The Sixty-Five Years of Washington - Softcover

Saer, Juan José

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1934824208 ISBN 13: 9781934824207

Publisher: Open Letter, 2010

Synopsis

"With meticulous prose, rendered by Dolph's translation into propulsive English, Saer's The Sixty-Five Years of Washington captures the wilderness of human experience in all its variety."—New York Times

It's October 1960, say, or 1961, in a seaside Argentinian city named Santa Fe, and The Mathematician—wealthy, elegant, educated, dressed from head to toe in white—is just back from a grand tour of Europe. He's on his way to drop off a press release about the trip to the papers when he runs into Ángel Leto, a relative newcomer to Santa Fe who does some accounting, but who this morning has decided to wander the town rather than go to work.

One day soon, The Mathematician will disappear into exile after his wife's assassination, and Leto will vanish into the guerrilla underground, clutching his suicide pill like a talisman. But for now, they settle into a long conversation about the events of Washington Noriega's sixty-fifth birthday—a party neither of them attended.

Saer's The Sixty-Five Years of Washington is simultaneously a brilliant comedy about memory, narrative, time, and death and a moving narrative about the lost generations of an Argentina that was perpetually on the verge of collapse.

Juan José Saer was the leading Argentinian writer of the post-Borges generation. The author of numerous novels and short-story collections (including Scars and La Grande), Saer was awarded Spain's prestigious Nadal Prize in 1987 for The Event.

Steve Dolph is the founder of Calque, a journal of literature in translation. His translation of Juan José Saer's Scars was a finalist for the 2012 Best Translated Book Award.

About this title

About the Author

Juan José Saer was the leading Argentinian writer of the post-Borges generation. The author of numerous novels and short-story collections (including Scars and La Grande), Saer was awarded Spain's prestigious Nadal Prize in 1987 for The Event.

Steve Dolph is the founder of Calque, a journal of literature in translation. His translation of Juan José Saer's Scars was a finalist for the 2012 Best Translated Book Award.

Review

"In this brilliant novel, the Argentine writer Saer packs several decades of his country's history into a single hour ... With meticulous prose, rendered by Dolph's translation into propulsive English, Saer's novel captures the wilderness of human experience in all its variety, as well as the “blind, incomprehensible, ceaseless drift of time."—Jascha Hoffman, The New York Times

"The Sixty-Five Years of Washington is worth working through—not only for the richness of its content but also because the effort itself is what gives us a three-dimensional understanding of its themes."—Suzanne Marie Hopcroft, The Rogue Idea

"...Phenomenal, demonstrating a dazzling unification of form and function."—Scott Bryan Wilson, Rain Taxi

"But while some of those sentences are long enough to rival Proust's, they are infused with a palpitating sensuality, their breathing equally crafted. A cerebral explorer of the problems of narrative in the wake of Joyce and Woolf, of Borges, Rulfo and Arlt, Saer is also a stunning poet of place."—Lorna Scott Fox, The Nation

"The most important Argentinian writer since Borges."—The Independent

"To say that Juan José Saer is the best Argentinian writer of today is to undervalue his work. It would be better to say that Saer is one of the best writers of today in any language."—Ricardo Piglia

Edition details

• Publisher: Open Letter
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1934824208
• ISBN 13: 9781934824207
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 203