Rage by Sergio Bizzio is a strange and mesmerizing novel.  In the world of Jose Maria, violence is happenstance, love is sudden, and subterfuge is mandatory.  Jose Maria is barely visible, a man approaching the middle of his life, just getting by on his construction job, living on the fringes of Argentine society. A strong attraction, a premeditated murder, and the sudden return of rich Argentineans to their villa tended by Jose Maria’s lover Rosa, results in the erasure of Maria (as he is called), his disappearance and his re-invention.  He becomes invisible but omnipresent, and cycles of violence and tenderness, of sexuality and chastity, propel him onwards to realizing the nature of himself, his society, and the possibilities of life itself.

The book is full of surprises, both in observations and actions. The trajectory of the plot is impossible to predict; it is exciting and disturbing, shifting in speed from a safe lull to a suddenly accelerated careening towards discovery, both literally and figuratively.  Maria is hidden to everyone but us, the readers, and he shares his own details and his observations sporadically, sometimes intentionally and sometimes by accident, but always viscerally and honestly.  He comes to see things clearly, now that he has time for the first time in his life, time to think, and his vision is sharp and painful: “To please other people, there’s no need to be beautiful but to be horrible…You have to say what others want to hear, you have to smile at everyone you meet, you need to be impersonal, transparent and a whole heap of other things too, all horrible.“  But Maria is not transparent, he is not visible at all, preferring only to leave enigmatic evidence — toys, footprints, bodies, a filled toilet — of his existence.

Rage is an exciting book, with many layers of meaning and no easy explanations or solutions, no stereotypes of character or landscape, and with haunting qualities of shared human experience, not only of rage, but of  love, and of longing. This book will stay with me, percolating in my brain, for a very long time.