SOURCE: "Enmeshed in Their Own Language," in American Book Review, Vol. 15, No. 3, August-September, 1993, p. 8.

In the following review, Nimtz details the themes of Black Novel and Valenzuela's oeuvre in general, especially in relation to the author's provocative use of language.

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. Agust...