Opendoor (original: 2006; edição: 2007)

An existential novel that has the air of a post-war nouveau roman. Many of the elements are here: an impersonal narrator, a focus on the surfaces of things, and dramatic events driven by oblique motivations while retaining plausibility. The combined influence of Camus and Dostoevsky is palpable.

The novel is not a "coming of age" story, but it is suffused with the audacity and insolence of youth. The narrator is a young woman who leaves Buenos Aires to live in country near a psychiatric hospital, the "Open Door" of the title. There is some obscurity about the connections of the various characters to the hospital and its noninterventionist approach means that such a connection would be tenuous. Even so, there is a disquieting feeling throughout that madness, like the asylum, is just around the corner. ( )

There are several unanswered questions in this puzzling and brief novel by a writer who has been hailed as a great young Argentine writer, among them what happened to a girl who was thought to be dead and why a rare old book turns up in the simple home of an aging ranch worker. But most of the novel is the story of a somewhat hapless young woman, originally an aspiring veterinarian living in a city, who ends up moving in with the aging ranch worker out in the country and doing relatively little other than having a hot romance with a neighboring girl who seems to be sexuality personified. Oh, they try various drugs too.

What gives the novel its title, and the country town its name, is the Open Door, a psychiatric hospital that operates on the principle that the mentally ill shouldn't be locked up but should be able to wander around on their own and find activities that they enjoy; there are no locked doors or gates, but apparently the inmates don't run away. And isn't that just a tidy metaphor for life! We all wander around trying to find ways to enjoy life and there isn't any way to escape.

Havilio writes well, and this was an easy and quick book to read, but I didn't really engage with the narrator or the other characters: the narrator herself seems so passive and the other characters more symbolic than real. There is another book by Havilio that continues the narrator's story, but I'm not very motivated to read it.