The Eighth Wonder
a novel
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- Pedido anticipado
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- Se espera: 25 ago 2026
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- $249.00
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- Pedido anticipado
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- $249.00
Descripción editorial
A fantastical story where the protagonist is caught between reality and the feverish inventions of his mind by a groundbreaking female novelist of Argentina’s metaphysical tradition.
Available for the first time in English, this classic of Latin American literature--in the tradition of Borges, her mentor--features a foreword by Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Alberto Paradella, a divorced lawyer, journalist, and writer who is thirty-two years old, wakes up one morning in Buenos Aires next to a blonde woman who insists her name is Alicia Martínez and wears a necklace identical to one he saw on another woman’s neck in Berlin. Originally written during Argentina's Dirty War, this story is set in Buenos Aires in the 1970s but shifts to Milan, Berlin, and Vienna. The narrator, a castaway of sorts, travels aimlessly between countries but also between past and present, waking life and dreams, truth and lies.
Isolated in his study, Alberto pretends to write a novel to escape from himself and those around him. As betrayals are exposed, his life begins to fall apart. His journey—physical and psychological—unfolds like a dream. Specific characters like the mysterious woman appear, but the boundaries between memory, fantasy, and reality blur. This “adventure of the philosophical imagination” as Bioy Casares describes the book in his foreword, leads us to question, like all great fiction: What is real?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Argentinian writer Kociancich (The Last Days of William Shakespeare), who died in 2022, offers a mesmerizing character study of a lawyer turned writer trying to make sense of his life. Alberto Paradella, 32, wakes up one morning in 1970s Buenos Aires to two strange discoveries: a naked blond woman outside his door, pleading with him to let her in; and a story in the newspaper about an award-winning film he wrote during a dreamlike visit to Berlin, which, he learns from the article, he didn't receive credit for. The woman finds her clothes in his apartment and he remembers meeting her the day before at a train station, but it's not clear what happened. He tries to recover his sense of self, having realized that by entering the world of cinema, he's become "one of those tourists I pity, people who wager their desire to be another on the roulette of foreign circumstance." A series of flashbacks build to his momentous trip to Berlin, where he sees a woman who looks just like the one who appears at the beginning of the novel. Kociancich guides the reader with a steady hand as the book draws to its dizzying conclusion, and she peppers the narrative with fascinating insights into cinema, which one character calls "the eighth wonder." This will stay with readers.
