He Who Searches

A professor of semiotics who doubles as a psychologist in Barcelona visits (always in disguise) a prostitute in the early morning hours on Mondays and Thursdays in order to analyze her without her knowing it. The story moves from Barcelona to Mexico to Buenos Aires, but above all it is about Argentina: its recent history, its 30,000 missing children, its stunned middle class, its writers in exile. He Who Searches is multifaceted in structure, combining narrative references to old-fashioned storytelling, realism, psychoanalysis, feminism, politics, and suspense, all of them tinged with a patina of eroticism that reflects a feminist perspective. Ultimately the disguises of the plot--transvestism, transsexualism, differing sexual points of view--become pieces in a puzzle tha can be taken apart to create other figures, other puzzles. It ends with its narrator back in Buenos Aires: He who searches, finds.

Luisa Valenzuela was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1938. In 1958, she moved to France and wrote her first novel while living in Paris. In 1979, she moved to the United States and lived in New York for ten years, working as a writer in residence at the Center for Inter-American Relations at NYU and Columbia. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983. Helen Lane contributed to In Praise of the Stepmother from Picador.