3 ideas
In a collapsing, violent Buenos Aires, the middle-aged narrator Ernesto Kollody plans to break his domineering, ailing father out of a Convalescent Home that the elderly are not allowed to leave. He tells the story to an unnamed former lover. He pursues the plan despite the long resentment between father and son.
Ernesto sets out to rescue a father who diminished him, but the bond between them stays ambivalent rather than dutiful. The father keeps manipulating him, and Ernesto comes to want to escape their shared existence even as he acts on his father's behalf.
The horror in this narrative comes from a dry, domestic tone that treats private security, random violence and warehousing the old as routine background to family errands and love troubles. Reading a decaying society through a narrator who has normalized it shows how atrocity becomes invisible. The atrocity comes to seem like logistics, something to manage, and it stops being an outrage to resist.