Once Upon Argentina
-
- 10,99 €
-
- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
Once Upon Argentina tells the sentimental and political story of a family that comes from everywhere, and of a country’s wandering, migratory culture
In the beginning it was Jacobo, born in tsarist Russia, who fled to Buenos Aires and married a young Lithuanian woman named Lidia. Or was it René, a French sculptor who knelt before no one, and his wife Louise Blanche, who left France only to end up in a remote town in northern Argentina.
Descended from these colorful, half-forgotten character, the young narrator of this novel employs dazzling prose to construct a journey through a family tree populated with endearing, eccentric, unforgettable figures, along with an intelligent and personal account of the construction of contemporary Argentina, from Yrigoyen to Menem, through Peronism and the nightmare of dictatorships.
These stories intersect, intertwining like a set of Matryoshka dolls or hall of mirrors, letting the personal and political histories of the twentieth century reflect off of one another. Wit extraordinary delicacy and intensity that combines elegy, tragedy, and humor, Andrés Neuman unpacks a territory as real as it is fantastic, as strange as it is our own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Argentine writer Neuman (Fracture) delivers a dazzling kaleidoscopic account of his personal and familial history. At his urging, Andrés's grandmother writes down the partial story of her life in a letter to him, leaving it abruptly unfinished. Years later, he decides "to complete the story," imagining details of his ancestors' lives and including his own recollections of his boyhood and youth in Argentina in the 1970s to 1990s. Across 75 short, vignette-like chapters told out of chronological order, a charming family saga comes into view. With a pitch-perfect balance of the light and the serious, Neuman describes the triumphs and terror faced by his family, including his musician mother's performance in the Buenos Aires Philharmonic Orchestra for president Juan Perón and the torture of his aunt by the junta following the 1976 coup. At the heart is the author's own coming-of-age in a bohemian neighborhood of Buenos Aires before his emigration to Spain with his family at age 14. A sharp prose style guides the reader handily through shifting places and times, and it renders the occasional figurative language (a student politician's speech is like "a tune anxious to become reality") all the more beautiful. This love letter to the author's family and homeland transcends the personal and reaches the universal.
