Three Horses

""I have to stop losing people,"" resolves the unnamed narrator of De Luca's slender novel. As a young man, he was drawn into Argentina's Dirty War, which robbed him of his wife and compatriots and forced him to become a soldier, then a fugitive. At the outset of the novel, he has finally found tranquility as a gardener in Italy. Throughout the novel, the reader can see glimpses of Neruda in the narrator's descriptions; one type of soil is ""lean, thievish"" and love is ""bees in my blood, a bear in my heart."" His simple words reveal complex thoughts and deep sympathy for the other characters, especially Laila, his much younger lover, which raises issues of truthfulness and self-representation: what should he share with his lover when his past is an entirely different life? This question becomes critical when Laila's past and present threaten her future with her lover. The prose, translated by Moore, who also translated De Luca's God's Mountain, is deliberate and sparse, though the characters' voices too closely resemble the narrator's, infringing on his distinctive locution. However, the elegance of the prose and the mischievous and startling imagery compensate for the book's flaws, making this tale a surreal puzzle to be savored.