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Pablo Pérez (bom in 1966) is one of a group of young Argentine writers whose work explores the wide variety of homoerotic experience and identity among the post-dictatorship generation in Argentina. Pérez's small and rather idiosyncratic corpus of fiction has just begun to attract the deserving attention of critics and scholars. Giordano, for example, places Pérez into an "inter-century" generation which, like the Modernist writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is a group characterized by an "egotismo desenfrenado" that puts their lives as artists directly at the center of their literary works. Giordano indicates, however, that the autobiographical journals, letters, and confessions of this contemporary group of writers (which includes such authors as Raúl Escari, Daniel Link, and Elvio Gandolfo), following several generations since the advent of pop art, do not hold themselves up as exemplars of exceptional or superior living, surrounded by the dreariness and crass commercialization of bourgeois values as their Modernist counterparts did; instead they emphasize the "banalidades extremas" of their daily lives, demonstrating that "la exhibición de algunas vulgaridades íntimas puede servir muy bien a la empresa de convertir en obra la propia vida" (Giro 14). The two novels of Pablo Pérez, Un año sin amor: diario del sida (1998) and El mendigo chupapijas (2005), do indeed masterly blur the line between autobiography and fiction through a sophisticated interplay of artistically altered lived experience and erotic fantasy.1
In a manner similar to Giordano, Ingenschay focuses on the autobiographical or "homographical" nature of Pérez's first novel (using Ellis' concept of how homoerotic writers have modified autobiographical discourse), and he connects it to the important tradition of fiction writing that explores the consequences of HIV/AIDS within the multifaceted Latin American cultures. Employing Angvik's term of "tanatografia" as contrast, Ingenschay shows how Pérez has produced quite a different type of AIDS narrative, one in which a very active sex life and the hopefulness of living with the condition, due to the development of newly-developed anti-viral drugs, is an unexpected and powerful variation on the typical texts which focus on the agonizing ending of life.
From a different perspective, Laddaga explores the inescapable legacy of Borges on the newest generation of Argentine writers, and mentions Pérez's Un año sin amor as "uno...