 |
 |
   |
|
|
|
|
The Tango SingerEditions
ReviewAnother novel set in the Argentine capital (see the review of The Moldavian Pimp Bruno Cadogan, a PhD student from North America arrives in Buenos Aires in 2001, at the height of Argentina’s economic troubles. The visit is meant to help him put together material for a thesis on the subject of Borges’s essays on the origins of tango. Serendipitously, he gets to stay at the apartment in the very building where Borges’s celebrated story ‘The Aleph’ is set, and he starts on a trail of a legendary tango singer, mysterious, brilliant, elusive, and crippled, Julio Martel. In the plethora of intertwined stories where myth, fiction and history sit side by side, through a character of Bruno, Eloy Martinez attempts to understand the secret of tango and its hold on the imagination of writers, musicians and artists, and on the ever-expanding number of tango enthusiasts across the globe. Born in the slums of Buenos Aires in the 1880s, tango was first associated with pimps and prostitutes and flourished among what high society called lowlife. For Borges – Bruno learns- the only true tangos were those composed before 1910, when they were still danced in brothels, and not the ones that appeared later, influenced by Parisian tastes and Genoese tarantellas. Julio Martel sings just such very old tangos but he hasn’t recorded a singe line and turns up to sing unannounced at apparently arbitrary sites around the city. Like American jazz, tango grew to popularity and acclaim abroad before coming back home triumphant. Later, the genius of Astor Piazzola revolutionised the form taking it from traditional dance halls to modern-day concert halls. Today, you can listen to tango music and dance this most sensual, elegant, seriously sexy-in-a-grown-up-sort-of-way and utterly addictive dance in ‘milongas’ in London and all major European cities on almost every night of the week. If this sounds more like a recruitment drive for new tango fanatics than a review, let me assure you, this book is a damn good read too, and a marvellous evocation of the city of Borges, Peron and the generals. - review by Marzena Pogorzaly |
|
John Sandoe [Books] Ltd |
Fax:
020 7581 2084