South American Fiction

I’m pretty up on Latin American fiction lately. I’m thrilled that all of Bolano is getting translated. I’m also interested to get a little deeper into lesser-known and newer Latin American authors. The Village Voice has a nice essay on several new ones.

In The Tango Singer, the latest novel by Tomás Eloy Martínez, author of Santa Evita and The Peron Novel, Borges is everywhere. The book moves at a feverish, thriller-like pace, yet it is also riddled with false turns and fictions, mazes and puzzles. Bruno Cadogan, an American grad student researching Borges’s essays on the tango, arrives in Argentina just in time to watch the twin towers collapse on TV while the city around him descends into chaos and the economy crumbles. Staying at a lodging house rumored to be the setting for Borges’s famous story "The Aleph," Cadogan tries vainly to make sense of Buenos Aires, a palimpsest where each corner, each building, conceals a secret history. But as Cadogan follows the trail of Julio Martel, an ailing, enigmatic tango singer who only appears at random locations around town, he begins to see Buenos Aires in a different light.

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