Malvinas requiem - Rodolfo Fogwill

It?s early June 1982 and winter in the Falkland Islands: 24 young soldiers ??deserters from the Argentine army ??spend the last weeks of the conflict hiding underground in a cave. Inside their refuge they listen to the radio, stockpile supplies and exchange stories; outside, under cover of night, they trade with the Argentine Quartermaster and with the British. Looking out over the bleak landscape, after weeks of grey skies and horizontal snow, one of them remarks that ?you?d have to be English to want this?. But the rationale of their own side is just as puzzling. The ?pichis?, as they call themselves ? short for pichiciegos, tiny blind armadillos that live underground in northern Argentina ? are a temporary tribe of survivors from different parts of the country (just as the English all seem to them to be either Scottish, Welsh or Gurkhas) with the bad luck to have been born in the early 1960s. Written before the surrender and recently reissued in Argentina, Fogwill?s Malvinas Requiem is shocking, subtle and superbly written.