Bravery, etiquette, hype
On March 25, 1977, Argentine writer Rodolfo Walsh was ambushed by a task group dispatched by the military junta. It appears that the plan was to apprehend him alive, but when cornered he opened fire on his wannabe captors, wounding at least one of them. Resistance proved futile and from that day onwards his name joined the list of those who were forcefully disappeared by the regime that would rule over Argentina until 1983. Some hours before his murder he had posted his Carta abierta de un escritor a la Junta Militar (Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta) to several news organisations, possibly revealing his whereabouts this way. This text — written to mark the first anniversary of the March 24, 1976 coup — would be his last and most powerful; in it he analyses and denounces the crimes of the junta accurately and fearlessly. I think about Walsh often, mainly around late March. But this time I ended up thinking about Walsh for totally different reasons.
A couple of weeks ago a friend posted me the memoirs of an author who I find incredibly irritating (a fact my friend knows very well). I wasn’t planning on reading this book due to this intense dislike, not to mention my lack of fondness for this genre, especially when it falls into the now fashionable pigeonhole of the “misery memoir”. But I ended up having a go at it anyway. For all my ranting about literature I try to keep an open mind about contemporary writing and this is a book that has been described as “brave” by the publisher and other peers online, receiving good reviews that played this same tune; so I thought “What the hell! Maybe it’s brave indeed! I need something brave!” and started reading it.