Carlos Franz - an investigation into the depths of both human cruelty and compassion. What happened in a provincial town during the early days of the Pinochet regime.

Carlos Franz, The Absent Sea, Trans. by Leland Chambers. McPherson & co, 2011.


The Absent Sea is the English-language debut of one of the most important Chilean novelists living, a major novel that hovers between actual history and timeless mythology.
Just before the coup d'etat that overturned Chile's govenrment under Allende, a young, idealistic judge is posted to a provincial center in the vast northern desert. After the coup, the town is occupied by the military, which establishes a concentration death camp for dissidents. Immediately, the conflicted relationship between the judge, Laura, and the commandant, Major Cáceres, leads to a life-changing decision which results in her lengthy exile to Germany. Twenty years later, she returns to Chile to face up to her past, and to answer the scathing question flung at her by her daughter: "Where were you, Mamá, when all those horrible things were happening in your city?" Laura's reply to her daughter takes the form of a long letter about the dramatic events of twenty years before. Meanwhile, in alternating chapters, Laura's return coincides with a religious festival. By the end of three days, the city and all its inhabitants will be forever altered.

"In The Absent Sea, Carlos Franz tells a fascinating story which is at once an investigation into the depths of human cruelty and compassion on an occasion of historical violence. Written and constructed with a masterful hand, it is one of the most original novels that modern Latin American literature has produced."--Mario Vargas Llosa


"What happened in a provincial town during the early days of the Pinochet regime.
Twenty years after the coup that toppled Salvador Allende's government, Laura Larco returns to Pampa Hundida. A young judge there in 1973 when the soldiers rolled in, Laura fled abroad a few months later. Now she has come home to resume her judicial post, carrying in her briefcase a manuscript written in response to her daughter Claudia s angry question, "Where were you, Mamá, when all those horrible things were taking place in your city?" Born in Berlin, Claudia has come to Chile "to serve justice" and make sure wrongdoers are punished in the restored democracy. But guilt and innocence are not easily defined, we see as Franz interweaves the events that unfold following Laura's return with her memories of the town s ordeal in 1973. The brutal Major Cáceres relied on the terrified complicity of Pampa Hundida s authorities as he executed political prisoners in a camp on the outskirts of town, and he established an unnerving bond with Laura, fearfully attracted to him from the moment she stormed into the church where he was praying to denounce his violations of the law. Past and present narratives build to a joint climax, as Laura learns of the terrible intimacy between a torturer and his victim, as well as the willingness of ordinary people to benefit from evil deeds. Revelations of Cáceres crimes threaten to discredit the annual religious fiesta that by 1993 is the primary source of Pampa Hundida s economic well-being. Wouldn t it be better, the nervous mayor asks Laura, just to let old wounds heal? By contrast Cáceres, disfigured and half-insane, looks to her to judge him The course of action she chooses is as unpredictable as everything else in Franz's superbly plotted novel, which invokes the ancient gods of Chile's indigenous people, as well as the eternal opposition between humanity's Apollonian and Dionysian instincts, to remind us that all judgments are partial and compromised.
Dark, brilliant and disturbing. Let's hope this first U.S. publication for Chilean novelist Franz will be followed by many more."  - Kirkus Reviews

"The first of Chilean writer Franz s works to be translated into English, this sprawling, compassionate novel grapples with the consequences of the 1973 coup, presenting a strikingly clear-eyed vision of historical trauma. Laura Larco, once the youngest judge in the history of the Chilean justice system, fled Chile for Berlin 20 years ago and established herself in a university philosophy department. As the book opens, Laura has returned to Pampa Hundida, where she served as the Magistrate after the coup, prompted by a question from her idealistic daughter, Claudia -- Berlin-born and now living in Chile -- who wants to know where Laura was "when all those horrible things were taking place." Laura's return and re-assumption of a recently vacated judgeship coincides with a renewed attempt to expose long-buried crimes, especially those of major Mariano Cáceres Latorre, the former commander of a prison camp near Pampa Hundida who has a history with Laura. The narrative is divided between Laura's present-day journey and her account of the past, and once the two accounts coincide, they create a tough vision of the responsibilities history saddles us with and offer a tender but unsentimental understanding of the personal compromises that refuse to remain hidden." - Publishers Weekly


"'Where were you, Mama, when all those horrible things were taking place in your city?'
This accusation from her daughter plunges Laura, the heroine of Carlos Franz's English-language debut, set in post-Pinochet Chile, into an abyss haunted by terror and shame. The provincial shrine city of Pampa Hundida is panic-struck when Laura, a former magistrate, returns to the post she fled two decades ago. How will she judge the townspeople who bore witness to atrocities committed in the wake of the military coup that ousted Allende and drove her into exile?
The Absent Sea is not easy to read but it's important to do so. A dark and complex psychological novel along the lines of Dostoyevsky, it dissects dichotomies between past and present, logic and desire, good and evil. Laura is not likable at first; she doesn't even like herself, having cowered in Germany for 20 years rather than remember. And when she allows her memories to return, her recollections, labyrinthian and laced with recurring mantras, are trance inducing. But if Franz's language sometimes sounds overwrought in translation, it also has moments of subtle beauty.
A victim of torture and rape, Laura reserves her harshest judgments for herself. "She sat down when she should have remained standing"--she was complicit. But through her efforts to close the growing gap between herself and her daughter, Laura comes to recognize shades of gray and that the burden of history, both the innocence and the guilt, is shared by all of us. --Tom Lavoie

"Like any great novel—and this is one of those—Carlos Franz's The Absent Sea brings the individual destiny face to face with the collective destiny. With a very clear gaze, distant but lovingly, Franz dares to look at the melodrama of some lives and elevate it to the tragedy of a nation. This is a new voice, powerful, creative, captivating, and deeply involved with the word." --Carlos Fuentes

 "The Absent Sea is less about the pain of living under dictatorship than it is about the gaping tensions that separate one generation from the next. In the novel, Laura and her daughter stand for these two generational perspectives on Chilean history and memory, each of which is drafted in letters they address to one another. ...By alternating between these two different registers, the text manages to skillfully interweave a mother-daughter story and the larger history of dictatorship and exile. ...As a story of clashing perspectives on a massively charged historical moment, the novel moves insistently toward the possibility of reconciling, even resolving, one and for all, the conflictive coexistence of painful memories, a longing for indictment, and a desire for closure. It does so to the very end, and will please readers who stay with it to witness it closing pages."--Sergio Delgado

 "Carlos Franz is one of the most noted writers in South America, but he appears in English for the first time here. The Absent Sea is a novel about memory and responsibility, set in the aftermath of the military dictatorship in Chile. Laura, a judge in exile, returns to Chile to answer her daughter’s question – where were you, Mamá, when all those terrible things were taking place in your city? The book cuts between the present, Laura’s written response to her daughter, and memories of those terrible things. Laura’s letter to her daughter is the highlight of the book. It is always a pleasure to read a novel with a powerful, intelligent female protagonist, and reading the character Laura one is reminded that she is the sort of character missing in the writing of so many other Latin American men. The Absent Sea is a terrifying and mesmerizing novel that succeeds in a similar way to Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife but with a more immediate punch in the gut. Highly recommended for all fiction collections."--Hey Small Press

"Returning to atrocity twenty years later doesn't change that atrocity happened. . . . Confronting how rifts of a nation create wounds that take a long time to heal and how to face a family you left to their fate, The Absent Sea is a poignant and gripping novel, very highly recommended." -- Midwest Book Review


“Where were you Mamá, when all those horrible things were taking place in your city?”  This question, put to Laura by her daughter Claudia, is what has drawn The Absent Sea’s protagonist back to the fictional town of Pampa Hundida at the start of novelist Carlos Franz’s exploration of the turbulent aftermath of Chile’s 1973 coup.
Pampa Hundida is a recurring setting for Franz’s work.  He places it in the northern part of the country, an oasis hidden in the Atacama desert; he has described it as “above all, a region of the spirit.”  In The Absent Sea’s opening pages the city is in the midst of La Diablada, Pampa Hundida’s annual religious festival.  Costumed pilgrims from the region—“a disparate bewildering, arbitrary crowd”—come “to beseech and to celebrate, to plead and to dance” in an age-old collective reckoning with evil.  After twenty years of self-imposed exile, Laura has returned for a reckoning of her own.  She’s come to reclaim the same judicial post she left two decades before, and to face up to where she was when all those “horrible things” were happening in Pampa Hundida.
“The desert was like extreme youth, for neither one allows any gray zones or chiaroscuros,” Franz writes.  Laura first arrives in Pampa Hundida during Chile’s “bloody and stormy period” of the early ’70s—the period of her own extreme youth.  Having just graduated from law school with the highest honors, she’s been named court secretary of the remote tribunal, a post from which she is quickly promoted, becoming the youngest magistrate in the history of the whole system.  She is confident in her abilities, and certain that a bright future stretches before her: “I believed in all good faith that this was the gift conferred on me by my times,” she remembers.
Then the soldiers arrive one October noon, a month after the coup.  They are led by a “tall, angular, impatient” officer named Major Marion Cáceres.  His face, gaunt and handsome, fills Laura with foreboding. The soldiers build a prison camp on the outskirts of town, and fill it with truckloads of handcuffed captives.  With horror, Laura realizes that:
. . . the law had been pulled to pieces, the legitimate authority had been demolished, and among those ruins the only thing left was me on my dais, behind the railing, completely alone.
She’s been left alone, but she has hardly gone undetected. Major Cáceres takes special notice of Laura.  He tells her the town’s revered statue of “La Patrona”—the Virgin of Carmel—looks like her, and with an eerie mix of condescension, reverence and irony, he nicknames Laura “patroncita,” or “little mistress.”  Provoked by the brazen major, Laura stages a surprise inspection of the prison camp. But inside its walls, she is the one surprised to find herself witness to a hastily convened military tribunal.  In Laura’s presence—and before she manages to rise from her seat to object—all of the camp’s prisoners are sentenced to death.
And so Major Cáceres’ s executions—one each morning—begin. Every dawn, the shots ring out over Pampa Hundida, tormenting its quiet citizenry.  Finally, a group of the town’s “ten righteous men”— the priest, the mayor, the baker, and others—approach Laura.  They beg her to appeal to the Major in any way she can (“Everyone knows how the commandant looks at you! And you do too.”) to end the killings and to return the holy statuette of La Patrona, which he’s taken from the church to punish the town for attempting to shelter condemned prisoners.  When Laura goes to him, he tortures and rapes her, and proposes a pact: so long as she continues to visit him regularly, he will stop shooting prisoners. In Laura’s acquiescence, the novel’s central metaphor is born. What happens when justice is forced into complicity with brutality?  When justice is cowed, can there be any hope of salvation?
These are fascinating, ambitiously posed questions but the prose with which Franz approaches them is sometimes overwrought.  In the moment before her rape, for example, Laura notices the tip of the Major’s penis:
. . .  glistening now, like satin, so very close and yet so distant, like the cupola of a tower trembling behind the wall of liquid air of the desert (or behind a veil of tears).  The tower of a forbidden city, or the watch-tower of an encampment of prisoners, or the main mast on a shipload of corpses.
Convoluted language like this distracts from the bleak horror of what Laura is made to endure—and detracts from the seriousness of The Absent Sea’s inquiry into the violent submission of justice under a dictatorial regime—by exalting the violence itself. Each time Laura returns to the Major, they reenact the first night’s torture and rape, ritualizing the obscene with its repetition; he beats her with a metal ruler, calling her pain a “song of steel.” More than a dozen taxingly florid pages are devoted to the details of their encounters.  Similarly, when Franz sounds certain repetitions to hint at the circularity of memory, the effect takes a touch of the mawkish. By circling around acts of degradation, hinting at the unspeakable, and grasping for the poetic, brutality is sentimentalized, and seems (if inadvertently) condoned. In Laura’s blackest hours, Franz’s narration—elsewhere commanding in Leland Chambers’s even-keeled translation—occasionally turns unsteady.
The novel’s deep fascination with feminine power—not just as prescribed by modern norms, but also in its most ancient and primal manifestations—is similarly dissatisfying. Feminine power is a theme Laura herself explores in two decades of academic writing after leaving Pampa Hundida, work that culminates in a book about justice and destiny named Moira for the powerful goddess of fate—“eternal justice, exalted above men and gods alike.”  The Absent Sea suggests that Laura has arrived at a scholar’s nuanced, profound understanding of dark truths about a femaleness inherent in “eternal justice.”  Yet The Absent Sea’s few female characters embody common stereotypes.   Idealistic, brilliant, and beautiful Laura and Claudia are defined by their purity, desirability, love for truth, and fallibility while The Absent Sea’s other women—the saggy-breasted whore Rosita; the “corpulent” midwife (“her face with Indian features and round as a full moon”); the distraught varicose-veined mother of a disappeared prisoner—are large, tired, marginalized, and used-up, sullied and discarded by the world for their working knowledge of its sins.  It’s a disappointingly familiar dichotomy that hints at a serious failure of imagination.
In the end, these problems aren’t enough to entirely obscure The Absent Sea’s moral force.  Entwining imagined personal and factual national histories, Franz charts a bold, spellbinding inquisition into how collective guilt is experienced by the individual.  In the end, this is a powerful story about a kind of contradictory love— “I’m not speaking about a sentimental love affair”—born out of the darkness of necessity and a grasping, desperate faith:
The kind of love engendered by a pact whose intimacy—that between executioner and victim, between captor and hostage, between him and me—had been more powerful than I ever could have anticipated . . .
Laura returns to Pampa Hundida to acknowledge that intimate pact, to settle unfinished debts, and, finally, to claim her own complex story—and write its ending for her own daughter.  She returns because she knows “there are some questions you can only respond to with your life.” Pampa Hundida might be a fictional place, in Franz’s words,  “a symbolic space . . .  appropriate for a modern tragedy” but the psychic space it conjures—the heart of the Atacama Desert, where the Pinochet dictatorship piled the bodies of countless “disappeared” prisoners—is only too real.  The Absent Sea is about human nature in its most vast, arid, and uncharted reaches. - Mythili G. Rao


Can a victim be complicit in her own oppression? In this dense and historical novel, Carlos Franz attempts to answer that question through the story of Laura Larco, a philosophy professor residing in Berlin who is called back to her native Chile to confront her past. Set in the fictitious town of Pampa Hundida during the religious festival La Diablada, forty-four-year-old Laura is forced to resolve her own guilt for escaping the Pinochet regime that came to power in 1973. Split between alternating points of view (the third person and a first person letter to her daughter), Franz’s debut novel in English dissects an individual’s responsibility to right the political wrongs that they were not only subject to, but a witness of.
Laura’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Claudia, who has left Berlin for Chile to attend University as a law student, questions her mother’s participation and silence in Pampa Hundida’s history during Pinochet’s dictatorship. In an effort to explain what happened, Laura writes a letter to Claudia chronicling her traumatic involvement in that eventful time. In it, she explains that she was heralded as an exceptional law student and appointed as the youngest judge in Pampa Hundida’s history, a twenty-five-year-old woman with power, just as Major Mariano Cácares LaTorre arrived as Pinochet’s henchman in order to build a prison for political prisoners. When idealistic Laura challenges Cácares, they develop an abusive relationship in which “the torture had created between us, who were strangers, an intimacy that parodied love.” Prompted by Claudia’s quest for the truth, Laura decides to return as the magistrate of Pampa Hundida’s vacated judgeship and seek justice for herself and for the city.
As with many Chilean novelists, religious symbolism plays a major role in the novel. Laura’s return for redemption and recompense coincides with La Diablada, the three-day festival of penance. Cácares is a disfigured outcast waiting for Laura, the only person he believes can administer his own penance, the justice of death. Franz draws on religious metaphors in both narratives; toward the end of the novel, the technique becomes a bit cloying and heavy-handed.
At its best, The Absent Sea is a complex and rich story from a historical perspective not often written about, especially in such a concise and engaging manner. Franz is a welcome member of the new cadre of writers portraying Chile with a more realistic eye than that of his magical realist forefathers. This is a well-told story that illuminates concepts of justice, oppression, and guilt, with a harsh light that leaves no one untouched. - Monica Carter