SOURCE: A review of Black Novel (with Argentines), in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 12, No. 30, Fall, 1992, pp. 175-76.

Below, Januzzi offers a favorable review of Black Novel, remarking that "the text is so well constructed that it provides a tight alibi for her sense of language as a secretion."

From what she terms the "Argentine darkness," from the metaphorical alphabet city of New York's Lower East Side, and from the wild zones of "authority," gender, and language itself, Luisa Valenzuela has won a brilliant, difficult, involving text. In a 1986 interview Valenzuela said she was "stalking" rather than writing this novel, and signs of the five-year struggle for its production are evident in the narrative(s) of its protagonists, who are also authors: "To write about the immediate, almost an impossible task. One's arm must extend way beyond its reach in order to touch what is virtually clinging to...