Why a Booktrail?
2001 – A story of how a fan of an author uses settings of a novel and of a singers performance to tell the story of a city – A booktrail classic!
The Tango Singer
What you need to know before your trail
An American student’s quest to find the greatest living tango singer leads him deep into the labyrinth of Argentina’s past.
It’s 2001 and inflation in the country is spiraling out of control. Bruno Cadogan, an American graduate student arrives in Buenos Aires specialising in the novels of Borges, 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.
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 mystery and legend of how the singers rare and random performances are actual the settings of some of the city’s darkest moments.
Travel Guide
“Buenos Aires was a city I knew only from literature….”
From the very first line, this book literarily and figuratively dances into the realms of booktrailing. A student writing a dissertation on Borges and his essays on the origins of the tango. At first he doesn’t want to go thinking that photos and films were enough –
I could imagine the humidity, the Rio de la Plata, the drizzle, Borges tottering along the southern streets with his white cane
The country and setting of Borges and of tango are intrinsically intertwined in this story which is as theatrical and extravagant as the dance that it is about.
“For Borges, the only true tangos were those compared before 1910 when they were still danced in brothels..”
Jorge Borges’ short story about the origin of the tango – The Adelph – is thought to be set in Garay between Bolivar and Defensa. The rest of the novel is about the places important to the story of the Tango and of Borges and to see and understand the places helps to put the various strands of the story together. For example when he sings opposite the Athletics Club – this is symbolic for being a place of torture under the military dictatorship. A factory – also a place in the Tango story – is noted for being where 30 striking workers were gunned down in the so-called Semana Trágica (Tragic Week) of 1919.
Where Next?
