Mass Media Totalitarianism: Hope Over All

It's difficult to present a first novel, especially when the work, like Die, Lady, Die, is destined from the outset to raze like a storm our preconceived notions about literature. And I don't refer here to the absolutely eccentric little world of Argentine literature, but to contemporary writing, what's called "world literature": Die, Lady, Die claims its place among current novels, independent of any language or nationality, precisely because it speaks of something with neither language nor nationality: pop culture, the industrial culture out of which we are now accustomed to mold our desires and our fears.
The plot is simple and the story develops like an arrow shot straight forward: an adolescent girl from the provinces (thrown out of a dysfunctional family) travels to the big city. The point of departure is Gualeguaychú, in Entre Ríos, Argentina, and the point of destination is Buenos Aires, but it's the same as if we had imagined Los Angeles and Springfield, a town where there is only one of everything. One record store, one school, one radio station, one discotheque, one boyfriend, one lover and one sole desire: to escape from a stifling, monotonous life, conquer the big city and accomplish a dream that not repeated, mass produced and made vulgar loses its power to disconnect from the awareness of its own past, its own terrors and the truth of its own body, all of which Die, Lady, Die sets forth with a force unusual in most contemporary narrative. The protagonist and narrator of this story is named Esperanza (Hope) Hóberal (over all, or if you prefer, all over). Hope everywhere. Hope above all/ everyone? Hope is all over. What the novel attempts to explain is that passage, that transformation, in any case that question of and about Hope.

"Afterword" a la traducción norteamericana de La asesina de Lady Di:
Die, Lady, Die. Aliform Publishing, marzo 2005

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