This is not quite what I expected from the blurb on the back. That indicates a story of a man who lost his mother as a child - she disappeared suddenly and without explanation, after a military junta took over Buenos Aires; the implication is that she was a political dissident, forcibly taken from her home. The blurb also indicates that part of this story is this man's childhood, living with his young and beautiful mother, but really... that's a good 85% of the book. The looking back, and trying to piece together, is a very small section at the end, and it's not really enough to tie the book together. There's no resolution as to what happened to the mother, but I can understand (only marginally familiar with that continent's history as I am) that this is a realistic choice that reflects other experiences of dissidence in South America.

The problem with telling a story through the eyes of a very young child, however, is that they often don't understand what's going on. This can be enormously effective as a narrative strategy, as the author works on two different levels so that the adult reader can bridge the gaps, but the balance here doesn't quite work for me overall. It's skewed a little too far toward the child, and although I enjoyed the book, I was left thinking that its 150 odd pages felt longer than they were because there was so much ambiguity. Beautiful ambiguity, it's true - the prose of the opening section is particularly lovely - but I would have swapped a little bit of that beauty for some much-needed clarity.