Saturday 18 February 2017


 






Glaxo by Hernan Ronsino    {Reviewed by THOMAS}
Told from four different viewpoints and in four different decades, the story of both the effects of and the contributory factors to a murder does no so much unfold as fold in and in upon itself, becoming increasingly claustrophobic, despite the beautifully spare and open prose and the pampas setting, until it closes in upon the pivotal act itself, which causes all the previously read sections to shift and realign and reveal their significance. The mechanism is so well-oiled and precisely wrought that the great weights of economic change and the political turbulence of the 1950s (including of the León Suarez massacre) swing just out of sight. When the train tracks are torn up in the 1970s, the Glaxo pharmaceutical factory continues to loom above the town and above the novel, out of sight, a shadow across the text.

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