By way of an epigraph (or technically, hypograph, but you don't care about Greek)

[starlady]

I didn't buy the shoes, because I decided if I was going to spend $200+ on shoes I should just put it to a pair of Fluevogs. I did buy the handbag. It's a really nice handbag.

I don't know how to reconcile the ignoble lines my hand was writing with the thoughts of the dazzling light I'd just seen. I had wanted to say to my friend that, since we didn't come from Buenos Aires, he and I were perhaps more sensitive than natives to its beauty. The city had been raised at the limits of an unvarying plain, among scrubland as useless for nourishment as it was for basket-making, on the edge of a river whose single redeeming feature was its enormous width. Although Borges tried to ascribe it a past, the one it now has is also smooth, without any heroic feats other than those improvised by its poets and painters, and each time one took any fragment of the past in hand, it was only to watch it dissolve, into a monotonous present. It's always been a city where the poor were plentiful and where one had to walk with occasional jumps to dodge the piles of dog shit. Its only beauty is what the human imagination attributes to it. It's not surrounded by sea and hills, like Hong Kong and Nagasaki, nor does it lie on a trade route along which civilization has navigated for centuries, like London, Paris, Florence, Geneva, Prague and Vienna. No traveler arrives in Buenos Aires en route to somewhere else. Beyond the city there is no somewhere else: the spaces of nothing that open up to the south were called, on sixteenth-century maps, Land of Unknown Sea, Land of the Circle and Land of Giants, the allegorical names of non-existence. Only a city that had denied so much beauty can have, even in adversity, such an affecting beauty.

     --Tomás Eloy Martínez, The Tango Singer, trans. Anne McLean (136-37)

Comments

[hl]

Perhaps not surprisingly, I'm having a somewhat strong reaction to that text.

I'm glad you got the handbag, though!

[starlady]

Have you read the book? I got it in BsAs before I left, and I liked it - review to follow. I don't know that I agree with what he is saying in here, even, but I liked it when I read it on the plane.

It was great to see you!

[hl]

I haven't! If it's actually not the authorial voice, but a unreliable narrator, I would be less bothered, but I still am not surprised it was written by an argentinian.

'Buenos Aires looks towards Paris' is not an idle phrase when it comes to the 'intellectual elite'.

Ascribing all 'civilization' to Europe and a general vague distrust about about our own historical heroes (and heroic villains) is also always in fashion, and only marginally less annoying to me than the opposite (that is, that overwhelming national pride the anti-intellectual bit of the right indulges in).

(The line about dog shit is probably the only charming part that is also recognizably Argentinian. :P)

It was awesome to meet you! I was very sorry I couldn't make it to dinner that other night.

[starlady]

It's an unreliable narrator - one Bruno Cadogan, an American grad student, highly intelligent but a bit of a moron in my opinion. More later, in the review.

[lilacsigil]

That text makes Buenos Aires sound exactly like Melbourne.

[starlady]

Not the effect Martinez intended, I'm sure. :)