A young Argentinian, Luz, arrives in Madrid with her young husband and baby. But Luz isn’t just on a holiday. She’s on the hunt for her biological father, Carlos, a man who doesn’t know she exists. When they meet at a café, Luz tells him the story of her life. Set against a backdrop of torture, imprisonment, and stolen children in the midst of Argentina’s Dirty War, her story brings to light the true personal horrors of a military regime that stopped at nothing in the late seventies and early eighties to protect the “Fatherland” from “foreign” left-wing influences.

Luz’s mother, Liliana, was taken and imprisoned because of her politics, while Carlos, her father, escaped. Believing his pregnant girlfriend to be dead, Carlos never made much effort to join the search for the “disappeared,” those people who vanished during the Junta. But Liliana was watched over in prison by a sadistic officer, Animal, who protected her from torture in order to take her baby once it was born and give it to his partner, Miriam. Animal’s plans are thrown into disarray when his boss, General Dufau, claims the baby for himself. His daughter, Mariana, is in a coma after her baby son is stillborn. He intends to pass the prisoner’s newborn girl off as his granddaughter. But Miriam, Animal’s girlfriend, still wants the baby and is entrusted with looking after both her and her prisoner mother, Liliana. As Miriam talks to Liliana, she begins to find out the truth about the prisons, the torture and the killing of women after they’ve given birth. Liliana is going to be killed after the baby is taken away from her. The two women plot her escape. In the end, unable to help Liliana, Miriam dedicates her life to letting the little girl, Luz, know about her true heritage. Over the years she makes successive attempts to contact Luz. Meanwhile, Luz’s “father” is slowly coming to realise the true nature of the crime he has participated in. His beloved “daughter” could well be the child of one of the disappeared, someone tortured and murdered, on the orders of his father-in-law.

Elsa Osorio tells her story in a fragmented style, following different characters, and switching from first to third person, sometimes with the same character in the same section. With interruptions and questioning from her biological father, Carlos, appearing in italics, this further complicates proceedings. ‘My Name is Light’ is not a book with a simple structure. This could be off-putting for some readers, but the story is a gripping one, and well told, with marvellous characterisation. The people in this book struggle to find love and happiness, sometimes snatching it while they can.

The reader is introduced to characters on both sides of the political divide. Luz’s “mother” Mariana, initially a sympathetic character after her recovery from a coma, is shown over time to be her father’s daughter. She worships the general, a man who wouldn’t think twice about having someone killed, and who even arranges the murder of his own son-in-law. Mariana’s contempt for the enemies of the military state and women like Liliana who die in custody is matched only by her snobbery and concern for what others will think.

Miriam, on the other hand, is a prostitute who risks her life and the revenge of her sadistic boyfriend in order to right a wrong and tell a child her parents died trying to fight for a just society. Luz’s biological father is believed to be dead, and it’s only later that she finds out he escaped to Spain.

The book is divided into three main sections: the period of Luz’s birth and the initial taking of the baby when Miriam witnesses the murder of Liliana; Miriam’s attempts seven years later to contact the child even as the child’s adopted father is also trying to find out the truth about his daughter’s parentage; and Luz growing up as a teenager after the Junta has passed away and democracy has been reinstated. But democracy does not bring justice. Most of those responsible have not been punished, including the general. Luz’s friends include people who have lost relatives and she’s afraid to tell them who her family is. Bit by bit, though, she puts the pieces together, suspicious of the circumstances of her own birth. She knows about the children who were taken from their mothers and suspects she might be one.

Although the book is well written and gripping, with believable characters, there are occasional leaps of logic that are just a little too convenient. While intuition can sometimes come into play in real life situations, in the novel it seems a little too pat at times. But these moments are fortunately few and far between.

‘My Name is Light’ brings the political down to a personal level. By the end of the book, the reader is in no doubt about the realities of life under the Junta, and it’s devastating legacy for the thousands of grandmothers looking for their children or their children’s children. With anecdotes of custody cases fought out between surviving biological family and “adopted” families, Osorio grounds the story of Luz in the day-to-day emotional and familial wreckage of Argentina’s Dirty War. It’s a particularly important book because the events portrayed are so recent and serve as a reminder of how modern societies can fall into the grip of political extremists, and the brutality and complicity that emerges in ordinary people as a consequence.

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.