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 HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.

Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985

ISBN: 038549081X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
BURNING QUESTIONS
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.