. Though described by the publisher as a "taut mystery," the meditative tale is neither taut—it ambles and wanders and digresses—nor a true mystery. The narrator, a young woman named Magdalena (which may be her real name or one she has taken for convenience), ponders such questions as: Who am I? and How do I solve myself? She takes a class called Mind Control, which tries to help students deal with the modern world, in this case Buenos Aires on the verge of the millennium. A wealthy patron, Juan Antonio, invites the class to his estancia. The story of his life, wife and lovers forms a less than gripping subplot, standing in contrast to Magdalena's childhood memories, which form the book's core. The granddaughter of Russian Jews who emigrated to Argentina, and the daughter of parents indifferent to Judaism who embrace Argentine society, she is in a kind of cultural limbo, caught between one world she cannot forget and another she wants to embrace. Walker Percy once said that being a Catholic and a Southerner was an almost irresolvable conflict. For Magdalena, the impossible clash is between European Jewish culture and contemporary Roman Catholic Latin American society. In the end, her warm and amusing recollections and her illuminating progress toward self-knowledge more than compensate for the meandering plot. (Oct.)