Argentina has two sharply contrasting roles in the book: it is the setting of a novel where private danger unfolds against political disintegration, and the South American destination of routes used to smuggle Nazi criminals out of Europe after the Second World War. In both contexts, the country is tied to lives shaped by forces extending beyond the immediate scene.

Setting in Nobody Nothing Never

In Juan José Saer’s Nobody Nothing Never, Argentina is the setting for a nearly eventless but politically charged story. During a stifling summer, Cat Garay, heir to a once-prosperous family now in decline, and his lover Elisa try to protect their horse from a killer at large. Their affair and the search for the killer unfold on the banks of the Paraná River, amid an atmosphere of political anxiety and disintegration.

The novel’s repeated narration makes this setting part of its formal design. Each event is told twice, first by an apparently objective narrator and then in Cat’s voice, often with the same phrases recurring verbatim. The repetition makes the difference between perspectives more consequential than any substantial change in the events themselves: Argentina’s unsettled political atmosphere forms the background against which the narrative examines that gap.

Destination of postwar escape routes

Argentina also appears as a destination in the book’s account of the Catholic Church’s role in helping Nazi criminals escape after the Second World War. The usual route led through Northern Italy, where some fugitives were hidden in remote monasteries or, in certain cases, Vatican City. They were then smuggled onward to Spain or placed aboard ships, usually in Genoa, bound for Argentina.

The account presents this passage not as an isolated escape but as part of a substantial, organized underground network. Argentina is the endpoint of the route described, while the intervening stages show how religious institutions and European transit points facilitated the fugitives’ departure.

Political and historical significance

The discussion uses this escape network to raise a question about the Church’s priorities: why it helped Nazis after the war, yet did not build a comparable network to save Jews in Rome in the early 1940s. The contrast places Argentina within a wider argument about institutional action and omission; the country’s significance here lies in its place at the end of a route that connected postwar concealment in Europe to refuge in South America.