The Present Begets the Past

With this fragmentary account of one of the countless victims of Argentina’s Dirty War, Marc Raboy gives readers two stories, one nested inside the other. The first is about a young woman, with the same last name as the author, who died at the hands of a bloodthirsty dictatorship in 1976; the other is about the author himself.

What prompts the desire to tell these stories, to spin this web? For Raboy, a former journalist and a retired professor of art history and communications studies at McGill University, it started with a tenuous link: a year-long visit to Buenos Aires that his Ukrainian grandfather made before he emigrated to Canada in the early twentieth century. Could Marc be related to the Raboys who still live in the Argentine capital? While there is some discussion of possible family affiliations through another putative Ukrainian ancestor, this topic soon recedes into the background of Looking for Alicia. What really sparked the author’s interest in...