The Tango Singer: A Novel - Hardcover

Tomas Eloy Martinez

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582346011 ISBN 13: 9781582346014

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2006

Synopsis

A hypnotic novel in which an American student's quest to find the greatest living tango singer leads him deep into the labyrinth of Argentina's past.
It is 2001, and inflation is spiraling out of control in Argentina as Bruno Cadogan, an American graduate student specializing in Borges, arrives in Buenos Aires. Cadogan is on the trail of Julio Martel, an elusive tango singer rumored to be even better than Carlos Gardel, the greatest singer of the 1920s and '30s. Martel has never recorded and his strange, powerful performances, at seemingly arbitrary sites around the city, are always unannounced.

Cadogan finds lodging in a boarding house rumored to be the setting of the famous Borges story "The Aleph," and soon finds himself drawn into the tangle of legends surrounding the singer's life. As the economic tension grows and the city hovers on the verge of riots, Bruno begins to believe that Martel's increasingly rare performances are in fact far from random―that they instead form a map of the darkest moments in the city's past.

About this title

About the Author:

Tomás Eloy Martínez is a journalist, a professor, and an award-winning and bestselling novelist whose books include Santa Evita and The Perón Novel. Born in Argentina in 1934, he lived in exile in Venezuela during the military dictatorship. He has lived in the United States since 1982 and is currently a professor and director of the Latin American Program at Rutgers University. He was shortlisted for the 2005 International Man Booker Prize.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* The Argentine author of The Peron Novel (1988) and its sequel, Santa Evita (1996), presents another history- and culture-drenched novel about another famous Argentine figure--writer Jorge Luis Borges--and one of the most signature features of Argentine society, the tango. This complicated novel's conceit is that a young American man by the name of Bruno Cadogan is writing a Ph.D. dissertation on Borges' essays on the tango and goes to reside for a while in Buenos Aires to find occasions to listen to master tango singer Julio Martel, who sings tango songs of a much earlier era, never records his voice, and whose appearances are sporadic and spring up in odd places around the city, his prematurely -broken-down body making a strange host to such a mesmerizing vocal instrument. As Borges' writing was keyed to places and events around the Buenos Aires he knew so well despite his blindness, Cadogan seeks to find a pattern to Martel's unannounced appearances that will also provide a key to understanding the city's dramatic past. This discursive, digressive novel, at once oblique and tantalizing, crammed as if it were a scrapbook with anecdotes about Argentine's past and present, is, in the end, a magical impression of the chimera that is Buenos Aires. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1582346011
• ISBN 13: 9781582346014
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 246