He Who Searches
1987
First Published
3.43
Average Rating
134
Number of Pages
A professor of semiotics who doubles as a psychologist in Barcelona visits (always in disguise) a prostitute in the early morning hours on Mondays and Thursdays in order to analyze her without her knowing it. The story moves from Barcelona to Mexico to Buenos Aires, but above all it is about Argentina: its recent history, its 30,000 missing children, its stunned middle class, its writers in exile. He Who Searches is multifaceted in structure, combining narrative references to old-fashioned storytelling, realism, psychoanalysis, feminism, politics, and suspense, all of them tinged with a patina of eroticism that reflects a feminist perspective. Ultimately the disguises of the plot—transvestism, transsexualism, differing sexual points of view—become pieces in a puzzle that can be taken apart to create other figures, other puzzles. It ends with its narrator back in Buenos Aires: He who searches, finds.
Avg Rating
3.43
Number of Ratings
107
5 STARS
21%
4 STARS
31%
3 STARS
26%
2 STARS
16%
1 STARS
7%
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Author
Luisa Valenzuela
Author · 12 books
Luisa Valenzuela is a post-'Boom' novelist and short story writer. Her writing is characterized by an experimental, avant-garde style which questions hierarchical social structures from a feminist perspective. She is best known for her work written in response to the dictatorship of the 1970s in Argentina. Works such as Como en la guerra (1977), Cambio de armas (1982) and Cola de lagartija (1983) combine a powerful critique of dictatorship with an examination of patriarchal forms of social organization and the power structures which inhere in human sexuality and gender relationships.
