SOURCE: "In Flight from the Junta," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4657, July 3, 1992, p. 26.

In the review below, Hopkinson briefly recounts the themes, style, and plots of Open Door.

Luísa Valenzuela is among Argentina's best-known writers of the "boom" period of the 1970s. Many voices were silenced when military rule returned in 1976 and waged war on "subversives", a category that inevitably included artists and intellectuals. Valenzuela survived by fleeing her country and spending ten years in exile, mainly in the United States.

Open Door, the latest anthology of her short stories to be published here, is informed by that period. Just as The Lizard's Tail, her only novel so far published in England, is based on the hated, strange and sadistic former "Minister for Social Welfare and Head of Paramilitary Organizations", López Rega, so many of these stories of the 1970s and 80s are rooted in the...