While memory is the novel’s structuring element, the sense of estrangement and nonbelonging pervades the text. Ania’s return to Campana, her father’s hometown where she had spent many childhood summers, elicits a series of recollections about the annual trips she made with him across the Andes and her experiences at her grandparents’ home. As is suggested sparsely throughout the novel, her father was a leftist, forced to leave Argentina for his political views. Whether the novel was inspired by autobiographical elements may be irrelevant noteworthy, though, is how it conveys a sense of urgency to reconstruct a family’s past and understand one’s own place in the world.Īnia, the protagonist, is a Chilean woman who travels to Argentina at her father’s request to represent him at his cousin, Agustín’s, funeral. The author herself was born in Chile to Argentine parents who had left their country in 1967 to escape the Onganía dictatorship. Additionally, the large numbers of European immigrants who settled in the country in the latter part of the 1800s-foremost among them Italians-have shaped national identity and influenced the creation of some compelling works of fiction and poetry that tell of their plight.Īlejandra Costamagna’s The Touch System, originally published in 2018, belongs to such a literary tradition. Argentina, in particular, has produced an important body of literature dealing with such themes, due to the country’s long history of political instability and dictatorships that during the twentieth century forced many Argentines into exile.

THE THEMES OF exile, immigration, and displacement have been recurrent in the literature of the Southern Cone since the region’s conflictive post-independence years.

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