He Who Searches     by Luisa Valenzuela, Translated by Helen Lane Original title: Como en la guerra Published by Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: March 1, 1987 Format: Paperback, 134 pages ISBN: 0916583201 List Price: $9.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

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A professor of semiotics who doubles as a psychologist in Barcelona visits (always in disguise) a prostitute in the early hours of the morning 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 middl e 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 that can be taken apart to create other figures, other puzzles. It ends with its narrator back in Bueno s Aires: "He returns to his Latin America, and for the first time, recognizes it." He who searches, finds.

"Luisa Valenzuela is the heiress of Latin American fiction. She wears an opulent, baroque crown, but her feet are naked."—Carlos Fuentes

"Luisa Valenzuela explores the terrain where love and violence, erotic pleasure and death, exist perilously close to each other. . . . Valenzuela plays with words, turns them inside out, weaves them into sensuous webs."— Voice Literary Supplement

"He Who Searches is as stunning a portrait of Latin America and its strange, magical realities as the portraits found in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra. And like those novels, it is also a work of universal appeal."—San Francisco Chronicle

"This novel . . . is a prime example of contemporary Latin American fiction. Its major themes are love, identity, reality, time, existence, and death, expressed with an innovative narrative structure and point of view, through myr iad symbols and against a political and feminist backdrop."—Choice

"To read her is to enter our reality fully, where plurality surpasses the limitations of the past; to read her is to participate in a search for Latin American identity, which offers its rewards beforehand. Luisa Valenzuela's books are our present, but they also contain much of the future; there is a true resplendence, true love, true freedom on each of her pages."—Julio Cortazar