THE TANGO SINGER

Name: THE TANGO SINGER
Author: Tomás Eloy Martínez
ISBN: 1-58234-601-1

by Tomás Eloy Martínez & translated by Anne McLean ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 16, 2006

Worlds better than Martínez’s banal Perón-inflected novels—and reason enough to understand why some readers consider him one...

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Argentina’s flamboyant culture and troubled history are explored from an unusual perspective in this third translated novel from the Argentine-born (now U.S. resident) author of The Perón Novel and Santa Evita.

It recounts the scholarly adventure (and intellectual awakening) of American Ph.D. candidate Bruno Cadogan, a Borges scholar who travels in 2001 to Buenos Aires to research both his dissertation topic (the treatment of the eponymous dance’s history in Borges’s essays) and a subject suggested to him during a brief meeting with the cultural historian Jean Franco: legendary “tango singer” Julio Martel. Thus, with convenient if somewhat arch irony, Bruno arrives in Buenos Aires, and finds lodgings at the boarding house famous for being the supposed inspiration for Borges’s great, maddeningly coy and enigmatic short story “The Aleph.” That story imagines the existence of a theoretical “point” at which all other potential points converge. And, as it happens, the elusive Martel’s artistry runs a somewhat parallel course. Chronically ill and perhaps near death, the tango singer performs only free concerts, unannounced except by “underground” word of mouth, in abandoned buildings, warehouses and slums throughout his city. His songs are patchwork distillations of Argentina’s history, epic laments that chronicle the experiences of immigration and exile and, more generally, a long, sorrowful reiteration of cultural, ethnic and political conflict. This is an ingenious concept, and Martínez handles it quite cleverly, doling out information in quick little bursts of introspection, surmise and narrative. But this structure betrays him into overloading the novel with discursive commentary—and the result is that the central story of Bruno’s seekings and findings ultimately becomes neither convincing nor especially interesting. And yet, the image of the tango singer as his country’s moribund yet stoical conscience is hard to forget.

Worlds better than Martínez’s banal Perón-inflected novels—and reason enough to understand why some readers consider him one of Latin America’s major literary exports.

Pub Date: May 16, 2006

ISBN: 1-58234-601-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
PURGATORY
by Tomás Eloy Martínez & translated by Frank Wynne

- BOOK REVIEW
SANTA EVITA
by Tomás Eloy Martínez

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

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Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.