The Tango Singer
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Bruno Cadogan has flown from New York to Buenos Aires in search of the elusive and legendary Julio Martel, a tango singer whose voice has never been recorded yet is said to be so beautiful it is almost supernatural. Bruno is increasingly drawn to the mystery of Martel and his strange and evocative performances in a series of apparently arbitrary sites around the city. As Bruno tries to find Martel, he begins to untangle the story of the singer's life, and to believe that Martel's increasingly rare performances map a dark labyrinth of the city's past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A playfully convoluted new work from Argentinean Mart nez (Santa Evita) follows an American graduate student to Buenos Aires on the trail of an unrecorded authentic tango singer named Julio Martel. In May 2001, Bruno Cadogan ("shitting" in Argentinean argot) arrives in Buenos Aires to hear Martel and complete his dissertation on Jorge Luis Borges's essays on tango. But who is Julio Martel? With the help of a scruffy young kiosk worker named El Tucumano, Bruno finds a room in a low-end boarding house near "the Aleph" of Borges's tale (e.g., a point in space that contains all other points) and begins to scour the city, gripped by out-of-control inflation, for signs of the singer. He plots a map of Martel sightings and elicits from Martel's lover and others tortuous stories of the singer's life: born prematurely in 1945, Martel suffers from hemophilia; he desired, as he made a name for himself in the unstable mid-1970s years of the Per n dictatorship, only to sound like the earlier star tango singer, Carlos Gardel. As each tale winds elaborately into the next, Martinez's work becomes an affecting, affectionate nod to Borges and his beloved, damaged Buenos Aires as the "aleph" of the universe.
