Group Read - March 2009 - Argentina

I am getting the thread for March up and running now, because it may take a little longer to find an Argentinian read compared to some of our other themes. There is a lot out there though. I have no personal expertise in Argentinian literature, but am having a year long Argentina jag, so hoped to take a few people along for the ride for a while.

I am only setting up the one thread for the moment, and would like to keep it that way if possible. Therefore, all discussion and recommends should go here. I really enjoyed out Haiti read last year, so would encourage a similar structure. Feel free to post questions, list recommends or intentions, and introduce your authors with a little biography. I would also like to attempt a summary again, once March is over.

With thanks to Wikipedia...

Where is Argentina?
Argentina covers the eastern and central regions of southern South America. It is constituted of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, and functions as a federation of these provinces. It is one of the affluent countries in South America, in terms of its Human Development Index and GDP, and is classed as the 23rd largest economy in the world.
Who lives there??
Most Argentines are descended from European settlers, although genetic studies have indicated that over half may have some Amerindian ancestors. c.7% of the population are Mestizo, 1.6% Amerindian and 4% are of Asian (Arab or far eastern) descent. Most of the settlers to arrive in Argentina came from Spain and Italy, but a wide array of others also came (there are, for instance, large Armenian and Welsh communities in some areas). Despite having a huge agricultural industry, Argentine society is highly urbanized.
A little bit of history
Pre-colonial Argentina was populated by Guarani and Inca in the north, and nomadic cultures in the southern and central regions. Europeans arrived in1516, and a Spanish colony was established in Buenos Aires in 1580. A viceroyalty (basically a country under the indirect control of the Spanish king) was established in 1776, but most Spaniards (called criollos) lived in Buenos Aires and the surrounding area. Many worked as gauchos, living ‘cowboy’ lifestyles.
Following the defeat of the Spanish King Ferdinand by Napoleon in Europe, in 1810, Argentina started to press for independence. Conflicts arose between Argentina, Spain and other South American states wishing to assert their own national identities away from Buenos Aires. Independence from Spain was achieved in the 1820s, allowing the rise of the brutal dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas. His overthrow in 1852 led to the rise of a constitution, paving the way for a single cohesive (non-federal) state, which was able to resist aggression from overseas, particularly the British. The 1870s saw an expansion away from the capital, and the final subjugation of the indigenous populations. The economy and the population burgeoned during the early 20th century, aided by the fact that Argentina was able to remain neutral (mostly) during the two world wars.
In 1946 Juan Peron, presented as a champion of the poor, took the presidency. Urbanisation and industrialisation grew, as did conflict between Peron and the Catholic Church. He was overthrown in 1955. A period of financial boom followed, but it was hampered by interference from conservative influences, such as the military, and political violence. The instability eventually led to a military coup in 1976. The resulting government harshly cracked down on opposition, a period known as the ‘Dirty War’, in which many dissidents simply disappeared. The government was eventually brought down by the fallout from defeat to Britain in the Falklands War. Since 1983, governments have been elected to office. The last 20 years of Argentinian history have been marked by economic instability, but it remains one of South America’s richest nations.

My past reads have included 3 short story collections by Jorge Luis Borges, of which Labyrinths is probably my favourite, as well as Agua by Eduardo Berti. My current pile, some of which I will read in March, is:
A Plan for Escape by Adolfo Bioy-Casares
How I Became a Nun by Cesar Aira
Winter Quarters by Osvaldo Soriano
A Funny Dirty Little War by Osvaldo Soriano

I would also like to read some Cortazar at some point, but haven't found any in the last month.

I am not going to post long lists of possible books. I think its fun to get on the web and see what's out there. I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone can find.

Books I've read:

Julio Cortázar: Diario de Andrés Fava, Historias de cronopios y de famas, Save Twilight: Selected Poems
Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths, This Craft of Verse
Adolfo Bioy Casares: The Invention of Morel, Asleep in the Sun
Ernesto Che Guevara: The Motorcycle Diaries

Books I have but haven't read yet:

Julio Cortázar: Los premios, Hopscotch, Autonauts of the Cosmoroute
Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones

I also have Borges: A Life by Edwin Williamson, and March would be a good time to read this acclaimed biography.

This is the first I've heard of this group read. I am definitely interested though. I recently read and enjoyed Ministry of Special Cases, set in Argentina though not written by an Argentino. I think for this occasion I will finally read Kiss of the Spider Woman which has been on my shelf for years.

Wow, this sounds like a fascinating read. I'm especially interested in "The instability eventually led to a military coup in 1976. The resulting government harshly cracked down on opposition, a period known as the ‘Dirty War’, in which many dissidents simply disappeared. The government was eventually brought down by the fallout from defeat to Britain in the Falklands War."

Realistically, March is the busiest time of the term, so I can only participate if I can find a short, fairly quick read. Does anyone have any recommendations?

Someone somewhere posted a link to a list of books by Argentinean writers, probably on LibraryThing. This is the url, don't know how complete or available in translation (which I need) this is but I thought it was a good source:
http://www.literatura.org/

>6 Nickelini:. Nickelini, for a short read, you might do worse than The Tunnel,The Invention of Morel or The Investigation, all of which are available in English. I haven't read How I Became a Nun (it might be my March read) but it's short too, as are the original compilations of Borges and Cortázar.

>7 estellak:. estellak, might this be the link: http://www.librarything.com/topic/10980 ?

For a list of translated works: http://www.ccsf.edu/Library/latambib.pdf

I've not read much Argentine literature, but I highly recommend The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, and Nickelini, it's very short (but dense).

I have not read much Argentine literature also (a little Borges, and the one Aira), but this theme read has given me permission to order a used copy of Streams of Silver: Six Contemporary Women Writers from Argentina edited by Monica Flori. I did not wish to leave Argentinian women writers out of the discussion!

Having enjoyed Cortazar's Los Premios (The Winners) so much last year, I'm going to read Rayuela (Hopscotch) for this.

Lois, you've just reminded me that I, too, have a half-read collection of short stories by Argentinian women somewhere - if I can find it I may read that as well.

This year I'm going to strive not just to read the books but also to participate in the discussions, which I turned out to be not very good at last year...

I read and enjoyed Guillermo Martinez's The Book of Murder late last year.

I'm tentatively planning on The Oxford Murders by Martinez (edit: well, maybe not as Martinez is Argentinian but the setting is UK) and Ficciones by Borges.

Chrisharpe, thanks for the suggestions (post 6). The Invention of Morel and How I Became a Nun are both in my library. They don't have Investigation, but they do have another short novel by the same author called The Event. No Tunnel or Ernesto Sabat though. I hope I can find some time to squeeze in at least one of these books. Thanks for the suggestions! I wouldn't have known where to start.

Found two more Argentina reads in bookshops near my home. Both have been mentioned before:
Kiss of the Spider Women
The Oxford Murders
I'm still not sure which ones I will read in March, and which later (I now have 6 books ready to go), but I'm looking forward to them.

I just got through checking my library to see what I had in the way of Argentine literature. Oddly enough, most of my books here fall under the tag fabulism or fabulist literature.

Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was by Angelica Gorodischer - For those who enjoy fabulism or literary fantasy of the dystopian sort, this book is fascinating. As far as I know, this is the only book of Gorodischer's to be translated into English (translator - Ursula LeGuin)

The House of Paper by Carlos María Domínguez - A short fabulist novella

El Gaucho Martín Fierro (translated into English as Martin Fierro) by José Hernández - "Martín Fierro is an 2,316 line epic poem by the Argentine writer José Hernández. The poem was originally published in two parts, El Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) and La Vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879). The poem is, in part, a protest against the Europeanizing and modernizing tendencies of Argentine president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. As well, the poem supplied a historical link to the gauchos' contribution to the national development of Argentina, for the gaucho had played a major role in Argentina's independence from Spain. The poem, written in a Spanish that evokes rural Argentina, is widely seen as the pinnacle of the genre of "gauchesque" poetry (poems centered around the life of the gaucho, written in a style that evokes the rural Argentine ballads known as payadas) and a touchstone of Argentine national identity. It has appeared in literally hundreds of editions and has been translated into over 70 languages. It has earned major commentaries from, among others, Leopoldo Lugones, Miguel de Unamuno, Jorge Luis Borges (see Borges on Martín Fierro) and Rafael Squirru." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mart%C3%ADn_Fierro)

The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel - I would classify this work as creative nonfiction. As the title indicates, it is a meditation on books - a definite must read for lovers of bibliobooks. Although technically a Canadian citizen now, Manguel was born in Argentina.

And then the usual compliment of Jorge Luis Borges
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings
Borges: Collected Fictions

>14 GlebtheDancer: I read the Oxford Murders as an arc some time ago, before it was published. While the premise was intriguing and it was moderately enjoyable, I thought it lacked something as a mystery; however, it would be interesting to read along with other Argentine fiction, I think.

I have 12 books tagged Argentina in my library - not sure what I shall chose for March read!

For the Argentina theme, I much look forward to reading The Moldavian Pimp by Edgardo Cozarinsky, a book whose title attracted me when I found it on a book shelf (free book exchange) of a local coffee house. My guess is that it will help me learn more about the situation (in this case, a cemetery where Jewish prostitutes were buried) which was alluded to at the beginning of The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander, whose novel was in itself very special. Do *not* miss this novel even though Englander is not Argentinian. It's amazing.

I'm looking forward to the indulgence of reading Labyrinths by Borges, which should be arriving just in time hopefully. I'm also trying to get hold of one or two books by female writers: Heaven of Drums by Ana Gloria Moya and possibly one by Alicia Borinsky, although I'm worried her books might make my head hurt.

I will read Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges because it's been patiently waiting it's turn next to my bed. Also have a couple of books by Manguel: The library at night and A history of reading but they will have to wait.

Of course, as others have already mentioned, Borges is the seminal writer in Argentina and for those dipping their toes into Argentine fiction he is the best place to start. His Jorge Luis Borges:Collection Fictions published by Penguin Classics is a wonderful collection and the companion Borges, A Life (mentioned by Kidzdoc#4) provides a detailed history of Borges, his influences and the country that shaped him.

Borges invented a new fiction, a true modernist and also quite the Fabulist, as can be seen in "Tlon,Uqbar,Orbis Tertius" and "The Library of Babel" both of which appear in his Ficciones published in 1944- interestingly I see that Urania1#15 sites other Argentine fabulists and maybe we will find a theme emerging in other Argentine writers.

Another great Argentine writer, not previously mentioned, and one I highly recommend, is Tomas Eloy Martinez, his The Peron Novel is a surrealistic recounting of Peron's exile years in Spain and his The Tango Singer, a marvelous tale wrapped around a search for Borges' "The Aleph" while, at the same time, mired in the mystique of the great tango traditions unique to the truly great metropolis of Buenos Aires.

One of the wonderful aspects of Argentine culture is that , much like New York, it is a true polyglot of different cultures. There is a rich Jewish literary history there. Nathan Englander's Ministry of Special Cases, though not written by an Argentine, captures a humorous and tragic moment in Argentine-Jewish history. For those interested in this aspect, Edgar Cozarinsky's (mentioned by SqueakyChu#18) The Bride From Odessa is worth reading, as is a wonderful edition of Habitus, A Diaspora Journal,#3: Buenos Aires, with short pieces by Ana Maria Shua, Ricardo Feierstein, Marcelo Birmajer and others. Feierstein also has a novel in translation: Mestizo. There is also Alberto Gerchnoff's The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, Borges has sited him as an early influence and an interesting collection of the Jewish-Argentine experience in The Silver Canelabra edited by Rita Gardiol.

I very much look forward to March.

I have two books to choose from Voices from Silence and My Name Is Light. Both look good but I think "Light" is winning the battle.

I bought Hopscotch after reading about it in If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents by Gregory Rabassa, the noted translator of contemporary Spanish and Portuguese literature, so I'll probably try to read that. Also have The Library at Night. Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas sounds fascinating too.

I have received my anthology of contemporary Argentine women writers (Alicia Jurado, Elvira Orphée, Alina Diaconú, Alicia Steimberg, Cecilia Absatz and Reina Roffé) in preparation for the month of March. I want to make sure the women are being represented. Did I say that before?

I picked up a cheap Cortazar, but it is a short story collection, and not the one I was really hoping to read (Hopscotch). I probably have plenty for the time being but I will be keeping an eye out for some female writers which, as Avaland points out are woefully underrepresented both in my library and in this thread.

I'm only realistically going to have time to read one Argentine book so I have reserved Collected Fictions by Borges at the library, I have always been meaning to read him and never quite got around to it.

Katrina- an excellent choice - a true treasure trove by a great master.

depressaholic: If it's The Blow-Up and other stories, I'd stick with it. I enjoyed it much more than Hopscotch. If it's another story collection though... some of his short work makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

>28 Sarasamsara:
Its a collection called All Fires the Fire. I'll be off now, to find the softest wall in my house, just in case...

I thoroughly enjoyed A ministry of Special Cases, and will have to go and ponder my options for March..............wandering off to bookcases scratching my head.....

I was appalled to see that I have not read anything by an Argentinian author. Did some quick research and think I will go for Borges: Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges. I am looking forward to this one!

A very funny novel I read years ago was The Gods, the Little Guys, and the Police by Humberto Costantini. It was recasting of 1970's Argentinian political figures into classical gods -- artfully done.

Costantini won the award, Premio Casa de las Américas, awarded from Castro's Cuba in 1979. I am now going to try put these awards into LT.

I've got several Argentine novels lined up for reading this year, including a few in the gaucho or gauchesque tradition. urania has already mentioned El gaucho Martín Fierro, which is the most prominent of the tradition, but I'm also going to be reading Facundo: Or, Civilization and Barbarism, Don Segundo Sombra, and La Guerra Gaucha (The Gaucho War, not in translation)

If you're reading in Spanish, I'd recommend Roberto Arlt's The Seven Madmen, which is about a guy who gets mixed up with some strange characters. Arlt's Spanish is a little idiosyncratic, so I don't know how well it translates. I'll be reading his Mad Toy this year as well.

i did read The Seven Madmen in translation/english and it was very good. Anarchists in Buenos Aires. A variety of strange characters - workers, bosses,gangsters,etc.

in the Guardian- a good list of South American Travel books not necessarily written by South Americans.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/12/hugh-thomson-south-america

14 -- I would definitely give Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman a big thumbs up. When I first picked it up, I was about 19 or 20, knew nothing about Argentina, and had decided to read it totally on a whim (not for a class, I mean). So I was a little confused at first, getting used to the mechanics of Puig's writing style (such as the use of dashes rather than quote marks and "he said"s to show different speakers) but then QUICKLY got the hang of it and was hooked. I finished it in a weekend, then ran out to find the video.

Anyway. If you like black & white movies, suspense and mystery a la sci-fi or Hitchcock, spies, intrigue, fashion, gender issues, grocery lists and food fantasies, you might want to give Kiss of the Spider Woman a try.

I just found a nice collection of Argentinian writers on Wikipedia --

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Argentine_writers

One name I recognize from my TBR pile is Federico Andahazi and his novel The Anatomist. Here's a teaser for it that I found online:

This historical novel is set in 16th century Venice, where the great anatomist and physician Mateo Colombo has just been charged with heresy and placed under house arrest. ... What is Colombo’s heresy? True, he has consistently violated the Papal Bull of Pope Boniface VIII that forbid obtaining cadavers for dissection, but his scholarly eminence and friendship with Pope Paul III have protected him from recrimination. His heresy is far worse than simply ignoring a Papal Bull; in fact, Mateo Colombo has discovered a dangerous new anatomical structure, the clitoris!

Exclamation point indeed!

For those interested in the tango, Carlos Gardel, and the seedier side of life in early 20th century Argentina, Andahazi's novel Errante en la sombra is a pretty good read. I don't believe this book has been translated into English, though.

I also really enjoyed his take on the infamous Byron/Shelley/Shelley/Polidori Swiss holiday that spawned Frankenstein and other monsters. The Merciful Women is deliberately overwrought and outrageously Gothic but also quite witty and clever. The translation into English by Alberto Manguel is a good one.

While I realize that poetry isn't focus of this group, I do want to put a word in for the work of María Negroni. I'm currently reading her Night Journey and am very impressed by the beauty of her language and the elegance and power of her imagery.

Marie #38- also Tomas Eloy Martinez's The Tango Singer is excellent!

Ernesto Sabato of Argentina has just been nominated for the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. I believe he is 97 years old.

Now that I've read The Book of the Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, which is said to be partly a tribute to Borges, I'm interested in reading some Borges. Can anyone recommend a good book to start with?

Alas! I just took a really close look at the Argentinian anthology I bought for this theme and it turns out to be lit crit (biographical profiles of and essays on the work of six Argentinian authors) instead of fiction. Bummer. I will redirect myself (I love lit crit but usually after I've read the fiction).

rebecca, the collections where Borges really becomes Borges are Ficciones and The Aleph. I don't know if they're the most accessible--they're definitely on the cerebral end. Universal History of Infamy might be a little more accessible; it's made up of brief bios and character sketches of criminals throughout history.

I plan to tackle El Gaucho Martín Fierro in the Spanish. My husband has a lovely, extremely old leather-bound dual language edition of this text. The English translation is a hoot, mainly because the translator wanders so far from the Spanish and lavishly embroiders the poetry with lavender verse.

Thanks for the recommendations, Carlos. It's very helpful to have an idea of where to start.

avaland, an anthology I spotted which appears to be a mixture of stories and lit crit is Women and Power in Argentine Literature, edited by Gwendolyn Diaz. I was going to buy it but got in trouble from the husband so am limited to Heaven of Drums by Ana Gloria Moya for my girly Argentine read, but you might find it interesting if you can get hold of it.

Just bringing this thread up to the top of the pile.

>45 frithuswith: Thanks, LizT. Since discovering my 'anthology' not is what I thought it was (messages 10, 41), I have decided to pick up a copy of Secret Weavers: Stories of the Fantastic by Women Writers of Argentina and Chile edited by Marjorie Agosin. I have the best of intentions for getting to this in March but am also under some school deadlines, so we'll see.

Just thought I'd post a quick note to say that I won't be posting a list of questions or anything like that in this thread. Just post away as you read, and try to comment on things others have found interesting in our other themed threads. If anyone has questions that arise as they read, feel free to post them, of course.

One thing I would be interested in, would be for people to post bios of their authors. Nothing major, just a couple of sentences from the blurb, or anything you turn up from web searches, etc.

I have already finshed my first book, but am holding off from commenting until I have read its sequel (and until March actually comes around).

I started El gaucho Martin Fierro yesterday. It was originally published in two parts, the first in 1872, the second in 1879, and was an immediate success. It is now considered a central work of Argentine literature.

The author, Jose Hernandez, was born in 1834 in San Martin, Buenos Aires province. His father worked as a foreman on a series of cattle ranches, and José spent many of his formative years in that environment, largely educating himself through reading. He had careers as politician and journalist, and in both he argued against the centralization of power that was going on at the time. (In 19th C Argentine terms, he was a "Federalista." Those arguing for centralization were "Unitarios.")

The character of Martin Fierro is the archetypical gaucho: noble, honest, poor, violent. He is conscripted by the army and placed in a frontier fort, where he is cheated out of his pay and expected to fight Auracan Indians with shoddy weapons and horses. After a couple of years he deserts, becoming a fugitive from justice.

The edition I'm reading is bilingual. I can usually follow the Spanish, but it is nice to have English to fall back on.

I have just finished a non-fiction book set in Argentina - On a Hoof and a Prayer by Polly Evans - I have put a review up for it. Is a very easy to read book and I learned a lot about Argentinian history and life today.

The Moldavian Pimp - Edward Cozinsky
First published in Spanish as El Rufian Muldavo.

As a Jew raised in the 1950's in the United States, my worldview of Jews grew exponentially after I left the United States and lived among Jews of more varied ethnic backgrounds during my vounteer year in Israel (1973-74). One of the most colorful groups I encountered there was of Argentine Jews, those young people who seemed eternally cheerful with their singing, dancing, "che"-saying, and mate-drinking. I felt so happy among them. In my recent reading, therefore, I was very surprised to learn of another more sinister side to the Argentine Jewish culture.

The Moldavian Pimp is a book which reaches back into a time when Argentina was the location of a profitable prostitution ring run by Jewish gangsters! This was no small enterprise either. Jewish pimps would go to Eastern European shtetls and lure poor families into giving up their young girls for the promise of a better life in the Americas.

In Edgardo Cozarinsky's book, a 25-year-old student interviews an old man for information to include in a dissertation. Shortly thereafter, the old man dies. The student examines a box of posters left by the old man and realizes that it was the old man himself in a poster of a musical. The scene in the book then fades into the 1920's when we encounter one young girl who had been lured to Argentina with just such a promise as noted above. In beautiful prose, we see the story of this young woman and the old man, in his younger days, slowly unfold. The story takes us to several people and we examine it from different angles, never really knowing what is the truth, but we see some disturbing facts arise from these stories nevertheless. Who were these Jewish pimps and prostitutes? Why were they in Argentina? What happened to them? This book will take you into that unsettling world.

Even though this book is small, I found the topic utterly fascinating. I've always been interested in reading about the love-hate relationship that Argentina has with its Jews. After World War II, it was safe haven for Jews, yet it was also a refuge for ex-Nazis. Buenos Aires has a huge Jewish population, yet its Jewish population is often scapegoated or targeted. Economic difficulties of recent years sent many Jewish emigrants to Israel; political unrest caused many Jews to be among the highest numbers of 'the disappeared' in Argentina's Dirty War (Read the amazing novel Ministries of Special Cases by Nathan Englander for a closer look at that issue).

In learning more (from Wikipedia) about Zwi Migdal, the organization of Jewish pimps in Argentina, I was flabbergasted to read that it existed from the 1860's to 1939! Attempts to control this organization were difficult because the pimps were very wealthy and quick to bribe government officials. At one point in the 1920's, pimps controlled 2,000 brothels with 4,000 women in Argentina alone! In the novel, a character says that 'in 1929 it's estimated that there were about 500 members of Zwi Migdal, who controlled about 2,000 brothels and 20,000 women in Argentina.' Yes, the number are vastly different, but the idea that this could have existed at all is mind-blowing to me.

The wikipedia article references other novels to read, but also cites a non-fiction book, Bodies and Souls by Isabel Vincent which is a book I actually own and hope to soon read.

Even though this book was small, I found the topic utterly fascinating. I loved this book for presenting such a fascinating but little known topic and for the way in which the author made the story come alive with his unique way of story-telling and looking back into Argentine history.

About the author (from the Book blurb):
Edgardo Cozarinsky was born in Buenos Aires in 1939 and now divides his time between that city and Paris. Best known for his subtle, semi-documentary films, he is the author of two notable short-story collections, The Bride of Odessa and Urban Voodoo.

...and this from Wikipedia:
An inveterate nomad, Cozarinsky has shot at least part of his films not only in Buenos Aires and Paris but also in Budapest, Rotterdam, Tallin, Tangiers, Vienna, Granada, Saint-Petersburg, Seville and Patagonia. He rarely spends more than three months in any fixed place and considers Buenos Aires his pleasure basis and Paris his cultural department store.

In have accumulated a fairly large pile of Argentinian books. I'm not sure how many I will get through this month. but a lot of them are actually very short, so hopefully I will post a few times. I have finished the first couple of books, both of which are by Osvaldo Soriano. They are the novella A Funny Dirty Little War and its follow up Winter Quarters.

Soriano was a left-leaning writer and journalist during a period in which right-wing and military influences controlled the government. His newspaper 'La Opinion' was the subject of censorship by the government. Following the military takeover in 1976, Soriano left for Europe. The two books, both of which parody the rise of the military in Argentina, were written and published in Europe, before eventually becoming bestsellers in his home country following the fall of the Junta in 1983.

A Funny Dirty Little War is a brutal black comedy set in the outpost of Colonia Vela during the first sparkings of Argentina's military takeover. It follows the bloody events of a single night, which are sparked by the attempts of the local police to take control of the town council by labeling its members communists and anti-Peronists. Unexpectedly, the councillors fight back, arming themselves and barricading themselves inside the Town Hall as the shooting begins. Local militias aid the police, while student organisations mobilise to help the councillors, resulting in a night of horrific violence in the small town.
I absolutely loved this book. At little more than 100 pages it can be read in a single sitting, but it manages to pack a punch far beyond its size. The town of Colonia Vela reminded me of one of the outposts described by Garcia Marquez or Vargas Llosa, where the rules of the rest of the world don't quite apply. The local politics is absurd, with everyone trying to be more Peronist than everyone else, and the swirling nexus of petty power-mongering blurring party lines beyond recognition. It is a comedy, but be warned, the comedy is so dark as to be almost invisible. Characters being killed by being blown through the roof on a toilet, or blowing their own brains out with a faeces covered gun may suggest a scatalogical bent, but the overwhelming feeling of the book is complete shock at the brutality of the terrible events unfolding. Soriano described these events with a subtle power and uncomplicated prose. The dark comedy simply adds to the unbelievable-yet-believable surreality of the explosion of absurd political violence that swept the whole of his country prior to writing this book. This is a wonderful blackly comic novella, but perhaps not for the faint-hearted.

My second book is Soriano's Winter Quarters. Set in Colonia Vela three years after the events of A Funny Dirty Little War, the military have now moved in, and wholly control the town. They have organised an anniversary celebration for the crushing of the uprising, and invited Galvan, a tango singer, and Rocha, an uncouth and washed-up boxer. The two meet on the train in, and form an uneasy partnership. Galvan is due to sing at the celebrations, Rocha is to fight the army favourite. Galvan falls foul of his hosts by refusing to attend mass. As he is thrown out of town, he realises that Rocha is being set up to lose, and that his life may be in danger. Galvan returns to town to try and rescue his unlikely friend.
This book is less brutal than the previous one (though it does have its moments) but retains the same comic absurdity. Galvan and Rocha's relationship is genuinely touching and Soriano once again writes beautifully about his sadness with what has happened to his home country. Whereas the Colonia Vela of the first book felt a long way from Buenos Aires, by the second book the Junta had reached out its tentacles into all corners of Argentina. Galvan's weariness and Rocha's naivety make perfect counterpoints to the growing horror of military rule. This was a touching novel, longer and less bloody than A Funny Dirty Little War and, consequently, had much more emotional pull. If Soriano's first book was very good, the this one was excellent. An author I will look for more of in the future.

I finished another book yesterday, and may finish yet another tonight. Don't worry, I don't intend to read a book a day for March, its just that the first 4 books on my pile are all really, really short.

The book I have just finished is Adolfo Bioy-Casares' A Plan For Escape. Bioy-Casares was a longtime friend and collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges, and wrote similar metaphysical puzzles. During the early days of Peronism, Bioy-Casares found himself censored, and wrote A Plan for Escape as a response to the restrictions on his freedom. He would eventually go on to become one of Argentina's most prestigious and celebrated writers.

The book is set on the eve of WWI, on the French penal colonies off Guyana, including the infamous Devil's Island. Nevers, a young naval lieutenant, is sent the islands for unspecified reasons by his family. On his arrival he becomes aware of erratic behaviour by Castel, the governor of the colony. Convinced that Castel is plotting a rebellion with the help of the prisoners, Nevers becomes unwillingly embroiled in an investigation, becoming both fascinated and repelled with the islands' nightmarish effect on the humanity they house.
This was another very good book. Bioy-Casares builds an ominous tension, aided by the heat and lethargy of his setting. The feel is almost apocalyptic, as what starts as idle curiosity for Nevers turns into a morbid obsession, that he realises will eventually threaten his own sanity, and perhaps even his life. Just enough plot is revealed at the right pace to maintain interest. It is difficult to say too much about the denouement without giving too much away, but suffice to say that, as befits a friend of Borges, the mystery resolves into a metaphysical puzzle. Definitions of freedom and captivity become bent out of recognisable shape, leading to an almost sci-fiesque feel to the book. Perhaps the ending felt a little frivolous in comparison to the dark intensity of the rest of the book, but it was still a very interesting read.

re # 51...SqueakyChu

the story told in The Moldavian Pimp is a classic immigrant story. One of my attractions to Buenos Aires, having grown up as a New Yorker, is that it is so similar in history, style, commerce, etc.

like many immigrant waves a first step for some, maybe the more "street smart" types, is the gangster experience. There were murderous Jewish gangsters during the same period of time in both NYC and Buenos Aires. Interesting that there is also a strong Italian presence in Buenos Aires. Of course I do not mean to stereotype but only to refect that the Moldavian Pimp could have easily been located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early 1900's.

An interesting aside regarding the immigrant experience in Buenos Aires is a story recounted in Tomas Eloy Martinez's The Peron Novel. As a young army officer Peron stopped one day in a small dark tobacco shop on a side street in Buenos Aires. There he met a young Greek immigrant whose family had sent him to Argentina with a supply of Turkish tobacco. Peron suggetsed the young merchant needed to make some contacts and he helped him do so. 10-20 years later when Peron took power he asked his advisors to find the 10 most successful "self-made" businessmen for he wanted to make one of them his Treasury Secretary. Not surprising the young man showed up on the list;his name was Aristotle Onassis.

By the way I am a big fan of Tomas Eloy Martines whose The Tango Singer is filled with the mystique of Buenos Aires and the tango tradition.

an interesting sidebar: news about Borges: from
www.argentinepost.com

New Efforts To Repatriate Borges’ Remains
March 4th, 2009 | 07:50 PM

By Dean Nicholas

Though tango may be the national dance, slow waltzes with the deceased remain a worrying trend in Argentina. Decades after the remains of Eva Peron were unceremoniously shunted around the globe, a row has erupted once again over the final resting place of the country’s most famous writer, Jorge Luis Borges.

Upon his death in 1986, Borges was interred in Plainpalais cemetery in Geneva, the city in which he passed away and one he visited countless times throughout his life.

Despite residing there peacefully for some 22 years, two weeks ago lawmaker Maria Beatriz Lenz opened a storm of controversy by declaring her intention to request that the writer’s earthly remains be repatriated to Buenos Aires, where they could be laid to rest in his family’s plot in Recoleta Cemetery. Borges’ widow Maria Kodama, a woman who some consider the Yoko Ono of Latin American intellectualism, has long claimed that the writer wished to be buried in Geneva, something that Borges’ biographer Alejandro Vaccaro, who supported Lenz’s move, strongly disagrees with.

The latest twist in this macabre tale came with the publication last week of a long-lost letter that Borges wrote during the weeks before his death from liver cancer. In the letter, Borges speaks of his joy at being an “invisble man” in Geneva, a city in which he confesses to feeling “mysteriously happy”. The letter confirmed that Borges himself wished to be laid to rest there, and Lenz has subsequently shelved her proposed request, but Vaccaro, who is also the president of the Argentine Society of Writers, will persist with the debate.

The motivation for this new polemic is a curiously Argentine cocktail of prestige, pesos, and patriotism. Though Borges’ love for his adopted European resting place is well-known, it is in Buenos Aires that he is adored. The simple fact is that Buenos Aires loves Borges as much as the writer did his birthplace, and for many, the absence of his earthly remains, in a city which glories in monuments to the dearly departed, is a cause of anguish, even humiliation. How could Borges have preferred that effete, cold European capital? Surely Kodama must have somehow tricked him into being buried there? Vaccaro nearly makes such an accusation, claiming recently that he has secret evidence indicating Borges himself wished to be buried in Recoleta, though he offered nothing to back this claim up beyond an interview with the writer that dates from the 1960s.

The public spat between Vaccaro and Kodama has rumbled along for years, though the involvement now of Lenz gives the story added weight. Neither party looks particularly clean: Vaccaro has long shown himself to be something of a Borges obsessive, despite never meeting the man in person, and allegedly released a series of fake texts ascribed to Borges into the public realm during the 1990s. Kodama, meanwhile, has repeatedly been accused of mis-management of the Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges, and has never quite escaped the stigma of being the writer’s personal assistant for many years before their marriage. She was forced to fight a legal challenge over his estate in the early 1990s, and has claimed in the past that the question of transferring his remains has more to do with inheritance than tribute.

The irony is that Borges elected to remain in Geneva precisely to avoid just the political and media circus seen in recent weeks. For that reason alone, the poor man should be left to rest in peace and seclusion.

Link: Letter by Dying Borges Explained Fondness for Geneva
Link: Fascinating Color Borges Video Documentary

Borges photo courtesy of Popular Persons.

*Dean Nicholas is a British-born journalist, and a contributing editor for Londonist, one of London’s most popular websites. He is currently based in Buenos Aires.

51 -- what a fantastic review. You've just clued me in to a really fascinating set of topics. :)

I just finished reading The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato. Sabato, now 97 years old and recently nominated for the Nobel Award in Literature, first published this short novel in 1948. It was well reviewed by Albert Camus who praised it and saw that it was quickly translated into French.

Sabato had strong ties to Paris having worked at the Curie Institute as a PhD in physics. During WWII he spent some time at MIT working in atomic radiation but at some point during the war he experienced an existential crisis, rejected science, and turned his interest to literature. He got his start in literature reviewing books for the Argentine journal, SUR , a highly regarded publication started by the writer and philanthropist, Victoria Ocampo, and on whose Editorial Board Jorge Luis Borges was an influential figure.

The Tunnel is a short novel, an anatomy of a crime of murder, narrated by the perpetrator-a well known Buenos Aires artist, Juan Pablo Castel. Castel becomes overwhelmingly obsessed with a mysterious 26 year old woman, Maria Iribarne, who visit’s a show of his paintings. Observed by Castel from a distant part of the gallery, Maria appears to be intently gazing at a small yet significant feature of one of Castel’s paintings:

…“in the upper left-hand corner of the canvas was a remote scene framed in a tiny window: an empty beach and a solitary woman looking at the sea. She was staring into the distance as if expecting something, perhaps some faint and faraway summons. In my mind the scene suggested the most wistful and absolute loneliness…No one seemed to notice the scene; their eyes passed over it as if it were something trivial, mere embellishment. With the exception of a single person, no one seemed to comprehend that the scene was an essential component of the painting.”

Maria disappears in the crowded gallery and Castel quickly becomes obsessed with finding the only person who truly understood the meaning of his artistic endeavor. In fact, obsession, is one of the major themes of this novel. Castel over analyzes his thoughts and observations of the world and people around him which he basically holds in disdain and is greatly disappointed by. In a way Maria becomes the light that shines through that small window Castel had painted in the corner of his canvas…she becomes the light and meaning of his life.

The obsessive theme instills itself in the writing style of Sabato’s book which is comprised of brief staccato like chapters that move the interior action of his own thoughts from page to page. Pressured to first find Maria and, then once found, to possess her, his passion and fears push the tale forward.

The imagery of “the tunnel” becomes clearer near the end of the book when he describes the tunnel as a passageway of time within which we all live our lives. Often the tunnels run parallel to one another and one catches glimpses of the other but we are stuck within our own walls. It is an image that strikes at the heart of alienation and it is this theme of the modern man, of the existential man, that Sabato seeks to depict in the only italicized passage that appears in the book.

“and that after all there was only one tunnel, dark and solitary: mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my entire life”

In the end this short novel carries a powerful punch. In a brief 137 pages it describes the angst of modern man.

>58 GlebtheDancer:
Sounds fantastic. I'll have to add it to my list. A friend recommended 'Of Heroes and Tombs' by Sabato many years ago, but I had all but forgotten about it. When i finish my current Argentina TBR I am going to move on, but am planning a re-visit later ion the year, hopefully with more Soriano, some Sabato and Saer. And of course, with whatever else people dig up in the meantime.

depressaholic- i have actually heard that On Heroes and Tombs is his better work. Unfortunately, it appears most of his work is out of print unless, of course, he wins the Nobel Prize.

I finished El gaucho Martin Fierro, which is actually in two parts, both of which are epic poems. In the first part, Martin Fierro gets pressed into military service on the frontier, where he's underfed, underpaid, and generally maltreated. He escapes and returns to his home only to find that his wife has died and his kids has scattered. He continues his nomadic, outlaw existence until one day attacked by a press gang looking to send him back to the frontier. The ferocity and courage with which he fights inspires one of the press gang, a Sergeant Cruz, to join his side. Together they head to the frontier to live outside the reach of the law.

The second part, "The return of Martin Fierro" has Martin Fierro come back and find his now adult sons, who tell of some of the troubles they have had with the corrupt authorities. Then he has a payada (a sort of musical contest or duel) that ties back into the first story.

The Spanish is influenced by the rural language of Argentina, featuring dialect and the wordplay particular to that region. (A style of punning insult that doesn't translate well is used several times.) I was worried the language would be impenitrable and/or dull, but I found it very readable and enjoyable. Both the footnotes and the translation helped in this regard.

There were several interesting aspects to the novel. I rather liked the outlaw mystique aspect. Something about the musician-outlaw type portrayed seems pretty universal, with our own culture having more than a few examples.

There's also a good degree of social realism tied into political issues. It is depressing to read about the way corrupt officials abused their power and made life worse for people who already had a hard lot in life. It's even worse to think about the extent to which abuse of power was to reach 100 years later in Argentina.

>59 berthirsch: The friend that recommended Sabato actually recommended 'Of Heroes and Tombs'. He wrote it down for me. Unfortunately, being Mexican, he translated it as 'Heroes and Graves' and, because I couldn't read his writing, I read it as 'Heroes and Grapes'. He also didn't write the author's name, so I spent ages looking for a book called 'Heroes and Grapes' by an unknown writer. Anyway, alls well that ends well.

>60 CarlosMcRey: Sounds interesting. When was it written/set, and which conflict was it about?

>59 berthirsch:...that is pretty funny.

>60 CarlosMcRey:...i am embarrassed to say that i have still not read Don Quixote but your first papagraph summary remonded me of all I have heard. Did you find any similarities between Martin Fierro and Don Quixote?

Just finished another couple of Argentina reads. The first was How I Became a Nun by Cesar Aira, which I received from Avaland a little while ago (thanks again).I did a quick scout on the web for information about Aira, and I think its fair to say that most people seem to think that he is crazy. The actual words tended to be 'eccentric', 'unique', 'a writer of quasi-dadaesque nonsense', 'odd', etc, but I think you get the picture. Born and raised in the province of Buenos Aires, Aira is recognised as one of the leading figures of contemporary Argentine literature. He is extremely prolific, publishing around four novellas a year, but is not well known outside his native country. One of his signatures is his use of 'flight forward' rather than traditional editing. 'Flight forward' means that if he writes something he doen't like, or his novels go somewhere he doesn't want them to, he must write himself out of the problem, rather than going back and changing what he has already done. As I said: eccentric.

How I Became a Nun is the truncated life story of a six year old boy, called Cesar Aira. His entire existence is sandwiched between two unsavoury incidents involving strawberry ice cream. Seen through the boy's eyes, Argentina becomes a surreal and nonsensical place. The child's perspective is retained throughout, allowing flights of fancy and comic misunderstanding. This particular child's flights of fancy are a tad more disturbing than most. Aira is a strange, solitary child, given to describing himself as a girl (and bemused by the failure of others to recognise his gender), and believing him/herself to be an almost invisible presence in the world. A disturbing precociousness pervades his thoughts, and result in actions that often feel psychopathic, particularly with respect to his parents. Aira's narrative is mostly aimless whimsy, an internal monologue of a disturbed child, and feels like it was written purely for the joy of writing. When I ask my brain if it liked the book, it nods heartily. When I ask it what it was all about, it just sort of wanders off, whistling nonchalantly, with its hands in its pockets. There may be something that I was missing here (or many somethings), but I like the idea that How I Became a Nun is fantastical nonsense written purely for Aira’s own pleasure. I would be happy to read more in this vein, and happy to recommend it to others.

--> 61

I spent ages looking for a book called 'Heroes and Grapes' by an unknown writer

LOL! It's hard enough finding the books we think we want to read!!

--> 63

'Flight forward' means that if he writes something he doen't like, or his novels go somewhere he doesn't want them to, he must write himself out of the problem,

Interesting! Isn't this what American bestselling author Stephen King also does? I think he lets the books write themselves rather than drive a pre-destined plot, or at least that's what he said he used to do.

When I ask my brain if it liked the book, it nods heartily. When I ask it what it was all about, it just sort of wanders off, whistling nonchalantly, with its hands in its pockets

I love how you describe this. I happen to be reading Trout Fishing in America, by the late American author Richard Brautigan, which gives me the same feeling. Yours is a good way of describing non-sensical literature that one finds especially appealing. Thanks for putting that idea into words!

#63--I loved your description "When I ask my brain if it liked the book, it nods heartily. When I ask it what it was all about, it just sort of wanders off, whistling nonchalantly, with its hands in its pockets." I find myself having that reaction to a lot of books.

#61 - I'm a little fuzzy on the exact time and place, the action takes place over a ten year period roughly in the 1860 - 1879 time frame. If one assumes Hernandez meant the writing to be at around the same time of the action, I'd say 1869 - 1879. The location is in the Argentine countryside, possibly Buenos Aires province, but Fierro's service would be on the border of what were considered Indian Lands. I have to admit that I have little idea where that would have been. The fort Fierro is posted to is intended to prevent Pampas and Araucan raids from beyond the frontier, but there isn't technically a war going on.

#62 - I have to admit I haven't read Don Quixote either and what little I know doesn't allow me to make many comparisons. I get the impression Martin Fierro is important in Argentine literature roughly the same way Quixote is in the literature of Spain.

Per rough translation from my copy of Facundo: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento was a teacher, journalist, writer, historian, pedagogue, and politician. He was an autodidact who from early in his life displayed an affinity for teaching and journalism, running his uncle's school at the age of 16 and publishing a newspaper at the age of 18. His editorial efforts set him first against the local caudillo and then dictator Juan Manuel Rosas, which caused him to have to flee the country twice, in 1829 and 1842. He served as president from 1868 - 1874 and spent much time working to expand education and break the power of the provinicial caudillos.

I found Facundo: Or, Civilization and Barbarism to be quite an interesting work, though I have to admit I'm a bit unsure as to whether I can call it a great book. It is in some ways a rather odd duck: part biography of Facundo Quiroga, part history, part polemic, part sociology, sometimes novelistic. The main section of the book details the life of Facundo Quiroga, who began his career as a gaucho and would go on to become an important part of the federalista movement that brought Rosas to power.

The portrayal of Quiroga is certainly striking. Quiroga killed a cougar as a young man, thus earning the nickname The Cougar of the Plains, by which he would be known his whole life. His impulsiveness and bad temper caused him to give up schooling at an early age and led to his attempt to join the War of Independence to end with being thrown in prison.

After independence, he raised an army of gauchos and fought against the unitarios, who believed power should be centralized in Buenos Aires. Though he fought under the banner Religion or Death, Sarmiento describes him as a man who did not believe in any sort of religion and had no qualms about killing priests. Quiroga could at times be a terrible general; the only military units he knew how to use were irregular gaucho cavalry (called montoneros). He did, however, manage to succeed in some critical battles which insured the rise to power of Rosas.

Quiroga appears to have been uninterested in governing but did take on some government positions. It was on a government taks that he was later assassinated in a pretty brutal ambush. It's unclear if Rosas was behind the assassination.

That is only part of the book, since Sarmiento casts Quiroga as embodying the sort of barbarism which is the way of life in the provinces and which has led to the brutality of the Rosas government. He also presents an interesting portrait of Argentina at the beginning of the 19th century. Quiroga makes for an interestin guide, though not without his flaws. For one, his casting of the debate in terms of civilization vs. barbary strikes me as simplistic and leads to a certain idealization of European culture and politics. And there's a certain loose quality to the narrative, with Sarmiento digressing to editioralize or tell a story about Quiroga. It's not unpleasant, though he isn't above his moments of overheated prose, but I did find it hard to follow. Sarmiento is also obviously not an objective historian, so his account is one-sided.

The book provided some interesting insights into Argentina. For example, one stereotype of Argentines (especially those of Buenos Aires) is that they like to pretend that they're European. I always thought that was just a comment on the snobbery and racism of Argentines, but Buenos Aires did see a substantial amount of immigration beginning in the 19th century. Along with that came an influx of Enlightenment thought, so that while the political thinking of much of the rest of the continent was still basically Spanish, the elites of Buenos Aires were looking to the politics of England, France and the United States for inspiration. (And I don't think I'm breaking any taboos by claiming the politics of Spain was relatively backwards in the 19th century.)

One final note: Quiroga reminded me a bit of Che Guevara, another brave though not always brilliant military leader who was more interested in fighting than governing.

The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martinez

I'll keep this very short, because I haven't got too much to say. I almost never read crime fiction/mysteries, because I find that I just don't get much from them. Consequently, I was unlikely to like The Oxford Murders from the start. Part of the point of doing reading jags is to force myself to encounter different types of literature I wouldn't normally read, so I went in with an open mind.

The book follows a young Argentinian maths student spending a year studying in Oxford. Shortly after his arrival, his landlady is murdered, and a cryptic note left with Arthur Seldom, an eminent professor of maths. As more bodies turn up, accompanied by notes and symbols, Seldom and the student find themselves in a race to interpret the symbols and find the killer.

This was a very quick read (200 easy pages), but there was nothing to raise it above the level of by-the-numbers 'genre' fiction. We have sexy femme fatale suspects, eminent mathemeticians, disgruntled academics, policemen who appear to feel the need to include civilians in all their conversations, red herrings aplenty, you know the rest. As a mathematician himself, Martinez takes the opportunity to weave in some fairly complex ideas (Godel's theorem as a motive for murder, anyone?), and he just about keeps it above the level of a silly analogy. There is even something vaguely Eco-esque in the unfolding of the mystery, with false trails, semiotic trickery and an almost meta-physical twist at the end. However, whatever interest this may have generated in me was lost in his determination to stick to the most mundane, formulaic thriller mould he could find. The entire book, with its multiple deaths, felt about the same length as the amount of time Eco takes to describe a doorway (some may see this as a positive). Anyway, as I said, I have no real frame of reference, because I don't read many thrillers, but I didn't really enjoy this one.

I read this book several weeks ago to tie in with this read but haven't had time to post until now, which means I might not remember it as well as I'd like to.

Purgatorio by Tomas Eloy Martinez (no touchstones)

This is Eloy Martinez's latest novel, published last year, and I don't think it's available in English yet.

In 1976 Simon Cardoso disappears at the hands of the military junta in Argentina. His wife, Emilia, devotes her life to searching for him, in vain, until she finds him sitting in the next booth in a New Jersey diner in 2008. The novel opens with the scene in the diner and then switches between present and various times in the past - Emilia and Simon as newly-weds, cartographers both, heading off on the mapping trip in the south of Argentina from which Emilia will return alone; Emilia's life back with her parents in Buenos Aires - her father, chief "spin doctor" to the junta, was presumably responsible for Simon's disappearance; the years spent by Emilia chasing down phantom sightings of her husband across Latin America; the surreal craziness of life under the generals; the loneliness of exile in the USA.

Simon, the "disappeared", is at the centre of the novel, yet the book is about Emilia and the hole left in her life rather than about what happened to Simon. How does a wife carry on without knowing whether her husband is alive or dead? (And by extension, how does a country carry on without knowing whether thousands of its citizens are alive or dead?) The lively Emilia who married Simon is transformed, less by loss itself than by 30 years in limbo (in purgatory, in fact, hence the novel's title), reduced to a sad shell of a woman whose search for her husband has taken over her life. The details of her drab life in New Jersey are particularly touching, especially when seen through Simon's eyes - she cultivates her friendship with the insufferable Nancy Frears because Nancy is all that stands between Emilia and absolute solitude; as Simon points out, her would never have expected the Emilia he knew to have such an empty life that supermarket coupons have come to play a major role in it; her manicure strikes him as vulgar, but again, having it done every week keeps her in touch with human beings. Even more touching is the realisation that Emilia is acutely aware that this is what she has become.

Eloy Martinez himself appears in the novel as the narrator of some of the contemporary sections, those most concerned with life in exile. He casts himself as the only other Argentinian in the neighbourhood, and therefore someone towards whom Emilia gravitates and in whom she confides; he is repulsed by her, but at the same time cannot find in it in himself to abandon her. I've read interviews with him in which he says that this is his most "personal" novel so far, the one in which he has invested the most of himself.

I haven't given anything away here, but there is a huge twist to the plot. It doesn't become clear at any one particular point; it's there all along for the reader to realise - it all depends on how much you want to trust the different narrative voices. I found it so powerful that when I realised what was actually happening it felt like a blow to the stomach. I didn't want it to be like that, but this twist is what makes this a great novel.

The Winners by Julio Cortázar

Julio Cortázar was one of the most influential and widely praised of the postmodern Argentinian writers. He was born in Brussels in 1914 but spent most of his formative years in Buenos Aires, after his parents divorced. He taught in secondary schools after college, where his career as a writer began. He emigrated to France in 1951, due to his opposition to the Perón government, and he remained an exile in Paris until his death in 1984.

Cortázar wrote several novels, plays, and collections of short stories and poems. His first novel, The Winners (Los premios), was published in Spanish in 1960, but it wasn't translated into English until 1965. He is best known for his stream of consciousness novel Hopscotch (Rayuela), published in 1963 in Spanish and in English in 1966, and his short story collections Blow-Up and Other Stories, All Fires the Fire, We Love Glenda So Much, and A Certain Lucas. His last book was Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, a humorous travelogue about an automobile trip between Paris and Marseilles that was co-authored by his companion and wife Carol Dunlop. It was re-translated and published in English by Archipelago Books in 2007.

I have to include this hilarious quote by Pablo Neruda about Cortázar from the back of my copy of Autonauts of the Cosmoroute: "Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease, which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who has never tasted peaches. He would quietly become sadder...and, probably, little by little, he would lose his hair."

Here is my review of The Winners:

Two dozen citizens of Buenos Aires, representing all facets of Argentinian society, are declared the winners of a state lottery. Their prize is a luxury oceanic cruise...but to where? And for how long? They are told to meet at a café on the day of departure, where they will be given more details about the voyage. A bureaucrat comes to the cafe, demands that everyone not going on the trip must leave immediately, and orders a policeman to lower the iron shutters of the café. Despite these mysterious precautions, the bureaucrat is unable or unwilling to tell them where they will be going, what ports they will visit, or even the name of the ship they will be traveling on. They are taken on a bus at night to the dimly lit ship, and told to board quickly and quietly.

The secrecy continues once the passengers board the vessel, as they are told that they cannot venture past the small section of the ship to which they are confined. Multiple disparate explanations are given for their sequestration and the delay in going out to sea. Some of the passengers accept these excuses without question, but several others are deeply troubled by the stories they are being told by the staff, who relay second-hand information from the captain. They decide to conduct their own investigation, but are unable to learn any more information or meet the captain. The tension builds between the passengers, which leads to an unexpected and unbelievable set of actions and conclusion to the story.

This is a captivating story of human nature, and how the actions and opinions of others can influence our own decisions and actions. All of the characters are unremarkable citizens prior to the journey, but several take extraordinary positions and actions, which in retrospect are unnecessary and absurd. I highly recommend this book!

>69 rachbxl: - regarding Tomas Eloy Martinez, his connection to New Jersey - for several years now he has lived and worked in New Jersey- heading up a Latin American Studies Program at Rutgers UNiversity.

I did not know that. I'm a Rutgers alum, BTW, and I'm planning to read The Tango Singer next week. Thanks, Bert!

Maya Jaggi, who is my favorite book reviewer, interviewed Tomás Eloy Martínez a couple of years ago, when The Tango Singer was released in the UK:

Tango lessons

I'd like to read Purgatorio, but I will unfortunately have to wait until it is published in English, which I hope happens sooner rather than later.

I will be reading Hopscotch. My original choice was The Winners, but my local store only had Hopscotch, so I went with that. Based on your review, it looks like I'm going to have to follow up with The Winners.

kidsdoc- The Tango Singer is a fabulous book. Also The Peron Novel is surrealistically fascinating.

What happens when a 32 year old Argentine, Paris trained, lawyer rapes and seduces the 13 year old daughter of a hard-drinking physician who was close friends with his father and family?

There is little buildup of description , character development or atmospherics. Sultry Moon by Mempo Giardinelli is a tale that explodes in the first few brief chapters of what is a short 110 page murder mystery.

This is the equivelent of watching an Alfred Hitchcock thriller and reminded me of the memorable American film, Fatal Attraction.

Giardinelli, a 62 yr old Argentine writer is well accomplished having been awarded the Premio Romulo Gallegos literary award in 1993. Sultrty Moon may be his best known novel having won Mexico's National Book Award in 1983.

Wikipedia has a page on Argentinian novelists, including several contemporary women authors:

Argentine novelists

Alicia Borinsky is particularly interesting to me. Tomás Eloy Martinez made the following quote about her work: "Alicia Borinsky is unique, with an Argentine ear perfectly attuned to tangos and boleros...Her All Night Movie renews and transforms the genre of the picaresque novel. Borinsky is the reincarnation of Macedonio Fernandez and Julio Cortazar, as a daring and seductive storyteller in skirts."

I've added her novel Low Blows to my Amazon order.

Don Segundo Sombra is a coming of age story about an orphan growing up in a rural town. At the start of the novel, he's a teenager who's living something of a fruitless existence, hanging out at the local watering hole with other nether-do-well friends. He meets the gaucho don Segundo Sombra one day and is so impressed with him, that he becomes a farmhand where the gaucho is working and goes on the follow him on his various journeys. Don Segundo Sombra goes on to become his mentor and teach him much about life.

This is a pretty sweet story, with the gaucho Sombra acting as the surrogate father that the narrator never had. There are some of the same guacho elements as in Martin Fierro, though softened to some extent. There is only one lethal knife fight in this book, in which Sombra does not participate. The gaucho's wandering lifestyle is a little more romanticized, reflecting the gaucho's love of freedom more than his marginal social standing.

I've never seen the movie Shane, but I once read a sociology book about Westerns, and I think Sombra plays a similar role to Shane: he's a civilizing figure, but not one that is able to exist within civilization. Having saved the town or raised the orphan to maturity, he must move on and continue his wandering ways.

The book comes with a small section of commentary, which I have not delved into, mostly because I worry it'd influence my review too much. However, the brief biography does note that at the time the book was written (1920s), the gaucho was rapidly becoming obsolete. A global demand for Argentine beef had brought in lots of money, and the old ways of cattle raising were making way for mechanization. Thus, the book seeks to capture a vital part of the national culture just as it's beginning to disappear.

Güiraldes was the son of wealthy Argentine landowners and his time growing up was divided between Buenos Aires and the family ranch. It was in the latter that he came into contact with the gauchos that would inspire the novel. He also became, along with Macedonio Fernandez, something of an elder statesman to the Argentine vanguard which included authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Arlt and edited the magazines Martin Fierro and Proa. He died of Hodgkin's Disease in 1927 at the age of 41.

I too have read The Tango Singer.

I haven't got round to writing a proper review, but here are my comments for my 75 book challenge:

23 The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez.

This was for the Reading Globally group's theme read for March on Argentina. I'm not entirely sure I understood the book that well. I loved it at first, and found it very evocative about Buenos Aires, somewhere I'd love to go, and about the tango.

The story follows an american student in Buenos Aires to write his PhD. He's looking for a tango singer who is supposed to have a magical voice, but is very difficult to find since he is ill and sings in unusual places on a whim without his performances being advertised.

But then it drifted away from this theme, and became too overtly political for me, and I started to lose interest. Which is a shame because it had great potential. My view is that I wish it had stayed away from delving too deeply into Argentina's recent political history. This is not because I'm particularly fond of tango, but because I thought that was what I was going to get and therefore was left disappointed.

I finished The Tango Singer yesterday; my review from yesterday is similar to the one just posted by jbeast:

Tomás Eloy Martínez (1934-) was a journalist and film critic in Buenos Aires and Paris for many years before moving to Venezuela in 1975, to escape the political strife occurring in Argentina. He moved to the US in 1983, where he initially taught at the U. of Maryland. Since 1995 he has been the director of the Latin American Studies program at Rutgers. He has written several novels and nonfictional works, most notably The Perón Novel, Santa Evita and Flight of the Queen.

The Tango Singer is Martinez's latest novel, which I read for the Reading Globally theme read on Argentina. The narrator, Bruno Cadogan, is a graduate student in literature at NYU, who travels to Buenos Aires in order to complete his Ph.D. dissertation on Borges' essays on the origin of the tango. He soon learns about Julio Martel, a mysterious tango singer who is considered to be even better than Carlos Gardel, the greatest of all tango singers.

Cadogan sets off on a search for Martel throughout the city, which he describes as as a labyrinth. His paths are frequently blocked by demonstrators and crowds watching spontaneous tango performances, and the "street names change from one week to tne next", which causes even long time residents of the city to become lost outside of their own neighborhoods.

Eventually he meets and befriends Martel, but in doing so he discovers the dark side of Argentinian history, and achieves a greater understanding of Borges and his story "The Aleph", which describes a point in space that contains all other points.

Although it was a well written novel, I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would. The frequent references to streets, neighborhoods and sections of Buenos Aires and a lack of knowledge of Argentinian history made this a tedious read for me. I've heard good things about his other novels, and I'm willing to give them a try. I think that anyone with better knowledge about Argentina would enjoy this book far more than I did.

Hi kidzdoc.

I agree, I think we had similar views of this book, and that you put into much better words the same feelings I had - that readers would really benefit from background knowledge of BA and Argentine history to properly get to grips with the novel.

He clearly is a great writer, and I particularly enjoyed his description of the labyrinthine neighbourhood (I can't remember its name), where Cadogan got lost and was rescued by Martel's partner and muse (can't remember her name either!). It made me feel quite uneasy about how uncomfortable I would feel myself lost in a strange country. Equally, I would have hated to have been driven around Buenos Aires in the back of that tanker.

I also thought the characters were well portrayed and easy to sympathise with.

Still, the political/historical parts to me were weak. I was never really clear WHY they were driving round with the corpse, for example, and to be honest I didn't really care. It was like Martinez was trying too hard to show his knowledge, but didn't quite choose the right setting in which to do so.

Hi jbeast,

Actually I liked your review better! Reading it reminded me that I did not post yesterday's review on this page. I agree with you, our opinions of the book are essentially the same, which affirmed my view of it.

Like you, I got the sense that he is a talented writer, and I did not want to discourage anyone from reading him. (And he is a professor at my undergraduate alma mater, so I'm that much more reluctant to throw him under the bus!) Many of my favorite authors have published books that I haven't enjoyed, but were still well written. If anything, reading this book makes me eager to pick up one of his other books.

It took me a while to post my comments on this thread, because I wasn't sure that I hadn't completely missed the point of the book! So your review kind of validated mine.

That's interesting, which college? I just wikipedia-ed him (is that a verb yet?), and it said he is a director of a programme at Rutgers University, so I assume it was that one.

If you read something else by him let me know, because I really did think he was good with a lot of potential.

If googled can be a verb, so can wikipedia-ed!

He was the director of RULAS, the Rutgers University Latin American Studies Department (I remember that acronym from my undergraduate days). Apparently RULAS has been divided into the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies. Martinez is a professor in the former department:

http://span-port.rutgers.edu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1...

i am sorry the 2 of you were dissappointed with The Tango Singer, a book that i thoroughly enjoyed. For me it was a kind of "rumination" on Tango, Borges and the city of Buenos Aires; having spent a good deal of time in BsAs may have helped me soak up and relate to the atmospherics- ie- the subay entrances under Nueve de Julio and the labyrinth of streets and barrios.

once you have been there it is an easy city to fall in love with.

Nathan Englander's take on imagining Buenos Aires:

http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=600&source=email

based on The Ministry of Special Cases

#85 I think that's just it. I think probably you appreciated it more than I did because you've been there and you understood it better, and were able to get more of a feel for the places described.

I would love to go there and I plan to in the future (far too poor at the moment!), so am very jealous.

>87 jbeast: actually one of the great reasons to visit Argentina in today's economy is that the US dollar goes a very long way there. Once you get past the cost of air travel the cost of living is basically a third of what it is in the states.

transportation, housing, food, entertainment,etc is very ,very reasonable if you convert to pesos from Us dollars.

I'm way behind on posting to LT due to travel. I see lots of great suggestions above! For my Argentina read I packed Sábato's La resistencia. It's a short meditation on modern life and does not appear to have been translated into English. This is the second time I have taken on the book and, I have to admit, I abandoned it after the first 30 pages once again. The main problem for me is the overwhelming negativity of Sábato's senitment, even though I happen agree with most of his points. But couldn't he be a bit more up-beat? If anyone has read the whole of La resistencia and can encourage me to finish it, I would be grateful (I think!).

Like fullmoonblue, I read Kiss of the Spider Woman a while ago and based on its strength selected another book by its author, Manual Puig. Puig (1932-1990) left Argentina for Mexico in the 1970s, fearing persecution from the right-wing government. Only marginally successful as a screenwriter, his novels are a pop art blend of big screen characters and plots and more literary tendencies. Critics divide his early movie-influenced novels from his later, bitter and self-reflective works that lack the trademark media flourishes.

Heartbreak Tango, Puig's second novel, recounts the life and loves of Juan Carlos, a small-town Argentinian bureaucrat, as he slowly dies of tuberculosis. Good-looking, well-mannered Juan Carlos is the apple of his mother's eye and a prize jealously guarded by his sister Celina. He alternately pursues Nene, a local shop girl tainted by scandal, and Mabel, a teacher from a wealthy local family. His romantic pursuits, along with late-night visits to local widow and evenings out with his carousing card-playing friends, ultimately drive him to exhaustion.

On the surface, this story is a typical tale of romantic entanglement. Puig reframes the story as a series of excerpts from letters, diaries and newspaper clippings and plays with the chronology. The story begins with Nene's letters to Juan Carlos' mother following his death and travels backward and forward in time, alternately bringing the characters closer together and driving them further apart. All of the women idealize Juan Carlos and pity his tragic demise, all the while failing to see the ongoing tragedies that have left them heartbroken and alone. Billed as a novel in a series of installments, reminiscent of a 1940s serial romance, the novel has flashes of wit and at times draws the reader into the puzzle of piecing together Juan Carlos' love life. An enjoyable read in a somewhat experimental form, but not groundbreaking in any way. A bit of a disappointment overall. (3.5 stars)

I checked and Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia made the Guardian's top 10 list for South American Travel Writing (per post 35). Often mentioned as a classic of travel writing, I had high expectations for this read. Flipping through the book, I saw photos of glaciers and ancient cave paintings. I should have looked more closely at the photos of rugged homesteaders and abandoned ranches. Chatwin's classic trek is tightly focused on the settlement of Patagonia by various Europeans and the possibility that Argentina was the last hiding place for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The book mainly recounts the names and home countries of various settlers and the type of livestock they raised and the church they attended. It provides little more than a few rambling theories about the notorious cowboy's time in Patagonia. The author never finds the time to describe the natural splendor of Patagonia or the history or culture of its original inhabitants. The framing of the tale is interesting but Chatwin's search of the origins of his Uncle Charley's Giant Sloth skin is a very small part of the story and not enough to make up for the monotony of the seemingly endless slog from isolated ranch to isolated ranch. (2 stars)

Hopefully I will find Borges' Personal Anthology and Santa Evita by Tomas Eloy Martinez more enjoyable. They seem that way so far ...

Golpes Bajos / Low Blows: Instantaneas / Snapshots by Alicia Borinsky

My rating: 1/2

I obtained most of this information from Ms. Borinsky's bio on the web site of the Department of Romance Studies at Boston University:

Alicia Borinsky is a literary scholar, fiction writer, and poet and has published in Spanish and English in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Her publications include Mean Woman (1993); La Pareja Desmontable (1994); Madres Aquiladas (1997); and Cine Continuado (1997). She teaches modern and contemporary Latin American literature in the Department of Romance Studies at Boston Univesity, and directs the Writing in the Americas Program.

She was born in Buenos Aires, received her MA and PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, and has held visiting professorships at Harvard University and Washington University in St. Louis. She won the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching (1985), the Latino Literature Prize for Fiction (1996) and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2002).

Her book Golpes Bajos/Low Blows: Instantáneas/Snapshots was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2007.

Golpes Bajos/Low Blows: Instantáneas/Snapshots is a collection of stories about Buenos Aires, which are brief scenes of the lives of people and stories told about others. The stories are presented in both Spanish and English, and Ms Borinsky tells us that the English versions are not literal translations, they are similar creations that maintain the flavor and spirit of the original Spanish vignettes. The people portrayed in the stories are reflective of the diversity of the city's inhabitants, with generous portions of lovers' tales, and sections of stories about orphans and prophets.

I've included two of the snapshots that I especially enjoyed, though there were at least a dozen others that I liked as much:

haven't i seen that face before?

what really gets me is when he walks behind me so close he
could step on my heels I tell you my mouth goes dry just thinking
about it as always he is about to walk past me without as
much as a glance. He walks by, stares across the street as though I
wasn't there what does he care about our midday escapades
the splendid nights carelessly abandoned beds our hushed
conversations in the train station, the same one he is going to
now I am sure he is heading home although we didn't even
go through half the excellent bottles of wine I got for us at a
discount. I can't stand it when I catch a glimpse of his mis-
matched socks and above all the way in which he hurries so
close indifferent and arrogant without knowing that soon
she will open up the envelope and breathless, shocked, will confront
him with the photograph, an address, a key, our scandal.

For the Country

Once there was a country with so many doctors that the military
junta that had generously taken over the responsibilities of govern-
ment organized a civil war so the doctors would have plenty of work
but they forgot that the earlier lack of cases had turned them into a
bunch of lazy bums with no interest beyond getting cushy jobs and
taking illegal payoffs from chemical and pharmaceutical companies.
When the number of neglected dead and wounded became a scan-
dal the entire country demanded that all the doctors be killed. Still
five years after the dramatic executions, we keep celebrating our
great national reconciliation with embraces and festivals.

I loved these brief glimpses into life, and the mind of Borinsky. Although this was a quick read, there is much to savor here, and I'm sure I'll revisit it often.

>trayfox...if non-fiction is your cup of tea you may enjoy Borges:A Life by Edwin Williamson. A rather long biography with lots of detail one walks away knowing probably more about Borges than you need to know BUT also a deeper understanding of the people and history of Argentina.

I'm planning to start Borges: A Life this weekend or early next week.

Has anyone else read anything by Alicia Borinsky?

Kiss of the Spider Woman
by Manuel Puig

tracyfox did a little biog of Puig in message 90. I would only add that Puig was openly homosexual, something that did very little to endear him to the right-wing religious governments that he was already critical of, and a large factor in his lengthy exile.

Kiss of the Spider Woman is an unusual book, told only in dialogue, without any pointer text ('he said', 'she said' etc). It is almost entirely made up of conversations between two prisoners, Valentin and Molina. Valentin is a left-wing revolutionary, imprisoned as a terrorist, Molina is a homosexual, convicted of corrupting a minor. Molina keeps Valentin entertained by recounting the plots of films he watched on the outside. Molina is an aesthete, preferring ideals of beauty to ideas of right and wrong. Valentin is the opposite, seeing everything through the filter of his ideology. The two have an uneasy relationship, but a friendship of sorts is forged in the cell and, by the end of the book, each has taken on aspects of the other's personality, with serious repercussions for both men.

I thought that this book was great. The device of only using dialogue was not remotely disorientating, and gave a cramped claustrophobic feeling to the writing that reinforced the conditions the two men found themselves in. It was as if Puig described nothing because there was nothing to describe, just the same four walls and ceiling. But the book's strength was really in the relationship between the two characters. Born out of necessity, their friendship is awkward and forced, as each keeps the lid on the excesses of their personalities for the sake of the other. Eventually, something beautiful arises between them, a communion of minds that couldn't occur in any other situation. The last two pages were some of the most beautiful prose I could remember reading for a long time, and completely blew me away. Be warned though, some of the text is fairly dense, and the conclusion is ambiguous and obscure, which may not provide the sort of pat finish some readers may look for.

Great comments, depressaholic. You voiced exactly the thing I remembered as being so extraordinary about the book ... that the dialogue-only narraitve made the book feel cramped and claustrophobic like a prison cell (not that I could have voiced it so well). I will have to see if I can find a copy and riff through the last few pages. I do remember the ending as memorable but I'm fuzzy on the details!

All Fires the Fire
by Julio Cortazar

This Argentine binge of mine started because of a recommendation for Cortazar. I still have Hopscotch to read, but I started with this collection of short stories. I have to be honest, I wasn't tremendously impressed.

I am a big fan of short stories, but I have never enjoyed ones that rely too heavily on their cleverness (e.g. interesting concepts or unforeseeable twists). Cortazar's stories reminded me of what I don't like about Italo Calvino, and other authors whose surrealism borders on being sci-fi. There was a bit too much of this in All Fires the Fire for my tastes. That isn't to say that Cortazar isn't a good writer. He is, and is ably assisted by Susan Jill Levine's translation. His more human centred (as opposed to concept centred) stories still packed a punch, though not as much as I had hoped for, but his stories were as much intellectual as emotional episodes, and felt a little cold.

I am certainly not dreading reading Hopscotch after this, and would still be tempted to try Blow-Up, which is often quoted as his classic collection of stories, but I can't quite bring myself to give All Fires the Fire a ringing endorsement.

>96 tracyfox: Thanks for the comments. I have another Puig on the go at the moment (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth). It is harder work than 'Spider Woman' but still pretty good. I'm hoping there will be a few other readers try Puig on this thread, it would be interesting to compare comments.

Another post on Puig -- amazing, huh?

Mine is sadder, though... I just gave up on one of his novels, Pubis Angelical. I simply couldn't keep interested; didn't hold a candle to 'Spider Woman', in my opinion. Maybe it was a bad translation. Anyway, I do also have a copy of 'Rita Hayworth' though and *definitely* plan to start it soon, now that I know someone else'll be reading it too...!

I have copied and pasted a quote from Puig's wikipedia page, which may, in part anyway, explain some of your adverse reaction to Pubis Angelical.

Critics such as Pamela Bacarisse divides Puig's work into two parts: his early novels, which "attracted an enormous audience by weaving into his narratives the artistic 'sub-products' of mass culture"; and his later books which have "lost their popular appeal" as they evidence "a depressing, even unpalatable, vision of life, no longer even superficially sweetened by palliatives as the mass-media elements are left behind"

The three books mentioned above are his earliest 3, whereas Pubis Angelical comes a little (though not much) later.

I've been busy with other books, but have just started Cortazar's The Winners -- not sure if I'll finish it before the end of the month, but I'm enjoying it so far.

Betrayed by Rita Hayworth by Manuel Puig

Another Argentina book, and another by Puig. I am enjoying this month immensely, and have found some good stuff and some interesting authors. Also, because a few people have mentioned Puig, I feel like I'm getting to know him pretty well, despite only having read two of his books.

Having said that, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth isn't a book I can praise wholeheartedly. It is a good read, and contains many of the motifs and devices that Puig put expertly into practice in Kiss of the Spider Woman, but it isn't, in my opinion, nearly as good a book. It follows the lives of a cohort of friends born in a small Argentine town in 1933, finishing as they head towards the ends of their childhoods in 1948. Puig uses only voices to develop the narrative. initially there is reported conversations between the children's parents, when the children themselves are too young to talk. Later there are internal monologues, diary entries and school essays by the kids. There is roughly one chapter for each year between 1933 and 1948, each told by a different child. The themes are largely to do with sexual awakenings, and the role that popular media (especially movies) have in shaping ideas about sex and relationships in our heads. The reality of growing up is contrasted with the idealised relationships on the screen, and the hypocrisies of sexual exploration in a conservative catholic country are also explored.

My slightly lukewarm reaction is largely due to the profusion of voices and perspectives Puig uses. It felt like he was trying to build up a mosaic image from all the different children's thoughts and, in doing so, lost sight a little bit of some of his more interesting strands. One boy in particular, Toto, is presented as being a pivotal figure. He is a strange child, effeminate, possibly homosexual,who colours in pictures of movie stars rather than join the other children. I was fascinated by him, but he just disappeared for long periods under the avalanche of perspectives. I tend to struggle with books that have too many narrators, and this was no exception. However, the writing is fluid and crisp, and have reall grown to appreciate Puig's style. Read as a series of themed prose pieces or short stories, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth is a lovely piece of work with some really outstanding passages. As a single narrative entity, it fell a little bit short of the mark, but I think it will still be enjoyed by readers who have enjoyed his other books.

Only one book on my Argentinian TBR now: Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar. I hope to finish it by the end of the month. 2009 is my Argentina year, thanks to the book nudge group, so I hope to return later in the year with some of the recommends from this thread. Specifically, more Osvaldo Soriano, Bioyes-Casares, Eloy Martinez and Alicia Borinsky, as well as other bits and pieces.

What a fabulous thread!!! I'm going to have to reread it when I have some time. My Angelica Gorodischer novel is on hold for the moment and comments may not get posted until April. She considers Borges her literary father, btw.

I just finished reading A Universal History of Infamy by Jorge Luis Borges. I think that either his style is just not right for me or I was not in the right frame of mind for his works. I gave it three stars, because I want to read some more of his stories and see what I think. So, to be honest, I don't feel inspired to write about him or the short stories in the collection. Odd topic, odd style, and if it weren't for his touch of humor he might have lost me half way through.

>103 avaland: I am enjoying it too. I hope to summarize a bit later in the year (like I did for Haiti) but I intend to revisit Argentina, and therefore revisit this thread at some point. Just because March is drawigng to a close doesn't mean that Argentina has to!

>104 hemlokgang: Borges is one of those writers I think I am supposed to like more than I actually do. I am a big fan of some of his students, but Borges himself leaves me a bit cold. A Universal History of Infamy illustrates many of the devices central to Borges (false histories, blurring of truth and fiction, his attempts to disorientate the reader) but didn't really do it for me either. I like Labyrinths, but even that didn't blow me away. My advice would be to read Umberto Eco, who is self-consciously Borge-esque, but, in my opinion, writes better books.

A few Argentine favorites--Artificial respiration and Money to burn by Ricardo Piglia.
The seven madmen by Roberto Arlt.

Enrique Medina's The Duke and also his Las Tumbas.

Ernesto Sabato's On heroes and tombs and The angel of darkness.

Mempo Giardinelli's Sultry moon.

I am a huge fan of Umberto Eco as well, and now that you mention it, I can see the resemblance.

The Mad Toy, or El Juguete Rabioso

Roberto Arlt was a child of immigrants,a Prussian father and an Italian mother. He was expelled from school at the age of 8, and seems to have shared with some of his characters a restless striving for success in a world in which he really didn't quite fit in. He worked as a playwright, journalist, tinsmith apprentice, amateur inventor, and several other jobs. (Like the other Argentine authors I've read so far, he was an autodidact.)

Carlos Fuentes describes him as one of the fathers of the modern Latin-American novel, and his works tend to reflect the rawness and energy of Buenos Aires street life. (And also its unique language.) He was to some extent mentored by Ricardo Güiraldes who helped him get his first novel (The Mad Toy) published. He died at the age of 42 from a stroke. His coffin had to be taken out of the window of his apartment using a crane, the sort of surreal scene that could have come straight from one of his stories.

The Mad Toy is the first person tale of Silvio Astier, the teenage son of immigrants, and his attempts to find some measure of success in Buenos Aires. The novel is somewhat episodic and divided into four distinct sections. In the first, Silvio and his friends decide to engage in some robbery, beggining by breaking into a library. They soon give it up, because they decide the risk of being caught is too great. In the second, Silvio finds a job with a rather pompous bookseller. The bookseller turns out to be a less than honest merchant. In the third, Silvio gets a job as a mechanic for the air force, by impressing a sergeant with his technical knowledge. But he loses the job and becomes suicidal. In the last section, Silvio gets a pretty crummy job as a paper salesman until a friend offers him an opportunity to score a lot of cash fast.

The novel has Arlt's usual energy, eccentric characters, and his feel for the street life of Buenos Aires, but I wouldn't call this my favorite of his novels. It's more intimate than The Seven Madmen/The Flamethrowers, which is considered his opus, but feels too tame by comparison. Overall, I would recommend this novel, especially as an introduction to the author. But it doesn't quite reach the level that some of his other works, including his short fiction, do.

I am trying very hard to get through a very short novel, Mothers and Shadows by Marta Traba -- difficulties arise because I don't seem to have any time to read before 10 pm, and then I just nod off. I think part of the problem is avoidance of the horrors of the Generals' rule during the terrors as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo protested the disappeared. Has anyone read this one?

-->107 hemlokgang:
Eco's The Name of the Rose is written very much as a sort of pastiche of Borges. There are the themes of a discovered manuscript, a labyrinth, a puzzle with a metaphysical solution, and finally an irascible blind monk called Jorge of Burgos. Eco is having fun with Borges throughout the book.

>110 GlebtheDancer: Fantastic! Love finding out tidbits like this. Thanks, depressaholic.

>110 GlebtheDancer: Interesting. I never realized that connection.

I just finished How I Became a Nun and enjoyed it immensely. It is just the sort of book you regularly encounter in Latin American literature that makes you wonder just how the book publishing world works - my copy is published by a small publisher in Rosario, where the story is set. It is a brilliant and original little novella that reminded me a little of The Third Policeman in its blending of fantasy, dream, peculiar views of reality and sheer imaginative power. Depressaholic has hit the nail right on the head* in his review and there is really nothing further for me to add except to say that for me this was a "laugh out loud" book - and books very rarely have that power over me. There's a Rowan Atkinson (Mr Bean) TV sketch about two men reading on a train that I happened to watchwhile reading the book...

*Actually, Depressaholic and I seem to have very similar tastes (with respect to Borges, Puig and Ben Okri at least!), though I am nowhere near as widely read. I absolutely loved Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman when it was pushed my way some 20 years ago and I would rank it among my top 10 books - a list that apparently comprises some 100+ works! They're not Argentinian, but if you enjoyed Kiss of the Spider Woman, might I suggest Bernardo Atxaga's The Lone Man (about an Etarra trying to evade capture) and Vargas Llosa's The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (about a Sendero Luminoso member)? Both are brilliant studies of hunted men and have stuck in my mind for many years (yes, they are probably in my top ten!). However, the book that comes closest to it for me is Otero Silva's "The Death of Honorio" La muerte de Honorio (noen of his works have made it into English) about a group of men incarcerated during one of our own dictatorships.

I'm wondering whether I can squeeze in another Argentinian read before the group wraps up - I have Osvaldo Soriano's "The Eye fo the Fatherland" El ojo de la patria to hand. By the way, for those who want to continue after March, there's always the "South American Fiction-Argentine Writers" group at http://www.librarything.com/groups/southamericanfictio .

>111 hemlokgang:, 112
Also, in The Name of the Rose Jorge of Burgos was blind, and needed to be read to by another monk. This was the state that Borges found himself in during his later life. Eco also chose to make Jorge one of the more *ahem* sinister characters, as a tribute to his friend.

>113 chrisharpe:
I am tempted to make my Argentina jag into a South American one, but am going to hold off for the time being, having other things on. I have a Colombian writer (Laura Restrepo) a Brazilian one (Machado de Assis) and will leave it at that for the moment, but would like to visit the continent's writers in ernest at some point in the future.

I recently finished Cortazar's The Winners, a book about a group of lottery winners who embark on a mysterious cruise, while I myself was on vacation. One can never dislike a book that they enjoyed on the beach too much, but I confess to not being very impressed. Here's the review I posted on my 999 challenge thread;

The premise was great; a group of lottery winners boards a cruise with no hint of their final destination, only to find that they are confined to a small area and fishy doings abound. I was really excited to read it and didn't want to wait until March to do so (it arrived in January.) And Cortazar can really write. His descriptions are excellent. However, the book seemed to drag on after the group boarded the Malcolm. Perhaps it was the authors' intention to mirror their restlessness with a plodding storyline, but for me all it served to do was annoy. I liked Claudia and Jorge, but spending time with the other characters, especially Persio, was unfulfilling. Raul and Paula, particularly, were so self-centered and supercilious that I wanted to hear no more about them--I mean, no-one talks the way they do in real life. Completely unrealistic. Other characters, like Don Galo, were so rarely mentioned that I wondered why they were included at all. And we are never given a satisfactory explanation as to the crew's behavior--the typhus story is implausible both to the characters and myself. I think Cortazar purposely left the end open so his audience could decide for themselves who were the heroes & villains of the work. Were Medrano, Artilio, and Lopez doing the right thing by trying to break through the draconian restrictions imposed on them by the mysterious crew? Or was there a good reason behind these rules, and a simple miscommunication was to blame? Should they have just shut up and enjoyed the cruise? Cortazar skillfully leaves it open for interpretation. It's a great book to discuss, but not one to read, I think. The ending was wholly unsatisfying if reading for pleasure, which I was.

For this month's read, though, I think it was educational. The interaction of rich, poor, uneducated and highly intelligent characters aboard the Malcolm shed some light on Argentina's class differences. The contrast between promiscuous, high-maintenance Paula and shy, traditional Nora was particularly stark, and I admire Cortazar for showing the good and bad points of both. Neither woman was portrayed as preferable. He did similarly in-depth portrayals of other characters, such as Lopez, but some like Persio were never explained. I also found the musings on astronomy and so forth incomprehensible and distracting.

I read Blow Up and Other Stories by Cortazar. There’s already been information about the author posted previously in #70, so I won’t go into that. I enjoyed the stories and would definitely read more by the author – Hopscotch has been on the list for a while. A good portion of the stories involve some surreal touches, though many of them could simply be explained by the narrator’s delusions. Some are left ambiguous at the end – that usually never bothers me, and in some cases works to great effect, like the story ‘House Taken Over’ where a house is, well, taken over by an unnamed ‘them’. There are definitely stories that rely heavily on the fanciful premise or a twist end, especially the shorter ones, as depressaholic mentioned in #97 – but I actually like that kind of thing. I’ll probably look for All Fires the Fire. However, I do think Cortazar is at his best when juxtaposing the quotidian with the fantastic, as in the stories ‘Blow Up’ or ‘Letter to a Young Lady in Paris’. Blow Up starts with the narrator analyzing the relationship between two strangers, a meeting he’s trying to photograph; later, he makes a blow up of the picture and it takes on a life of its own. Letter describes all the anguished emotions and stratagems of the narrator, whose unfortunate condition – vomiting rabbits – conflicts with housesitting. There are a couple of ‘realistic’ stories in the collection – one of my favorites was ‘The End of the Game’- about three children and their imaginative game, which turns serious when someone else takes notice. Many stories incorporate the idea of the fluidity of identity – a man who flashes between past and present lives, another who finds himself a character in his book, one where the narrator converses with a possibly crazed man who believes he’s found a younger version of himself and that identities are perpetually repeated. Another thread running through the stories is Cortazar’s depiction of reality on the brink of madness (of course, some of the realities aren’t so realistic). Even ‘The Pursuer’, a realistic story about the relationship between a jazz critic and his self-destructive friend/subject, hints at something beyond the everyday, a closed door that only a few can open, but which has dire consequences for one’s grip in the real world. In any short story collection, there are always some that are forgettable. The few that I didn’t like were ones that I felt used Cortazar’s stream of consciousness narration poorly – jumping around excessively or spending too much time on objects. The intent was probably to get in the confused minds of the narrators – a device that works well in some stories – but in a couple just left me wondering when it would be revealed that the narrators were delusional.

Other books from Argentina - I’ve started Pot Pourri: Whistlings of an Idler by Eugenio Cambaceres, but I don’t know if I’ll finish by the end of the month, and Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares is on the pile.

> 92 Low Blows sounds intriguing. Is it all short-short, flash fiction or are some of the pieces more traditional short stories? Also, I fail at even tourist Spanish, so I'm wondering if not reading the pieces in parallel would detract from my enjoyment?

Leopoldo Lugones was born in the province of Cordoba in 1874. He abandoned his professional studies early on to became a poet and author. He was an important part of the modernista movement, alongside Nicaragua's Ruben Dario. Though most prominent during his life as a poet, he also published several collections of short stories, including the science fiction collection Strange Forces.

Though a supporter of democratic reforms in his youth, Lugones' politics leaned more and more towards authoritarianism as he got older, eventually becoming a proponent of fascism. Though still well regarded enough in the early 1930s to serve as a sort of predecessor and inspiration to Jorge Luis Borges and the new generation of writers, he became a marginal figure as the decade went on. The decline in his popularity coupled with a disastrous infatuation with a younger woman led to his suicide in 1938.

There are at least two grim footnotes I feel it worth including. The first is that Lugones' infatuation was made worse by his son's discovery of it. The son (also called Leopoldo, nicknamed Polo) was a high-ranking police official who threatened to go public with some of the steamy letters Sr. was sending to the object of his obsession unless he agreed to cut it out. Polo also invented an electrical torture device to better get confessions out of people in custody.

Lugones' granddaughter and Polo's daughter, Piri, would later join the Montoneros revolutionary/guerrilla movement in the 1970s. She was disappeared by the government in 1978, quite likely tortured using the device invented by her father.

La guerra gaucha (The Gaucho War) is one of Lugones' short story collections, this one centered on the contribution of the gauchos of the northwest to the War of Independence from Spain. Like Don Segundo Sombra the book has its grounding in the way attitudes towards the gaucho were changing at the beginning of the 20th century.

It's an interesting, though a bit uneven, collection of stories. At first I found it a little disappointing that despite the title, there's not much of a sense of how the war was waged. There's occassional accounts of battles, but they seem mostly written for dramatic effect. The stories do yield some gripping accounts of the hardships of war and some dramatic moments. Some of them are marred by a simplistic nationalism.

The strongest element is the sense of place and culture. Lugones' apparently did a fair amount of research in northwestern Argentina, including collecting oral traditions, and that comes through pretty strongly. Overall, it was an interesting collection, but as with Lugones' other works not something I would suggest unless someone already had an interest in the subject. (One reason I wouldn't suggest it is because I do not believe it has ever been translated.)

>110 GlebtheDancer: - The Name of the Rose is actually written as a patische of Sherlock Holmes - the two monks creating a Holmes and Watson partnership. (Both their names, William of Baskerville, and Adso play on Conan Doyle's figures). The central library theme however is obviously drawn from Borges - who was, of course, a fan of detective stories, including Conan Doyle's.

I also read Manuel Puig's Betrayed By Rita Hayworth - agree with Depressaholic's review in #102: Puig wanted to create a mosaic of voices showing the boredom of ordinary Argentinian life. The main problem is that the work never coalesces into a whole - it is too disjointed, and (it is worth pointing out that Puig uses the same narrative strategies as in later works - conversations without description/identification, diaries, essays, etc) the various voices, and hence characters, never quite achieve a sense of individuality.
Knowing Puig's biography it is difficult not to see Toto, the closest thing there is to a central protagonist, as a portrait of the author.

***BIGGISH SPOILER FOR 'THE NAME OF THE ROSE' AND 'THE OXFORD MURDERS'***

>119 Jargoneer: William and Adso are definitely Holmes and Watson. I think it is part of Eco's joke that, while the events point to a Conan Doyle-type mystery, the solution, and William's route to it, couldn't be further from one, or closer to one of Borges'. Holmes is right about everything, William is pretty much wrong about everything, but they both reach the same end point. There is a Borges story in Labyrinths in which a detective follows a trail based on hints and symbols from the Kabbalah. When he reaches the end he realises that he has interpreted everything wrongly, and built a mystery that didn't exist, but still came to the right suspect as a conclusion* (unfortunately I can't find my copy at the moment, and can't remember the title). The Name of the Rose is a sort of 'Borges-does-Conan Doyle', I guess.

By the way, if anyone reads Borges' Doctor Brodie's Report, there is a story in there called something like 'A Tale of Two Dreamers', which is identical to the main story arc in Paulo Coehlo's The Alchemist, only stripped of its cod philosophy and psuedo-self help mumbo jumbo.

*This is also a pretty good approximation of what happens in Guillermo Martinez's The Oxford Murders.

Are you thinking of "Death and the Compass"? That sounds very much like the story you're describing, though the mystery does exist in that story, just not in the sense understood by the detective.

Interesting note on Coehlo, who also wrote The Zahir, a name shared by another Borges short story.

>121 CarlosMcRey:
I honestly can't remember. It ended badly for the detective, from what I remember, and involved the hidden name of God. If that fits 'Death and the Compass', then that's the one.

I didn't know that about 'The Zahir'. Are the stories similar at all? I'm not Coehlo's biggest fan, so won't be reading it to find out, but it sounds like he may have been influenced by Borges as well.

Just catching up with this thread after 10 days away. The first thing I have to do is declare myself a big Borges fan! However, everyone that I've tried to introduce to his work has had a reaction similar to those described here - "I think I should like him more than I do, but I can't". I think the reason I like him so much is that I studied several of his collections of stories for my degree. I remember being quite lukewarm myself at first, but the supervisions, lectures and literary criticism must have been chipping away at me - at some point the penny dropped and I was won over completely. I don't mean that that would happen for everyone (it all comes down to personal tastes and preferences in the end), but what I do mean is that without the introduction to Borges that I had, I don't think I'd be the fan that I am (or was, because despite my best intentions I haven't read anything of his for years).

I have similarly lukewarm feelings about a Bioy Casares which I read earlier this month (The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata), about which I hope to post within the next couple of days. It was the first Bioy Casares I'd read, and again, I had that sneaking suspicion that there's more there to like than I found.

#122, I can't really say, since I've never read any Coehlo, though I have seen The Zahir in book stores. Borges' Zahir is a cursed object--sort of the opposite of an Aleph--which slowly takes over the thinking of anyone who looks at it until they are unable to think of anything else. The Zahir can be any object, but there is only one in existence at any time. Since Coehleo's novel is subtitled "A Novel of Obsession," I would guess there are some thematic links.

I read Yo era una niña de siete años by César Aira in Spanish. It was a way for me to brush up on my Spanish. I suggest it to others whose Spanish level is intermediate and upward: the narrator is a little girl, so the vocabulary and structure are rather simple. It is the story of a little girl whose father decides to become king and so she becomes a princess. But really it's just about a little girl's imagination, as well as the author's. I liked the book, mostly the first half. I found the second half hard to follow and thought it was rambling towards nowhere. It could be that my imperfect grasp of the language prevented me from getting it. But overall, I enjoyed the read. I don't know if it has been translated in English, but I know it has been translated in French.

Speaking of Borges (and Bioy Casares), I recently finished La continuacíon y otras páginas by Silvina Ocampo. Ocampo was friends with Borges and Bioy Casares, eventually marrying the latter. Her sister, Victoria Ocampo, was one of the publishers of the magazineSur, which was a part of the Argentine Ultraismo movement which gave rise to writeres such as Borges.

The book is an anthology of poems and short stories from various of Ocampo's works. I don't have much to say about the poetry--I don't have a good sense of poetry--but it seems to echo similar themes as the short stories. The stories reminded me a bit of Cortazar, though less surreal. There's the themes of identity and loss of, childhood and memory, the boundaries of reality. The title story involves a first-person account of a writer whose relationship is falling apart. His frustrations seem to be reflected in those of one of his characters, and the narrative suggests the writer losing to some extent the ability to distinguish himself from his character.

Just a little note to say that although April is upon us, please continue to post on this thread. I am halfway through a Cortazar, which I'll post on in a week (I hope). I have bought a few more Argentinian books that I don't intend to read until later in the year, but I will still post here. Thanks for all the posts (so far), it has been a very interesting month.

I am trying to read Hopscotch (and finding it a difficult read), and have Betrayed By Rita Hayworth on tap, so I'm glad we will be keeping the thread open. There are several books on the thread so far that I've put on my list of books to watch for.

Thanks, Andy, for the "extension," I hope to finish The Winners, which I'm enjoying, in the next week or so. And then maybe read some other Argentinian books.

I figured I'd throw in something a little different regarding this month's theme by revisiting a childhood favorite by borrowing my dad's copy of Toda Mafalda. Mafalda was a comic strip that ran from 1964 to 1973. It was written and drawn by Quino and centered around Mafalda--a little girl living in Buenos Aires--and her family and friends. I've sometimes described it as a cross between Peanuts and Doonesbury, though that doesn't completely capture it.

I had been a big fan of the comic strip as a kid, though there was certainly a lot I didn't get. It was a lot of fun to revisit. I think that despite the fact that the strip is very much grounded in the lower middle class life of an Argentine family in the '60s and early '70s, it manages to hit some universal themes. That I'm rereading them at a time when economic outlooks look bleak and it's hard not to wonder if the government really knows what its doing certainly helps, but I think Quino also has a keen eye for the human condition. (Check out the last strip on this page for a spot-on moment of life that requires no translation.)

His use of kids to handle global and national political issues seems like the sort of thing that could turn out terribly, but I was struck by the degree to which the point of view makes sense. For one, watching the terrible things happening around the globe, it can be pretty easy to feel a childlike sense of disconnect between the reality and the way political leaders address it, or between the seriousness of the challenges and one's own feeling of powerlessness to affect change. This isn't to say that the strip is pessimistic, if anything it's idealistic, though with a slight sense of frustration at the way things seem to end up.

Toda Mafalda collects the strips from the entire run of the comic strip's publication, including some strips that didn't end up in previous collections. There's also a good deal of material about the run of the strip and the upheavals taking place in Argentine during that time. I also learned that though Mafalda never had much success in the English-speaking world, the strip was translated into several languages, including Chinese and Italian. (Umberto Eco is apparently a fan.)

Quino, btw, is the pseudonym of Joaquín Salvador Lavado, who was born in the province of Mendoza in 1932. His parents were immigrants from Andalucia, Spain. After the death of his parents while he was still a teenager, he drops out of school to become an illustrator and cartoonist full time. His first successes are with commerical illustrastions, and Mafalda actually grows out of a a never-launched add campaign for the Mansfield company. He is one of the better known Argentine cartoonists and has been involved in humanitarian causes, such as the Universakl Declaration of the Rights of Children.

It's now April, but I've finished my Argentina read, The Winners by Julio Cortázar. I selected it because of an enthusiastic recommendation by kidzdoc. I won't repeat the basics of the plot, because kidzdoc (#70) and moneybeets (#115) already have done so.

Nominally the story of a group of disparate Argentinians who win a cruise as the prize in a lottery, it is really an exploration of deception, self-deception, the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, how people influence each other consciously and unconsciously, and probably a lot of other ideas that went right by me. I found it a little hard to get into, but then found it mostly absorbing with some memorable characters. The most compelling part for me was Cortázar's style, which is beautiful and occasionally stunning. Not an easy read and, as I said, I'm sure I missed a lot of what the author was trying to accomplish, but I'm glad I read it.

In response to moneybeets's comments, I would just say that I don't believe that the story was supposed to be taken literally.

I wrote a funky review for The Tango Singer.

A graduate student from the United States is looking for Julio Martel, the wondrous tango singer, but he proves to be very elusive. The deceased Borges tries to be a guide but is not always helpful because of his blindness. Martel is well known and has just just seen but Bruno Cadogan must go through a lot before he does The chaos of Argentinian political life threatens to dim his quest. People no longer see there relatives and friends and this is deeply felt. Bruno gets lost in a Buenos Aires labyrinth, or is it the one mapped in Borges' mind, which he can't find his way out of. Martel is in a hospital on the other side of the labyrinth, but the sightless administrators prevent his entry. He seeks out the boarding house on Garay Street but doesn't see it because it has been reduced to rubble it. But the voice, the sound of the singer, is unforgettable and will inhabit his mind forever.

I've finished Voices From Silence by Douglas Unger and have had a bit of a problem writing a review for it. I certainly enjoyed the book, and it definitely added to my knowledge of the problems in Argentina, but a cogent review remains elusive.

Essentially, the book spans 3-4 months spent in Argentina in 1985 by Diego and his wife.

In high school Diego was the foreign exchange student to the Benevento family, a family composed of Papa (Martin), Mama, and three sons, Martin Secundo, Alejo, and Miguelito. Papa was a lawyer and the family was wealthy. After Diego returns to the U. S., Juan Peron dies, his wife Isabel rises to power, but because she is apparently the victim of a severe mental breakdown she is put under house arrest by the military which takes power of the country. The military runs rampant and there was severe oppressions visited on the entire country. Many thousands are imprisoned, tortured, and ultimately murdered. Sometimes the bodies of those kidnapped by the military are dumped by the roads or in the river. Most often they are never seen again. There were over 20,000 who disappear.

Diego arrives in Argentina to discover that Alejo is one of the disappeared. Miguelito's body was recovered with six bullet holes. Martin Secundo was spared when his parents spirited him out of the country. He has himself just returned with his new wife and baby. Diego and his wife assist the family in preparations for Papa's testimony at the trial of the generals from the military who are deemed to be the most culpable. Though the current goverment is democratic, the military still has great power and is continuing to harass and terrorize the citizenry seeking to bring them to justice, including the Benevento family. The events surrounding Alejo's disappearance and Miguelito's death are slowly revealed while the reader gets a real sense of the chaotic conditions of the country.

It's been several days since I finished up Money to Burn by Ricardo Piglia, which is a novelized retelling of real events surrounding a bank heist and its aftermath. Piglia first learned about it when he ended up on a train with the ex-girlfriend of one of the criminals involved. He had done some research about it but couldn't figure out how to shape it into a narrative. He filed what he had away, then forgot it for 20-something years. When it turned up again, he sought out and gained access to a lot of previously unrevealed information on the case.

The story concerns a set of criminals who decide to steal the municipal government's payroll funds in a daring daytime robbery. The principal criminals are pretty colorful characters, with nicks like Brignone the Kid. Dorda the Gaucho, and Mereles the Crow. Despite having the Buenos Aires provincial police on their trail, they manage to flee to Montevideo. They are not their long before their presence becomes known to the police. They hole up in an apartment where ensues a very dramatic and bloody standoff against several hundred police officers.

Piglia does take liberties to shade in the story, such as describing the personalities of the crooks and cops involved. The characters are already pretty colorful, and Piglia manages to make them nigh unforgettable. It's a pretty engrossing account of criminality in Buenos Aires.

Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar

This will be my final Argentina read for the moment (I have several more that I will return to later in the year), and is the one that started me off in the first place. Hopscotch has been on my TBR list for longer than any other book, so lots and lots of thanks to Rachbxl for sending me a copy.

Hopscotch is an odd novel, written as a series of short, staccato chapters that can be arranged at the whim of the reader. Cortazar suggests two schemes: reading only chapters 1-56 in order, or a longer route that involves reading all 155 chapters (excluding one) in an order set down at the start. He also mentions that reading only the odd or even chapters is also acceptable. I suspect that many people, like me, read to the second scheme, because it is the only one that involves reading almost all of the book.
The first 56 chapters contain the bulk of the narrative. It follows the story of Oliveira, an Argentinian intellectual living in Paris. He is part of 'The Club', a group of intellectuals and Bohemians. Oliveira's mistress, known as La Maga, is a relative ingenue. She doesn't understand much of what the Club talk about, and is treated by them as a sort of pet, despite showing herself to be more than their equal when it comes to understanding other people. Oliveira and La Maga's relationship is strained, because he fails to understand his feelings for La Maga, largely because he tries to intellectualize them. When tragedy causes La Maga to run away, The Club drift apart, and Oliveira returns to Argentina alone, where he engages in a series of aimless employments, haunted by the spectre of his former lover. His distance from the Bohemian lifestyle of Paris allows him to reassess his relationship with La Maga, which has disturbing effects on his relationships with other people.

The extra, interpolated chapters are a mish-mash of ideas. They occasionally give deeper insight into the thoughts of characters and into the narrative itself. They also introduce Morelli, the putative writer of Oliveira's story (though Oliveira and other characters frequently discuss Morelli). There are also other quotes and ideas thrown in, some of which inform the narrative in obvious ways, others which are seemingly random. These interpolated chapters have the effect of creating an entirely different book, because the reader understands more about the motives behind narrative events (and occasionally the outcomes of them), creating a different set of tensions and altering their perception of the characters.

With such a complex book, and one so rich in ideas, it seems a bit anti-climactic to report that it was just okay. Not great, not terrible, but just okay. The narrative itself was interesting, and Oliveira is both intellectually complex and frailly human in a really believable way, but I found thoughts and conversations of him and 'The Club' truly irritating, over-intellectualized in a way that drove me crazy. It was a spewing out of ideas, an idea of life a sort of word-association game, that, I think, always sounds much cleverer than it actually is. I realise that it was part of the point to construct characters as antitheses to La Maga, but they were a bit much. The 56 chapter narrative is also largely built around 3 or 4 long set-pieces, a couple of which I found too absurd for words. The extremity of the characters' Bohemian posings really got in the way of me liking them, or even being interested in them.
As for the interpolations, they were very hit-and-miss. As I said, sometimes they turned the narrative, and my understanding of it, on its head, and sometimes a simple quote planted a seed that would germinate as the subsequent chapter unfolds. In this respect Cortazar was very successful, because he genuinely created very different books out of a single narrative. However, too often my mind skipped, or the interpolation did nothing for the narrative, and I felt like I had been swindled into reading a couple of extra pointless pages. Again, I think it is part of the point that the extra chapters help you as a reader create the book that you are reading, including the bits you skip or fail to understand, but sometimes I found it wearisome.

If I had my time again, I would read the 56 chapter narrative first, then contemplate re-reading with the interpolations. As it is, I can never go back because I have already read and understood Hopscotch one way, and cannot undo it.It was a tremendously interesting and ambitious work, but not one that was always successful.

Thank you for the review of Hopscotch. I chose it as my Argentina read, and have been unable to get very far into it. I am still on the fence as to whether or not to abandon it, whether the reward will be worth the effort. I get the feeling from your review that it may not. (At least for me). Your comment that "the extremity of the characters' Bohemian posings really got in the way of me liking them, or even being interested in them," summarizes my opinion of what I've read so far, and why I am ambivalent about reading more.

Have you read The Winners? That was the book I had originally planned to read, and the descriptions of it make it sound more interesting than Hopscotch.

>136 arubabookwoman:
I haven't read The Winners, but others have (check out messages 70, 115 and 131). As well as Hopscotch, I read Cortazar's short story collection All Fires the Fire. I felt a bit ambivalent about both, so am not going to rush to read more Cortazar. I haven't been completely put off, and enjoyed moments in both books, but he certainly hasn't blown me away.

I finished The Tango Singer a few days ago and thought I would weigh in. I really enjoyed the novel, both in the beauty of its writing and in its love-letter-to-Buenos Aires (warts and all) quality.

If there is one major flaw it's that the novel is perhaps too Borgesian, so that at times it felt almost like a pastiche or a game of catch the allusion. In fact, the whole plot seems to be an homage to Cortazar's "The Pursuer" which is also about a writer named Bruno who is fascinated by a dying musician for whom time seems to flow (subjectively) different when performing. Sometimes it was almost distracting, as when Bruno refers to the astrologer's death squads. Is that just to avoid the usual El Brujo apellation or because Martinez is trying to make an Arlt reference?

A relatively minor flaw is that Bruno made for a rather unconvincing American, both in his absolute disinterest in 9/11 (especially considering he lived in New York) and for his relative ease in navigating Buenos Aires. (One does not learn that much Lunfardo from reading Borges.)

But those points aside, I found the novel very engrossing, especially what I got to learn about tango and the history of the city.

I am very late -- but house guests and other distractions ( living in FL in March!) led me away from Argentina. I found on my shelves an old Readers International novel that had been there for years. I think I had avoided it because I didn't want to viscerally encounter the horrors that were going on in Argentina and Uruguay and Chile in the late 70s and early 80s.

Marta Traba's Conversacion al sur was first published in 1981, with an English translation by Jo Labanyi in 1986 as Mothers and Shadows. Traba was a prominent SA art critic, novelist, and political reformer. Re the cover bio: " Born in Buenos Aires in 1930, Marta Traba lived in Bogota, Montevideo and the USA. She and her husband, Angel Rama, died in the 1983 Madrid plane crash with other prominent Latin American writers. Marta Traba won the 1966 Casa de las Americas Prize. She authored 33 published volumes of fiction, poetry, essays and art criticism...."

The novel, set during the reign of terror of the Generals in Argentina, the military torture in Uruguay and the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile is a dialogue between two women. Irene is an aging actress, who has led a privileged and bohemian life in South America, and is confounded by the repressive governmental tactics, the possible capture of her son in the Chilean overthrow, and the disappearance of her aristocratic friend's daughter in Argentina. Dolores, a daughter of the fearful Uruguayan working class, has gone to university, married a revolutionary and lost him and their unborn child to the torture inflicted by the military.

The terror is inescapable. The governments' major tactic is that of denial and disappearance. When Irene joins her friend on the weekly vigil of the mothers at the Plaza de Mayo -- what is most apparent is the absence of any sort of recognition.

"So these were the Madwomen of the Plaza de Mayo...The number of women was incredible and so was the silence: apart from the rapid footsteps and muffled greetings, there was not a sound, not a single army jeep was in sight. The Casa Rosada looked like a stage set, with thick curtains drawn across its windows. There were no grenadier guards on sentry duty at the gates either. It was the realization that the grenadier guards were not there that gave her a sudden, terrifying insight into the enemys's machinations: every Thursday, for the two to three hours during which the the demonstration took place, the Plaza de Mayo was wiped off the map. They couldn't fire on the women or lock them all up. It would have undermined the concerted effort they'd made to project a carefree image of the 'the Argentina I love'. Their ploy was simply to ignore them: to ignore the existence of the square and of the madwomen stamping their feet. Had they arrived at that degree of sophistication? And why not, if the same sophistication operated at the level of tortures and abductions. A developed nation does things properly."

Chilling. But it was finally those those madwomen, those mothers, who brought down the regime of horror in Argentina.

As translated from the inside front cover flap:

Luisa Valenzuela was born in Buenos Aires. When 19 years of age, her first short story was published in the magazine Ficción; since then she's published more than 20 books. A constant traveller, she's lived the major part of her adult life abroad. In 1979, after having written the account "Cambio de armas," and feeling that she couldn't show it to anyone without putting them in danger, she accepted an invitation to work as resident writer for Columbia University and left with the intention of never returning. She lived in New York and taught atew York University until 1989. Her short stories have been collected in the book Cuentos completos y uno mas. Almost all of her works have been translated into English, and to a lesser extent into German, French, Portugese, Dutch, Japanese, and Croatian. She has lived in Buenos Aires since 1989.

The protagonist (and also possibly the antagonist) of The Lizard's Tail was a real person; Jose Lopez Rega, dubbed "El Brujo," was an adviser to Juan Peron in his later years. Among other things, he practiced Umbanda (similar to Santeria or Voudou) and studied astrology, even publishing a book about the latter. (A copy is available on-line, but only in Spanish.)

The central character is certainly Rega, and the novel delves some into his relationship with the Perons--Juan, Evita, and Isabela. The novel does, however, seem to part ways with reality quite drastically. The Brujo of the novel flees to his hometown in Northern Argentina, where he plots strange orgies and rituals, has a double pyramid built, takes over a small town and converts its newspaper to an occultist publication.

To make matters stranger, El Brujo is writing a novel about his life, as is a woman who appears to be Luisa Valenzuela herself. She becomes romantically involved with a man hoping to bring down Rega, and she begins to wonder if there's anything she can write in her biography that will manage to put a stop to him.

It's a very strange, often disturbing, yet compelling look at the nature of power and violence, and the question of the writer's relationship to politics.

I have just started my Argentine reading and shall post my thoughts here as requested by depressaholic.
Shall spend some time reading this thread too.

I have just finished reading Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. I think I would have enjoyed this more if there had been a crib with the text. I am not well read enough to understand some of the allusions Borge makes. However, I admire his knowledge and his skill of incorporating that into his stories and essays.

Enjoyed The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez. My knowledge of Argentinian history is not very great, but this did not prevent me from enjoying this book.

as you embark with martinez you would certainly enjoy The Peron Novel

^Reading it now and will follow up with Santa Evita. Enjoying Matinez's books.

Just finished The Peron Novel, a fascinating account of Peron's years in exile in Spain. Surreal. Beautifully writen.

Next read will be Santa Evita by Martinez.

Santa Evita by Tomas Eloy Martinez. Fascinating book about what may or may not have happened to Evita's body after her death. Told from different people's perspectives I found this a very absorbing and interesting novel.

The Hare by Cesare Aira. I did not like this book very much. Not to my taste I think.

The Buenos Aires Quintet by Manuel Vazquez Montalban. Private detective travels from Spain to Argentina to find his cousin who has 'disappeared'. Well written if a bit too long.

The Moldavian Pimp by Edgardo Cozarinsky. A short book full of history about the Jewish pimps in Argentina. Liked the way in which this was written, narrative going back and forth in time.

Starting Hopscotch. After reading some of the reviews I think I shall read Chapters 1 -56 and forget the rest.

your recent voracious appetite for Argentine literature is quite impressive!

thanks berthirsch. I still have 6 books to read for my visit to Argentina.

My global reading plan is to visit each continent, reading several books for each country.
Will take a few years, but I am enjoying the journey.

i look forward to hearing about the next 6 books.

Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar. I read Chapters 1-56 which consist of the main narrative. There was too much philosophical reflection which spoilt the story for me.

The Story of the Night by Colm Toibin. I thought this story of a young homosexual man was beautifully written even though the subject matter is not something I would normally choose.

The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt. Amusing story written in 1929, about a man who after embezzling money from the firm where he is employed and his wife's desertion get involved with some very shady characters.

Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig. Two men in a prison cell in Argentina, talking to each other, one homosexual convicted of corrupting minors, the other a political dissident. Sounded as though it might be boring. It was not. I was hooked from the first few pages to the end.

I said about a year ago that I had an ongoing Argentina pile. I have finally got back to it. I'm not going to post full reviews or anything like that, but I thought I would add the books I have read to this thread, in case anyone is interested. I have read about half my pile, and will add the rest when I finish them. My new Argentina books for 2010 are:

The Duke by Enriqe Medina - memoirs of a boxer turned hoodlum, told as a dialogue between him and a rat that has infested his room. A book I relly struggled to like

Heaven of Drums by Ana Gloria Moya - Narrative history of the birth of Argentina told via a love triangle between General Belgrano, a slave girl and her lover. Very readable but not brilliant.

The Anatomist by Federico Andahazi - Historical novel about an anatomist who discovers the clitoris as the source of female pleasure. The anatomist runs foul of the religious authorities, and sparks a moral panic, as his discovery forces a reexamination of definitions of femininity. Quick and enjoyable read.

The Wandering Unicorn by Manuel Mujica Lainez - Historical fantasy set in 12th century France and in the Holy Land during the Crusades. Involved fairies, knights in armour and huge historical events, such as the victory of Saladin. Great characters, loads of fun to read, as well as being thought-provoking and of genuine historical interest.

The Buenos Aires Affair by Manuel Puig - Puig's unusual take on detective fiction, written using his trademark of multiple narrative styles, such as dialogue or reportage. The structure was interesting but the story failed to grip me.

Dreamtigers by Jorge Borges - My favourite Borges to date. Deeply personal fragments about his own journey through the labyrinths he sees in everyday life.

Fictions by Jorge Borges - His most famous collection of stories, this was a re-read for me. His metaphysical and philosophical puzzles are mind-bending, but I still feel that similar themes have been written more subtly and entertainingly since (try Umberto Eco). Still well worth read.

Clara by Luisa valenzuela - Good short novel about a young women from the provinces who comes to Buenos Aires only to be exploited by the men around her. It was written when Valenzuela was very young, and shows some signs of naivety, but was a thoroughly charming read.

Departing at Dawn by Gloria Lise - Set during the 'Dirty War', it follows the steps of a young woman wanted by the security forces. She retreats further into rural Argentina and sees a people in denial about what is happening in their own country. A slightly clumsy attempt at building narrative, but otherwise a very good short novel.

The Algorroba Quartet by Mario Goboloff - Ethereal looks at small town Argentinian life. Peopled with fascinating characters and beset with a sense of detachment from the rest of the world. Reminded me a little of Pedro Paramo.

Santa Evita by Tomas Eloy Martinez - Possibly my favourite book of the year to date. It is a look at Argentina's obsession with Eva Peron, told by looking at the fate of her body after her death. The story is largely truthful, making it seem all the more bizarre, but it also takes Borge's 'Death and the Compass' as a constant reference point, meaning that definitions of truth are hard to put your finger on. Brilliantly clever and wonderfully thought-provoking.

Blood of Requited Love by Manuel Puig - The latest installment in my own personal love/hate relationship with Puig. A disturbing and intense observation of obsessive and unhealthy love, it is both repulsive and hypnotising. It presents such a negative view of humanity and their relationships that I almost didn't want to like it, but it was so well written that I couldn't help it.

Mean Woman by Alicia Borinsky - Also (indirectly) a look at the cult of Peronism and the role of the matriarch in post-WWII Argentina. Told in oblique fragments, a book that I could appreciated without ever been fully engaged with.

Mothers and Shadows by Marta Traba - Novel looking at the fates of two women drawn into South America's 'Dirty War' first by their associations, then by their activities. Traba's book is touching and frightening, and the relationship between the two women provides a centrepiece for a disturbing look at the lives of ordinary people during one of South America's darkest periods.

Andy, I am very impressed by how much you have been reading from Argentina. Many of these books sound fascinating, andI I'll certainly look for some, but I definitely don't have the concentration or dedication to focus on one country like this.

Coincidentally, I am currently reading Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas which I first learned about on this thread, and wouldn't have even remembered to come back here to post about it when I finish it. So thanks for the reminder, too.

I've favorited messages 158 and 159 for future reference, as I'll want to check out several of these books in the future. Santa Evita and Dreamtigers are most interesting, but a number of others will likely make my wish list. Thanks, Andy!

-->160 rebeccanyc:
I don't know if you have any particular interest in Jewish literature, but the Goloboff book mentioned in 159 is part of the Jewish Latin American Writers series. It was worth a read.

-->161 kidzdoc:
I have been really lucky with this pile of books. I wasn't too discerning when I bought them. Only the Marta Traba was really bought in response to recommendations (from numerous LTers). I seem to have stopped reviewing this year, but if you wanted to hear more detailed opinions about any of them then let me know.

Great thread and fascinating posts Andy! There's enough valuable information here that you might consider posting to the "South American Fiction-Argentine Writers" group (http://www.librarything.com/groups/southamericanfictio). The group sometimes goes quiet, and perhaps this sort of information - together with further spectacular performances in the World Cup! - would nudge it into action. I'm currently reading César Aira's "The Seamstress and the Wind", having enjoyed his wonderfully bizarre How I Became a Nun last year.

I loved How I Became a Nun (my review is on the book's page, as well as message 63 on this thread). I was none the wiser about the world after I finished it, except having my suspicions that strawberry ice cream isn't good for you confirmed. I would love to know what you make of any other Aira you have read.

I will check out the Argentine writers group, though having successfully escaped from my Argentina TBR by finishing it, I don't want to get sucked back in for the moment. My new Argentina TBR already consists of one book (The Tango Singer), but I think it might be time to explore other bits of the world.

#162 Thanks. I did see it was part of a series (the first in fact), and I do have an interest in Jews and Jewish writing from places around the world where one wouldn't "expect" to find them. I am finding it charming (reading it on the subway, so it's going in fits and starts) but am irritated by a number of obvious typos.

#162 I read An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by Aira and I too was "none the wiser" when I finished it As I said in my review, "Parts of the novel are very beautifully written, and the author is clearly exploring ideas of beauty, horror, the nature of perception, and the nature of art but what it all adds up to is a mystery to me."