what the night tells the day

What The Night Tells The Day by Hector Bianciotti (The New Press, 1996)

Although I found this book at times somewhat impenetrable, perhaps  due to the author’s “Classic French” style and its translation into English (by Linda Coverdale), I read it with considerable pleasure, especially the second two thirds, which seem somewhat clearer and therefore more engaging. 

Hector Bianciotti was born to second-generation Italian immigrants in Argentina in 1930.  His father, a farmer/rancher, was quick-tempered and somewhat crazy, while his mother was gracious, kind, and calm.  He grew up on the endless Argentinean plains and felt both trapped and disturbed by their unvarying vastness.  Aware of his homosexual feelings from an early age, he first turns to religion as a ways of escape, and manages to get sent to a seminary during his teenage years.  But there he finds he is more interested in and attracted to his fellow seminarians than he is to God, and renounces the religious life in favor of the secular.  He returns home — by now his family is living in a village — learns to type, and gets a job as a clerk.    After a year or two of that he moves to Buenos Aires, where he works in a real estate firm and pursues a bohemian and queer life, both made dangerous and difficult by the repressive Peron dictatorship.  The portrait of Buenos Aires during the Peron era, a city soaked in paranoia and fear, is especially evocative and chilling.  Finally, in his early 20s, he manages to to move to Europe, where he apparently flourished, ending up in Paris as literary editor at Le Monde.

This book, a memoir of his early years in Argentina, is written in many short chapters of impressions, anecdotes, and portraits.  It is by turns funny, charming, lovely, heartbreaking and chilling: the classic homosexual story of someone growing up and necessarily away from his family.