The Tango Singer

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A bestseller in Latin America, this hauntingly beautiful novel by Argentinean Tomás Eloy Martínez is now, blessedly, available in the U.S. in a superb English translation. The complex story follows an American scholar on a dreamlike odyssey to Buenos Aires, where his obsessive search for an elusive tango singer takes him through a Borgesian labyrinth and into the darkest secrets of Argentina's troubled past. A strange and beautiful book than blends fiction, history, and myth into an intoxicating brew, The Tango Singer is strongly recommended for lovers of literature and/or Latin American culture.

Publishers Weekly

A playfully convoluted new work from Argentinean Martinez (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 Per n 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) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Written by veteran novelist Eloy Martinez, who was born in Argentina and now teaches at Rutgers University, NJ, this novel follows an American researcher named Bruno Cadogan as he searches for a little-known but exceptionally gifted contemporary tango singer in the chaotic and bankrupt Buenos Aires, when within ten days in 2001 Argentina had five presidents. The voice of Julio Martel is said to be "full as a sphere" and far more beautiful than that of legendary tango singer Carlos Gardel. Because Martel performs his vocal magic at a string of odd places throughout the city, Cadogan believes his trajectory springs from the Kabala or some other arcane formula. But Martel is dying of a necrotic liver, and the loyalty of his caregiver Alcira so inspires Bruno, who is gay, that he even proposes to her. As Bruno makes sense of Martel's far-from-random movements, readers are treated to a captivating tour of the gutters and glories of Buenos Aires. Essential reading for all enthusiasts of Latin American culture.-Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

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 Per-n 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 Mart'nez 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 theresult 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 Mart'nez's banal Per-n-inflected novels-and reason enough to understand why some readers consider him one of Latin America's major literary exports.