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book review

Plaza Requiem

By Martha Batiz

Exile Editions, 128 pages, $19.95

I have a nit to pick with the subtitle on this collection's cover, which is "stories at the edge of ordinary lives." It isn't that the stories or the lives are ordinary – far from it – but that the ordinary/extraordinary isn't to me what this collection is about. If I were to pick a theme drawing Plaza Requiem together it would be the notion of "the disappeared." This is of course a euphemism for the victims of state terrorism that for many references Argentina's Dirty War in particular, and the histories of other Latin American countries more generally (Martha Batiz is Mexican-Canadian). The introductory, title and final stories in Plaza Requiem all contain this form of disappeared. But Batiz also explores disappearance in a larger, metaphorical sense, especially as forms of violence against women. The horror of disappearance, what makes it such an effective political tool, is that life just carries on. In Batiz's telling, disappearance as repression, while not ordinary, is too common. As we lately consider what seems an ever-growing list of sexual abusers, I believe her.

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