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The Tango Singer: A Novel
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Product Description
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.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #715514 in Books
- Published on: 2006-05-16
- Released on: 2006-05-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
A playfully convoluted new work from Argentinean Martínez (Santa Evita) follows an American graduate student to Buenos Aires on the trail of an unrecorded authentic tango singer named Julio Martel. In May 2001, Bruno Cadogan ("shitting" in Argentinean argot) arrives in Buenos Aires to hear Martel and complete his dissertation on Jorge Luis Borges's essays on tango. But who is Julio Martel? With the help of a scruffy young kiosk worker named El Tucumano, Bruno finds a room in a low-end boarding house near "the Aleph" of Borges's tale (e.g., a point in space that contains all other points) and begins to scour the city, gripped by out-of-control inflation, for signs of the singer. He plots a map of Martel sightings and elicits from Martel's lover and others tortuous stories of the singer's life: born prematurely in 1945, Martel suffers from hemophilia; he desired, as he made a name for himself in the unstable mid-1970s years of the Perón dictatorship, only to sound like the earlier star tango singer, Carlos Gardel. As each tale winds elaborately into the next, Martinez's work becomes an affecting, affectionate nod to Borges—and his beloved, damaged Buenos Aires as the "aleph" of the universe. (May)
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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
Review
“Brilliant... A superb craftsman, Mr. Martínez moves through stories of Evita’s life and death—and the peregrinations of her body—with a dazzling array of literary devices...He affirms his place among Latin America’s best writers.”—New York Times
“For Martinez, this tale—which he relates in fetid, intoxicating prose, as eerily enticing as the faint odor of lavender—isn’t just a way into his country’s essence but into its soul.”—Salon.com
“Finally, here is the novel that I have always wanted to read.”—Gabriel García Márquez
Customer Reviews
The Life of Buenos Aires was a Labyrinth
Tomas Eloy Martinez is a superlative writer. He has written about his native Argentina in award winning books such as 'Santa Evita' and 'The Peron Novel' and though he has been on the faulty of Rutgers University (Latin American Program) since 1982, he first wrote THE TANGO SINGER in Spanish in 2004. It comes to us through the English translation by Anne McLean. Many idiosyncrasies here, but at least we finally have access to what is one of the finest novels this reader has read this year!Martinez writes with a flowing, dancing style and with a technique that obliterates the lines between the past and the present in such a unique manner that his style is utterly mesmerizing.
Bruno Cadogan lives in Manhattan and is writing a dissertation on Jorge Luis Borges' essays on tango and discovers a clue to understanding Borges' words about the famous Tango singer Carlos Gardel (in early 1900s) in finding information about a current tango singer Julio Martel whose strange life and lack of recordings drive Bruno to fly to Buenos Aires in hopes of not only hearing Martel sing but to also engage him in conversation to further define his dissertation. Upon arrival in Buenos Aires Bruno meets a fellow he calls El Tucumano and they room together (we are not sure to what extent these two attractive men are bonded) and together they search the city for performances by Martel. Every performance location, though thwarted, introduces them to different characters who relate different aspects of the history of Buenos Aires: the rooming house where the two live is also the location of a librarian Bonorino who lives in the cellar and is convinced he has found Borges' 'aleph' ('a point in space that contains all other points') and Bruno falls under the spell of the new information. But the main goal of finding Martel overtakes him and eventually he is on the trail of the mysterious tango singer who was born a hemophiliac and has a distorted body and health. Ultimately Bruno meets Martel's lover Alcira and meets Martel in an ending to the novel.
The story of Martel's strange life is alone fascinating enough for the novel to hold the reader's interest, but Martinez doesn't stop there. He finds ways of reviewing the long history of Buenos Aires from 1810 when the Spanish domination was ended through the many trials of political upheaval, through the Peron era, to the present 2001 period when five presidents were elected and rejected within a week's time! He lets us get to know the mysterious city of Buenos Aires: 'the shape of a labyrinth is not in the lines but in the spaces between those lines'...'the true labyrinth of Buenos Aires is its people. So near and at the same time so distant. So similar on the outside and so diverse within. Such reserve, which Borges tries to assert as the essence of Argentina, and at the same time such shamelessness.'
Tomas Eloy Martinez' style of writing takes some mental adjustment to keep the timelines clear and he uses no quotation marks making it difficult at times to differentiate between conversation and reportage, but the style once understood is like the music about which he writes. This little novel has all the seduction and romance and challenge and lust of a tango. It is brilliant! Highly recommended. Grady Harp, June 06
I really enjoyed this!
If you love Argentine culture, literature and her people, this is an extremely satisfying novel. If you don't know a lot about Borges or Argentina in general, it may not be the best Martinez novel for you.
Atmospheric and mystical literary read about Bs As
A short but intriguing novel set in 2001 from Eloy Martínez, a writer whose work battles between history and literature. Whereas 'Santa Evita' (****) and The 'Perón Novel' (****) saw history dominant, here it is the literary side that provides an (allegorical?) framework for an almost mystical search through the horrors of Argentina's recent history. Best read if you have a knowledge of Buenos Aires and Borges - and a map handy!.
