SULTRY MOON

This marvelous novel, its Argentine author's fourth, won the 1983 Mexican National Book Award. It's a tense, resonant story of a 30ish intellectual, Ramiro Bernadez, whose hopeful return home is destroyed by his impulsive commission of rape, then murder, and his inability--implicitly compared to that of Argentina's ruling elite--to take responsibility for, or even acknowledge, his actions. A beautifully controlled small masterpiece, filled with echoes of both Camus's L'Etranger and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.