The Secret in Their Eyes: A Novel

by Eduardo Sacheri

Overview

Now a Major Motion Pictured starring Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, and Chiwetel Eijiofor

Benjamín Chaparro is a man haunted by his past—a retired detective, he remains obsessed with the decades-old case of the rape and murder of a young woman in her own bedroom. As he revisits the details of the investigation, he is reacquainted with his similarly long, unrequited love for Irene Hornos, then just an intern, now a respected judge. Absorbing and masterfully crafted, The Secret in Their Eyes is a meditation on the effects of the passage of time and unfulfilled desire.

Eduardo Sacheri’s tale is imbued with the subdued terror that characterized the Dirty War of 1970s Argentina, and was made into the Academy Award winning film of the same name in 2009. Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, and Chiwetel Eijiofor now star in the English language depiction of this gripping story, to be released in the Fall of 2015.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590514511
Publisher:	Other Press, LLC
Publication date:	10/18/2011
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	396
Sales rank:	128,830
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Eduardo Sacheri was born in Buenos Aires in 1967. His first collection of short stories, Esperándolo a Tito y otros cuentos de fútbol (Waiting for Tito and Other Soccer Stories) was published in Spain in 2000 under the title Traidores y otros cuentos (Traitors and Other Stories). Three other collections were published between 2001 and 2007, all of which have been best sellers in Argentina. His novel La pregunta de sus ojos has been sold into eight territories, and the film adaptation, The Secret inTheir Eyes, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2010.
 
John Cullen is the translator of many books from Spanish, French, German, and Italian, including Margaret Mazzantini’s Don’t Move, Yasmina Khadra’s Middle East Trilogy (The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack, The Sirens of Baghdad), Christa Wolf’s Medea, and Manuel de Lope’s The Wrong Blood (Other Press). He lives in upstate New York.

Read an Excerpt

I’m not sure about my reasons for recounting the story of Ricardo Morales after so many years. I can say that what happened to him has always aroused an obscure fascination in me, as if the man’s fate, a life destroyed by tragedy and grief, provided me with a chance to reflect on my own worst fears. I’ve often caught myself feeling a certain guilty joy at the disasters of others, as if the fact that horrible things happened to other people meant that my own life would be exempt from such tragedies, as if I’d get a kind of safe-conduct based on some obtuse law of probability: If such and such a catastrophe befalls Joe Blow, then it’s unlikely that it will also strike Joe’s acquaintances, among whom I count myself. It’s not as though I can boast of a life filled with success, but when I compare my misfortunes with what Morales suffered, I come out well ahead. In any case, it’s not my story I want to tell, it’s Morales’s story, or Isidoro Gómez’s, which is the same story but seen from the other side, or seen upside down, or something like that.
   Although the morbid interest my subject arouses in me isn’t the only reason why I’m writing these pages, it carries some weight and plays some part. But mostly, I suppose, I’m telling the story because I have time to tell it. A lot of time, too much time, so much time that the daily trifles whose sum is my life quickly dissolve into the monotonous nothingness that surrounds me. Being retired is worse than I’d imagined. I should have known it would be. Not because of anything I knew about retirement, but because things we fear generally turn out
worse when they happen than when we imagined them.

Editorial Reviews

A brutal murder is the starting point for this strange, compelling journey through Argentina's criminal-justice system; the Argentinian writer's 2005 novel inspired the same-named film that won the 2009 Foreign Language Oscar.

Buenos Aires, 1968. Chaparro is a deputy clerk in the Palace of Justice. That title suggests a nobody. He's not. He oversees police work at crime scenes, such as the murder of Liliana Colotto, a young married schoolteacher. She has been raped and strangled. The conscientious 28-year-old also accompanies the detective to inform her husband, a bank teller. Chaparro bonds with the devastated Morales, who is not under suspicion, and intervenes when two dark-skinned workmen from the building are brought in and roughed up, blatant racial profiling. He has them released and files a complaint against their accusers; then, with masterful insight, he singles out the likely suspect as Morales is sorting through old photographs. One young man, Gómez, is gazing at the future victim, the adoration clear in his eyes. Chaparro's hunch proves correct, but the whereabouts of the presumed killer are unknown, so Chaparro must bend the rules to keep the case from being sealed. All this intrigue is handled beautifully, as are the subsequent twists and turns: the arrest of Gómez four years later on an unrelated charge, his imprisonment, his surprise release and Chaparro's own sudden vulnerability (he must be whisked out of town to a safe jurisdiction). Morales is memorable, too, a baleful presence intent on only one thing: revenge. Still, the novel is hardly without flaws. There is a secondary story line: Chaparro's undeclared, lifelong love for a married judge. The story starts languidly with Chaparro's retirement and his decision to write about the Morales case. At intervals, the clerk turned writer pauses to wonder how he should proceed. These are irritating distractions from the novel's theme: a good man working to secure justice in a fractured system.

A view of the world as a dark place illuminated by personal loyalties.

Kirkus Reviews