From the beginning, Luisa Valenzuela's Black Novel with Argentines reads like a murder mystery. The first pages set the scene: place, New York City; time, a freezing predawn Saturday. We meet the murderer/protagonist, Agustín Palant, as he creeps, badly shaken, away from the New York apartment where he has just shot and killed a young actress he met only hours before.

We are given the WHO, the WHERE, and the HOW; we must discover the WHY—the motive. Immediately, however, we are presented with an unusual twist on the conventional murder mystery format: the bewildered killer himself does not know the motive for his crime. Agustín, an Argentine writer in New York on a grant to write his new novel, is (or had been up to this point) an ordinary citizen. He is baffled and horrified by his apparently random, arbitrary act of violence, and spends the rest of the novel in a desperate search to find the reasos why. As readers we are drawn into his search as we try to make sense of this novel that is, and is not, a murder mystery. We try to discover the motive and to make sense of the self-referential, multi-layered story. We play the roles of detective, author, and audience to this bizarre crime. In this deflection of expectations typical of her deft writing style, Luisa Valenzuela forces the readers into the story, to struggle to make sense of the novel along with the characters.

Agustín, it turns out, purchased the murder weapon only that day, in a questionable gun shop in a questionable part of town. Emboldened by the gun in his pocket and inspired by the advice of his lover Roberta (also an Argentine novelist) to try to "write with the body," Agustín ventures across the borderline and into the dangerous part of the city. Walking among the many offers for illicit drugs and sex, Agustín accepts an offer of a theater ticket to an underground play where he first meets his victim. After the murder, Agustín confesses his crime to Roberta, who decides to help conceal him and the evidence. Sequestered for months in Roberta's apartment, the two writers enter on a long inner search that ends up powerfully affecting them both.

In committing his crime, Agustín has crossed boundaries. We see him as a person lost, wandering in the bowels of New York City. Valenzuela uses the deteriorated, drug-infested neighborhoods, dark alleys, and rank subway tunnels vividly to evoke the human subconscious. This "subcity" is a zone where anything is possible, society's rules no longer apply, and the dark, foreboding, violent, and bizarre are the norm. Suddenly face to face with his dark side, Agustín is a man no longer capable of self-recognition. He becomes a stranger to himself, going through denial ("No, not me. It wasn't me …"), revulsion, and despair. He realizes that "the person he thought he was until the moment of the shot had never existed."

The personal and the political often reflect each other in Luisa Valenzuela's work. In Black Novel Agustín's personal struggle with evil becomes a metaphor for humans dealing with acts of horror and violence, specifically for Argentines who witnessed their country's "dirty war" in the late 1970s. Agustín, we are told, is a "typical porteño," and his name even sounds like "Argentine." In his horror and shock, Agustín tries to suppress his memories in a kind of self-imposed blindness. He is a metaphor for his compatriots, who refused to acknowledge the extent of torturings and "disappearances" even after the dirty war was over. In this sense, Valenzuela's art serves as an instrument of instigation or shock. It is meant to startle us into new realizations and make us aware of new connections as we recognize ourselves in her characters. It is a symbolic probe into our individual and collective subconscious, and a struggle with the knowledge of our own fall from innocence.

Roberta is also caught up in Agustín's guilt, fascination, and horror at having crossed the boundary and fallen from grace. She becomes an "accomplice after the fact," cleaning up Agustín's apartment and hiding the murder weapon in her medicine cabinet. She shares his horror and his fascination with the dark side of human nature: that desire to venture into the "mouth of the wolf" without getting swallowed.

Roberta's mingled fascination and revulsion are evident when she visits the workplace of her friend Ava Taurel, a professional dominatrix. Valenzuela achieves a provocative, ironic metaphor in the not-so-underground New York S&M scene. In the spectacles played out in Ava Taurel's theater of pleasure and pain, Roberta encounters a bizarre, distorted reflection of the torture chambers of her country's past. The political resonates and the line between sex and violence blurs as Roberta asks the book's poignant questions: how can some people enjoy voluntary sexual torture when other innocent people are tortured against their will? What makes an ordinary person capable of violence? "What I need is to know why someone becomes a torturer, a murderer, to know why an upright citizen can one day unawares be transformed into a monster."

Along with the blurring of the line between the personal and the political, Black Novel includes other topics common in Valenzuela's work: memory, reality versus fiction, and, of course, language.

Memory and self-censorship are two common Valenzuela themes. In her short story "Cambio de armas," Valenzuela portrays Laura, a victim of torture to the point of brainwashing. Although Laura occasionally remembers fragments of who she is and what has happened, she fights her memories because they are too painful for her to bear. In Black Novel Agustín also experiences random flashes of memories (of Buenos Aires in the 1970s, when people in his own building "disappeared"), and he too attempts to suppress them. They are too painful; they are "memories to be stifled." But this self-censorship is to Valenzuela the most insidious form of censorship because it comes from within. It means the populace has been frightened into refusing to see. As the homeless woman in the novel explains to Roberta, "What's really yours is always returned." Memories, and the consequences of our actions, will return to haunt us despite our attempts to ignore them. Laura's and Agustín's denial of the truth doesn't change their situation, and in fact hinders their abilities to save themselves. Black Novel with Argentines condemns self-censorship and advocates confrontation with the truth—no matter how painful it may be—as a way of dealing with human evils.

Memory is also vital to identity, as Valenzuela shows us in the brainwashed Laura, who can't remember who she is, and in Agustín, who loses all self-recognition when he tries to deny his crime and his experiences in Buenos Aires. An individual without memory has no identity, and a society full of such individuals has no collective memory, no history.

The power of language to shape reality, and the tenuous line between reality and fiction, are two of Valenzuela's most consistent themes. In Black Novel, Agustín and Roberta teeter on the border between sanity and madness, and between reality and fiction. The "literariness" of their situation is not lost on the two writers. They refer to the murder/search as the "novel" they're writing together. Fiction seems real ("Do you know this firsthand?" "Yes. I read it in a novel"), and reality takes on the dreamlike quality of a cheap novel, a horror story, or a bad joke. Even as he is leaving the scene of the crime, Agustín feels as if he is trapped—ironically—in the plot of some cheap novel, "so true to the trashy local reading matter."

Valenzuela's work constantly questions language (which is, after all, a human creation) and language's ability to reflect "truth" or "reality," which are themselves fluctuating. In Black Novel, names reflect the characters' attempts to deny reality. Both Roberta and Agustín attempt to become someone else. Roberta helps Agustín to shave off his beard, then gives him her clothes to wear. She renames him "Gus," then "Magoo" in an effort to help him hide from the truth. As Agustín tries to dissociate himself from his crime and escape his newly discovered capacity for violence, his denial is reflected in his language. When retracing his steps the night of the murder, he refers to himself in the third person. Afraid of making Roberta feel betrayed, he tells her the murder victim was a man. With each lie, Agustín enters "the winding path of someone reciting only half-truths, who at every turn fibs a tiny bit more." Roberta also changes. She cuts and dyes her hair, puts on a man's suit, and is called "Robbie," then "Bobbie," and finally "Bob." Both characters become enmeshed in the web of their own language. Thus, a female murder victim becomes a male, and Roberta and Agustín reverse sex roles. In these transformations, Valenzuela is questioning the assumption that language somehow has a one-to-one correlation with reality. The proliferation of given names, nicknames, pet names, and aliases in the novel poses the question: do names define us and tell us who we are? Or do they just confuse the issue?

Black Novel with Argentines is not without flaws. There are occasional problems in the novel. Although Roberta and Agustín aren't necessarily meant to be likable characters, at times they come across as overly self-absorbed and writerly. The whole novel is rich in metaphors and multiple levels of meaning. However, this can lead to obscurity in places such as the scenes in the old theater, at the end. Here, theater and theatrical reality, birth and death, motives, and rites of passage references are so dense that it's difficult to navigate. Considering the huge issues that Valenzuela tackles, such as humans' capacity for evil, perhaps it is not surprising that occasionally we feel overwhelmed.

As in much of Valenzuela's work, it is important to notice not just what Black Novel says, but what it does. After actively engaging the readers in the search for the motive (for why there is violence in ourselves and our societies), Valenzuela refuses to give us the clear, all-encompassing answers we are looking for. In this sense, the ending of Black Novel completes the detective novel deconstruction. Instead of offering up a final, logical answer to Agustín's/Roberta's/our search, it compounds the problem. No shrewd detective nters upon the scene to offer us last-minute explanations. It's as if Valenzuela uses the detective novel form to engage us in the search for an answer, then chides us for hoping for a pat answer that would bring order out of the chaos of life. Various possible motives are offered along the way. But none offers the single, complete explanation that allows us the satisfaction of solving the case and putting it to rest so we can go on to other things. This is Valenzuela's point: that the issue of why humans commit violence individually and collectively is one that must be confronted and probed, as the dark face of ourselves. But ultimately what we are exploring is not neat, symmetrical, organized poetry or art, but something far more complicated, where good and bad, reality and fiction are not as clear. It is a cheap, badly written novel, a bad joke, or, as the character Dr. Hector Bravo calls it, "True, harsh, deceptive, gripping, fluctuating, imaginative, exciting, damned reality."