“HETEROPESSIMISM,” a term coined in 2019 by Asa Seresin, meaning, roughly, a pessimistic view of heterosexual norms, usefully names the mood of many works created long before the word existed. For example, El mundo de la mujer (The World of Woman), a short documentary filmed at the 1972 Femimundo trade fair in Buenos Aires, expresses what we might now call peak heteropessimism. Leggy, hollow-eyed gamines with zero body fat and elaborate bouffant hairdos mince down the showroom runway past bewildered children, embittered-looking mothers and grandmothers, harried husbands, and dour businessmen. On the soundtrack a man reading excerpts from the Femimundo catalogue alternates with a woman reading from Disney’s Cinderella and a “Guide for ascertaining what every man’s ideal is in a woman . . .” The man says, “You live in a universe that thinks only of you, in a country whose most powerful companies work only for you.” The woman says, “You must be romantic, undemanding, generous, easygoing, happy, and casual, while always maintaining a bit of mystery and never letting him see you’re tired.”

The film’s director, the great María Luisa Bemberg, co-founded the Unión Feminista Argentina. Soon after the film’s release, “Isabelita” Perón, the former dancer who’d become both First Lady and vice president of Argentina in the 1973 elections, assumed the presidency after the death of her husband, Juan Péron. Isabelita’s ascent to power was no victory for women, or for humanity. During her administration, the country was primarily run by José López Rega, a sinister figure with twin passions for black magic and fascism. By 1976, when the world’s first woman president was ousted in a military coup, the state terror campaign known as the “Dirty War” was well underway.

The Suicides, first published in 1969, conveys a hetero-pessimism much like that of Bemberg’s film, though the novel sees it through a male lens. The nameless single man who tells the story works at a news agency, goes to boxing matches every Saturday, loves watching sci-fi movies like Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) and Ugo Gregoretti’s Omicron (1963), and collects the Buenos Aires sci-fi magazine Minotauro, published from 1964 to 1968. He’s been shaped by writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, who fill Minotauro’s pages in translation, and probably also by another Argentine periodical of the day, Adán (Adam), which would have been the perfect client for the illustrated series of articles on the eros of suicide that he’s cooking up at work. Adán marketed its Playboy-like hedonism as resistance to the strict Catholicism of the military dictatorship that seized Argentina’s government in 1966, the year it launched. The Suicides, written and set during that dictatorship, barely alludes to any local or national politics or system of government. There’s only the criminal justice system: the police, the judiciary, the prisons.