Martín Kohan

Translated by Daniel Hahn

Brutal and overwhelming, Confession wrestles with the legacy of Argentina’s past and the passions of one young girl.

There are mysteries in the world of man, just as there are in the Kingdom of God, and that they too, albeit quite differently, are unfathomable.

When Mirta López looks out the dining room window, she sees a slim, self-possessed older boy on his way back from school. It’s 1941 in provincial Argentina, and the sight of the Videla’s eldest son has awakened in her the first uncertain, unnerving vibrations of desire. Naturally, she confesses. But she cannot stop herself.  Thirty years later, Videla is a general, leading the ruling military junta, and a cell of young revolutionaries plot an ingenious attack on him, and the regime.  Writing from the present into the past, Martín Kohan maps the contours of Argentina’s 20th Century, but finds his center in one woman—devout, headstrong, lit up with ideas of right and wrong—not the grand historical figures of her lifetime’s omnipresent, brutalizing history. “There is an art to keeping lives constant, not allowing them to be altered by facts that are merely external.” And there is great beauty in Confession, its decades and landscapes, and the legacy of love and guilt playing out in one family and against the background of dictatorship’s traumas.