Voices from Silence

Voices From Silence is a kind of sequel to Unger's El Yanqui, set some 15 years later. In that time, Argentina has suffered under an oppressive regime & is now trying to heal itself. But scars remain, and Unger's American protagonist has returned to Argentina to help the family that once adopted him as a son search for the 2 sons who have disappeared. Thus Voices From Silence deals with the macrocosm of the Argentine political tragedy through the microcosm of one family's story. But Unger does not resort to cheap theatrics in this novel. This is a scrupulously realistic account that is all the more dramatic because it resists melodrama. The horrors in Voices From Silence are all too real, and as the truths emerge through the efforts of the Benevento family to discover what happened to their lost sons, the insiduous & mundane quality of those horrors (each the result of a thousand minor failings that in themselves could never amount to much) makes them all the more troubling to witness. But Unger's novel is unflinching, and we are forced to witness acts & consequences more damaging than any melodramatic cataclysm. In this sense, Voices From Silence joins the ranks of Heart of Darkness and the works of Elie Wiesel in portraying how ordinary lives can be trapped by the very ordinary nature of oppression. Art is meant to affirm life, and Voices From Silence, by giving witness to the silenced, bravely affirms the lost value of the disappeared lives of anyone who has fallen victim to an oppression born of their fellow citizens