In memory state

The anguish of exile and the even more painful agony of return. Tununa Mercado, one of Argentina's most important writers, with a coveted Casa de las Américas award on her resume, experienced two periods of expatriation: the first, on the eve of the 1966 World Cup, was spent in France; the second, with her family, in Mexico, between 1974 and 1986. The Argentine exile in Mexico is the starting point for IN A STATE OF MEMORY. Tununa describes the daily lives of her fellow Argentines, other Argentines trapped in a kind of suspension of the space-time continuum. This collage of mementos parades through the text with a melancholic tone. But there is something cathartic in verbalizing even the most bitter memory. With sensitivity, she describes, in IN A STATE OF MEMORY, the impressions drawn from the experience. The alienation that accompanies exiles, the difficulty in absorbing the local culture, the reluctance to abandon one's own, a shield against longing and the revolt of being uprooted, removed from what they knew and loved. The moments of rage, when the pain of being expelled generates a controversial desire to embrace the new reality. IN A STATE OF MEMORY is a novel about memories of exile and patriotic belonging. About the reclamation of one's own country. Tununa Mercado explores the physical and psychological effects of lives hostilely separated from one's nation. A work dedicated to the emotional consequences of the dictatorship period in Argentina.