Pantalones azules is a novel with a deceptively simple appearance. As Leopoldo Brizuela has noted, fifty years after its first publication, it "reveals itself as the recounting of a process infinitely more subtle" than an impossible love affair, which was the key interpretation by its contemporaries. On the contrary, Pantalones azules is a story of multiple disillusionments: those of Alejandro, the young protagonist from a well-to-do family, Catholic and anti-Semitic, who encounters the limits of his convictions upon meeting Irma, an immigrant with a Jewish mother who lost her parents in the European war; those of Irma, who receives not compassion but the inhuman brutality of Alejandro’s convictions; and those of Elisa, Alejandro’s virgin fiancée, who must decide her position within the patriarchal family structure and whether to accept her role as a future wife subjected to the tacit violence of her fiancé. But more than a story of love and disillusionment, Pantalones azules is a prodigious representation, for its freshness and vitality, of the distances that separate social groups, cultures, generations, and genders within the same time and place. A prime example of Sara Gallardo’s extraordinary ability to bring her characters to life with wisdom, humor, a touch of malice, and a surprising economy of resources, this second novel by the author also broadens her perspective on the landscape: the countryside, the city, and the river are depicted here with unusual accuracy, possible only for someone who has experienced landscape and language as a unique amalgam, a defining characteristic of her works. First published in 1963, Pantalones azules has circulated only minimally since then. Fiordo is proud to bring this superb novel by one of Argentina’s greatest writers back to readers.
