Liria Evangelista

A Good Upbringing Liria Evangelista

As important as the historic context is to La buena educación, the story of Laura Borrelli, a young woman from a working-class, immigrant neighborhood, goes beyond a socio-political examination of the years of dictatorship. La buena educación is a novel about reading, and about desire. It explores the intellectual and sexual development of the protagonist, placing the craving for cerebral experiences alongside the yearning for sensual experiences, and showing how the two can overlap(...) The language and imagery in La buena educación is often shocking and disturbing, even violent. The narrative often veers off into the scatological and taboo. A book written in this style would never have gone undetected by careful eyes of the censors of the Proceso. There seems to be a purposeful desire to break some rules and as readers we are left to ask why. The most obvious answer is that the transgressive tone of the novel is a form of resistance, a narrative push against the authoritarian forces that stealthily inhabit the world of the protagonist (...) Additionally, as the author herself has affirmed, the seemingly transgressive nature of the novel follows a long tradition in Argentine letters of reacting to the violence and decadence of Argentine society with the same degree of violence and decadence of language. From Esteban Echeverria's canonical short story, "El matadero" ("The Slaughterhouse") through the drama and prose of writers such as Roberto Arlt and Griselda Gambaro, harsh and repulsive imagery often reflects the specific national reality of Argentina as well as the human experience in general. Jeanie Murphy, Translator´s Introduction