An explosion in an army depot storing weapons leftover from a brutal civil war unearths a vast archive of secret police documents, whose discovery threatens to tear the scab off a fragile peace and pits the archive’s researchers against each other.
That might be the elevator pitch for Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Human Matter, if the book were the high-concept novel it practically begs to be. Instead, Rey Rosa uses this real-life event — which occurred in Guatemala City in 2005 — to explore not only the dangers of exposing secrets, but more meta matters regarding the possibilities and responsibilities of a writer like himself in doing so.
