For humans, love is the richest emotion. It drives us through challenges; it propels us through peril; it shields us from loneliness. It is a transformative feeling without which our days are cold and dull, but why? Why does love outstrip and outlast anger, or resentment, or disgust? Why does it brighten our days unlike any other? Because of what it asks of us. For to love someone is to extend to them the deepest measure of our trust, our faith, our credulity. To feel love, we must be naked before it. This vulnerability is both the strength of its source and the cause of its devastation. For as much as love can bestow us with the light of happiness and warmth, it can take the light away, plunging us into the darkness of isolation and grief the likes of which few can stand. Many have described love's darker side, but few have managed it with such quiet and moving potence.
At the best of times, justice in South America has been a fleeting and inconsistent virtue, undermined by the criminal and elitist exceptions powerful interests have burrowed through it. At the worst of times, it is nothing more than a cheap veneer, a half-hearted sop to a frightened public from a ruthless government that cares far more for unchecked power than it does for righteousness. Having lived through some of the worst of these times, specifically Argentina during the Dirty War of the 1970s, Benjamin Chaparro, an officer of the court, knows this all too well. For, over his 40 years working in the judiciary, he has watched incompetents promoted and protected, cases killed and buried, innocents roughed up and robbed. He has watched as the smart and the connected worked the system, reducing it, at times, to a mockery.
The worst of these cases, or at least the worst that Mr. Chaparro has committed to paper, concerns Ricardo Morales who, not long after his marriage to the love of his life, came home, in 1968, to find her raped and murdered. For months, in spite of the best efforts of a sympathetic Chaparro and the honest cop assisting him, the brutal incident proved inscrutable until a chance discovery by Chaparro produces leads that must be followed, leads that will set into motion events both terrible and unforeseen. This is justice in the darkest times, shoved forward an inch at a time by a few honest men compelled to act. This is Chaparro's story.
As much a memoir as a dramatization of his most memorable case, The Secret in Their Eyes is gripping crime fiction. Animated by the same gritty realism that imbued The Wire with so much authenticity, Mr. Sacheri's tale never drags even as its protagonists exhaust themselves just to advance the case a few meager inches at a time. It conveys the powerful, and no doubt true, impression that the so-called wheels of justice most often turn at the behest of self-interested careerists fixed upon their own advancement, not the proper execution of their jobs. Righteousness has to be compelled by the pooled wills of multiple souls who must be resolute in the face of the inevitable, and sometimes murderous, reprisals.
Translated from the original Spanish, these pages are filled with Mr. Sacheri's acerbic wit and his earthy characters upon whom time and the perils of life exact a toll. Yes, the author is prone to treating his readers like dullards, leading them through his uncomplicated mystery as though it were the literary equivalent of the Gordian Knot, but the themes of unrequited love, toothless justice, and shattered dreams that suffuse this tale more than make up for this underestimation of our intelligence. For as much as the plot coheres around its central mystery, it is animated by the lives of the men and women who inhabited corrupted Argentina in its darkest hour. It is their struggles, their unrealized desires, that elevate this tale up from the ordinary.
Poignant stuff that seems tailor-made for the big screen. For anyone who appreciated The Wire, this will be cause for both enjoyment and nostalgia. Likewise, for anyone who enjoys this book but has not seen The Wire, you will not be disappointed. Moving work... (4/5 Stars)
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