Lo prometido es deuda

Le prometí a Oyola que iba a traducir la reseña de Kryptonita al español, así que ahí va...

Qué pasaría si...?

Es de noche en la guardia del hospital Paroissien de Isidro Casanova, una parte fea del Gran Buenos Aires. Un nochero (los médicos "extraoficiales" que por unos pesos cubren las guardias de los médicos que se supone están de turno) está por terminar su tercer día sin dormir y no puede pensar en nada más que en ir a casa y tragar un puñado de pastillas que le den un sueño que es cualquier cosa menos lleno de paz. Fue una noche movida pero se está por poner peor: llega un paciente con una herida extraña y varios amigos extraños a la saga. Es Nafta Súper, uno de los criminales más peligrosos de la zona, y sus amigos son los demás miembros de su banda. Se vacía la guardioa de pacientes y médicos, la policía rodea al hospital, y el doctor recibe instrucciones claras:  mantené con vida a Nafta Súper hasta el amanecer o sos hombre muerto. Pero Nafta Súper no es un ser humano común... de hecho, ninguno de sus amigos lo es.

Los "elseworlds" son una afianzada tradición de los comics y las novelas gráficas, una que ubica a héroes conocidos en contextos alternativos (un Batman pirata de capa y espada, Súperman como Tarzán, Linterna Verde en el Lejano Oeste, etc.), y Kryptonita es un tributo declarado a los superhéroes a través de un elseworld muy argentino. Aquí, Nafta Súper es Súperman y sus "socios" son los miembros de la Liga de la Justicia (la Mujer Maravilla, Batman, Linterna Verde, etc.). Hay reconstrucciones de sus historias de vida, y hasta relatos de algunas de sus aventuras más famosas (como la serie de DC de la Muerte de Súperman de 1996), y la representación es precisa hasta con sus rivales y debilidades secretas. Esta es apenas una de las referencias pop de la novela, llena de alusiones al rock/pop de los 80, al a cumbia y a los códigos de la calle suburbana. Eso sólo la convertiría en una rareza en un mundillo literario que sabe más de filósofos franceses que de los pasillos de las villas miseria. Pero para Oyola (el autor de Chamamé, gólgota y Siete y el tigre harapiento, entre otros) es "lo de costumbre": se especializa en historias suburbanas vertiginosas en las que delito, acción y violencia se mezclan con fantasía y mafia, empapadas de un clima hecho de referencias al pop y rock y personajes fuertes con raíces muy profundas en la realidad. Se lo llamó un novelista negro, y ganó el primer premio en la Semana Negra de Gijón, pero su paleta (por más oscura que sea) tiene muchos otros matices.

Y Kryptonita es el ejemplo perfecto, un guiso en el que todos los ingredientes no pueden venir más que de su pluma. La historia es directa (Nafta Súper fue traicionado por su némesis, deben sobrevivir la noche peleando con la policía y demás), pero el hecho de que los personajes tengan "algo más" transforma a la historia en algo más. En el mismo acto, pone de cabeza aquel viejo dilema de la ficción policial argentina, que es negra por definición porque en estos pagos es difícil distinguir a los criminales, los jueces  y el gobierno (un problema sobre el que El secreto de sus ojos y Betibú, de Claudia piñeiro, hicieron foco, por mencionar sólo dos ejemplos recientes y bien conocidos): si esto sucede con los detectives locales, ¿qué le pasaría a un superhéroe argentino? Si sacamos al último hijo de Kryptón de Smallville, ¿va a crecer honrado y defensor de la ley? ¿O escribirá su propia ley? Éste descubrimiento solo, y traer estos temas a un ambiente literario que no tiene un Michael Chabon que ensalce sus héroes pop, hacen que valga la lena leer el libro.

Pero, por más vertiginosas y duras e imaginativas que sean las historias, hay momentos en los que el relato se suelta y se le va de las manos a Oyola, recargando una trama a la que le vendría bien ir derecho y rápido como una flecha con largos desvíos de flashbacks e historias pasadas de los personajes. Los desvíos en sí son atrapantes, el universo ficcional es sólido y las voces que usa para contarlo son interesantes para explorar, pero cuando varios capítulos de 10 páginas nos quitan de la trama principal en un libro de 215 páginas llega un punto en que el lector dice "está todo muy bueno, pero lleváme de vuelta al tipo que se está muriendo en la camilla del quirófano y a los bonaerenses armados hasta los dientes afuera del hospital."

Si el escritor es el padre de la novela, se podría decir que a veces Oyola es un padre permisivo al que le encanta ver las destrezas de su hijo habilidoso y se niega a tirar de las riendas o editar su producción, Y una imaginación desbocada contando una historia salvaje requiere de una mano firme para controlarla y darle forma, o la misma fuerza del potencial narrativo termina por ir en contra de la efectividad de la historia: si Tolkien dejó tantos cuadernos con historias laterales inconclusas de la Tierra Media y Sussannah Clarke extendió el universo de su Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell en algunos cuentos de The Ladies of Grace Adieu, es porque se dieron cuenta del potencial del mundo imaginario que habían creado pero también de que todas esas historias no cabían en el marco de las novelas (y esos eran libros mucho más extensos que Kryptonita).

Hay que decir, también, que ésta hubiera sido un área para que un buen editor se luciera afilando. Un editor que mereciera ese nombre hubiera ayudado a ajustar los hilos de la narración para que la prosa potente de Oyola y su explosiva imaginación rindieran al máximo, pero, ¡ay! , el trabajo de edición en este libro está al borde de la incompetencia, al punto de horrores de ortografía como "exploción" (página 175) llegaran a la página impresa. Por desgracia, una mirada superficial a otro lanzamiento de septiembre de la misma editorial muestra fallas similares, lo que no habla mal de los autores (los errores ocurren) pero sí del hecho de que alguien en esa editorial no se está ganando el sueldo (están ahí para que esos errores no lleguen a las librerías).

Pero ninguna de estas cosas anula el hecho de que es una novela notable, una que pide a gritos más parentela: si fuera la primera de su clase y se pudiera algún día llenar un estante con historias de calibre similar escritas por Oyola y otros escritores argentinos, yo como lector me daría por contento y la literatura argentina se vería muy enriquecida. No estamos frente a "The amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay" de Michael Chabon, ni tampoco a un "American Gods" de Neil Gaiman, pero es un buen primer paso en esa prometedora dirección.

Publicada en el Buenos Aires Herald el 30 de septiembre de 2011

Entrevista con Scott Stoll, un ciclista que dio la vuelta al mundo en 4 años

Soul rider

By: Pablo Toledo

Scott Stoll on riding a bike around the world, writing about it and getting kids to illustrate it

What do you do when everything around you seems to crumble? Break down and cry? Roll downhill? Soldier on? Scott Stoll found an alternative: get on your bike and fall uphill.

Between Christmas and New Year, Scott was faced with a triple-whammy: he lost his job in an advertising agency, his girlfriend dumped him and his best friend eloped, leaving him without the little moral support he had left and half the rent for his apartment. But he seized the moment and took it as an opportunity to ask himself, for real, a question that we often fantasize about: if nothing was holding me back or tying me down, what would I do with my life? And the answer just flashed into his mind: I would ride a bicycle around the world.

A year later, in 1997, he rode his bike across the US to get trained. Four years (and a bad bike crash and serious knee surgery) after that, and only five days before two planes crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York, he and a friend were off on a journey that would take him four years to complete, across 41,444 kilometres (roughly the equivalent of the Earth’s circumference), 50 countries including Argentina and 6 continents. His bike took some serious pounding: 6 broken spokes, 9 welds, 2 snapped chains, 1 mangled derailleur, 2 broken seats, 1 snapped rear cog set, two broken racks and countless flats, some of which he fixed by just plugging the tyre full of mud and leaves. Needless to say, his body took an even bigger beating: he suffered from Facet syndrome (irritation of the joints), a dislocated wrist, a bruised tailbone, sprained knees, heat exhaustion, sunburn, hyper-extended elbows, saddle sores, nappy rash and many other ailments, including a broken heart somewhere in New Zealand.

Halfway down the journey his friend realized that going back home and “settling down” would be a greater adventure for him than completing the ride, but Scott made it to his endpoint in Cape Town and then back to San Francisco to write Falling Uphill, a book about his experience. Then he adapted the book for young adults and children, and got kids from the Poplar Creek Elementary School to do the illustrations. And now the US Embassy brought him back to Argentina (by plane, this time) to meet kids from primary schools across the country so they can talk to him and write the illustrations for the Spanish version of his memoir, due out in December.

The Herald caught up with Scott on a bike ride (where else?) organized by City Hall, which gives this scribe bragging rights for having ridden alongside the guy who rode around the world (I rode 30km on that day, somewhat short of Stoll’s achievement, but who’s counting?).

In the flesh, Stoll is one of the friendliest, most laid-back persons you can meet, like some close relative of Uncle Andy from Weeds. Two seconds into the conversation you realize that he could tell you all about the hardest climb and the longest ride and how to pedal your way through the Andes, up the Himalayas and across the Australian Outback, but that all those things are the bells and whistles of a journey across cultures and into the self that changed him forever.

“I was looking for something, some secret meaning, and I knew it had to be out there somewhere,” he says. He will return to this: “I realized that thing I was looking for, I had carried it with me all the way around the world,” and will talk about the multicultural awareness he earned along the way, about his new perspectives. And you can see that this is no bumper-sticker. If anything, it is a return to those lines by T.S. Eliot, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” It makes you wonder if the great Thomas Stearns ever rode a bike...

What was it like to ride out just as the Twin Towers were falling?

I only found out about 9/11 when I called my Mom and she was desperate. When I went to Mexico, all the US citizens were going home, so the Mexicans were very happy to see me, very sympathetic, and they were hurting because all the tourism was gone. I was the only person from the US biking around the world at the time. I know another English man who was doing it at the same time, and he told me he figured out that more people climbed Everest than do what we did.

What was the longest stretch between seeing someone and seeing someone again?

Not too long, because you’re on the road and you see people all the time. I would go months without speaking English – I’d like to think I learnt quite a bit of Spanish, but my problem was the different accents. Sometimes they weren’t even speaking Spanish: they were speaking Quechua and I was thinking ‘my Spanish is horrible’! Australia was very long days, a two-day ride between roadhouses (which is just a gas station and a restaurant). We rode through the atomic bomb testing range, I have a picture in the adult book of the graffitti with three-headed kangaroos.

Do people welcome you more when you are on a bike?

My friend and I always said that a bike is like an invitation, a ticket. US people don’t always get the warmest welcome, but because I was on a bike and I was doing it the hard way I was like a worker, a labourer, one of the people, and everyone really respected that. I was living like they were, sleeping in their places, eating their food, trying to talk their language, occasionally cutting down sugar canes or helping a guy fix a car at the side of the road. It was good, too, because nobody could steal my stuff, everyone knew me and they couldn’t ride my bicycle anyway! I got mugged once, but I didn’t have my bike then. I was in Guatemala. The police said it was ‘the popular thing to do’– I ran from the muggers and they said ‘you’re very lucky, it’s very popular to kill the person they’re robbing if they try to run away’.

What was the landing like when you came back?

I don’t even know where to start, it took me many years to get over from the culture shock. Basically, you could say there was nowhere left to run, you know? I came home and I could see myself like in a mirror, my own culture, and I could see how I was programmed by my culture to see the world a certain way. I realized that the world wasn’t the way your culture programmes it, but also me, my person, my values, my morals, who I thought I was, what I wanted to do... I realized I could be anybody I wanted to be finally, after all those years. It sank in when I went home that this was my life.

So that thing you were looking for when you started the journey, you found it...

Ironically, I found it only by coming home and realizing I had brought it with me all around the world and I wasn’t seeing it! There’s a difference between somebody telling you something and when you do it. I finally understand now that everyday life is your destination. The bicycle is the ultimate metaphor for life. Your dream is like a mountain, and to some people that mountain is so big it looks like a wall – you can’t see the top, you can’t see a way around it. Have faith: eventually, you will reach the top and you’ll have a view that you’ve never had before. And the good and the bad news is there’s another mountain on top of that one. There’s always something; you live one dream, you get another.

Did you write Falling Uphill right after you returned?

I wrote the majority of the book while I was travelling. When I came back I had some offers to publish it and I turned them down, and it wasn’t for another four years that I wrote the last two final chapters. It took me that long to feel comfortable, to put my truth into perspective. It was the difference between standing at the bottom of a hill and then standing at the top looking down and seeing your winding little path all the way to the top.

Would you do it again?

Probably not: I would be a little lonely, my knees would object... probably if I met a woman and she said ‘we have to do this’. If I did it again I would go slower: even riding a bicycle you can go pretty fast, and I think it could take you 8 to 12 years to see the world – probably your whole life! My adventure right now is working with the Embassy and Argentine schools making this book. To me that’s the best thing ever, to take what I learned and give all these people something I wish I’d had when I was a little kid. I didn’t have this understanding or this faith, I didn’t think I could do any of this. If I could just reach a few kids and leave them with this sense that they can do whatever they want to do, then my job is done.

When did you know you were actually going to finish?

Something happened in India, I can’t really say. I met a guru and talked to her and meditated. I was afraid she was gonna tell me ‘you’re gonna have to stay here and chant songs for the rest of your life’... but when I met her I told her what I was doing, about how to me life is about riding up a mountain: you ride to the top and all of a sudden you go ‘swoosh!’ and you relax and you can hear the birds sing, to me that’s what life is about. And she says ‘I couldn’t give you a better answer! Keep going!’ Somewhere around there I started to realize that maybe I hadn’t finished but I’d already arrived. I knew I could do it, and my only question was ‘Do I still want to?’ My friend Dennis started the ride with me and went home after 15 months, he said ‘It’s not worth it, I can have more of an adventure by going home.’ But you get half-way, you’ve gotta go the other half no matter what!

Is Dennis still a friend?

He’s still a friend, I told him I was coming to Argentina and his first question was if I was going to visit Ramiro, in the Chaco, the guy who rescued us from the mud. We were stuck in the mud, moving less than 5 kilometres in one day just pushing our bikes, and he showed up and put our bikes in his truck and then we spent another 12 hours pushing his car home. He said ‘You must think it’s easier to ride a bicycle than drive a truck!’ It was so muddy we had to get out every half an hour and shovel mud and push the truck and get back and slide off the road, we did that for at least 12 hours until we got to his house and he treated us to his son’s bed and all of this food. We met everyone in the community, we stayed for about 5 days until the roads dried and we could ride our bikes again, talked to the schools... it was one of my best moments. Up until that moment we had ridden our bicycles from the US down to Argentina and we would wake up every day and see how far we could get. We were literally struggling to survive, we didn’t know what we were gonna eat and where we were gonna sleep and we didn’t have enough water. But it wasn’t until things went so absolutely wrong that we couldn’t ride or even walk, that we were forced to stop and look around and live with the people and those people happened to be Argentines.

What is riding for six hours a day almost every day for 4 years like?

It boils your emotional baggage to the surface, your challenges in life. I had a lot of time to think and meditate. For me, my trip was not so much about the bicycle but more about how you ride the bike, how you manage life, what life is about – I would think all day about that. That was the good thing about going fast: I knew that if I went slow I would stop and meet somebody and never want to keep going, but I went fast and got my quick perspective of everything. I saw politics, culture, disease, poverty, starvation, the most beautiful and the ugliest and everything in between, and it really gave me my foundation for life and who I am. In the US we live too privileged a lifestyle sometimes, and I didn’t understand that. I saw people die, people who couldn’t afford to live and were still happy and that was a mystery to me, how could those people be so happy when in the US often people are just angry and upset? They need to spend a day when they have to find their own food and water and then they’ll sing a different song!

More information

You can read more about Scott Stoll’s journey at www.theargonauts.com.

Publicada en el Buenos Aires Herald el 27 de septiembre de 2011

Mi reseña de Betibú, de Claudia Piñeiro

Claudia Piñeiro returns to the scene of the crime

Claudia Piñeiro has established herself as one of the key names in Argentine literature, as far as readers are concerned, riding on a series of fortunate events: the runaway hit of Las viudas de los jueves (Clarín Novel Award 2005, international bestseller, adapted into a blockbuster film) followed by a successful reissue of her previous thriller Tuya, and then the critically acclaimed Elena sabe and the awarded Las grietas de Jara. Now the hat trick is complete with another bestseller, Betibú.

This first paragraph begs for the followup “a writer struck on a formula for bestsellers and is riding it big time,” if it weren’t for the fact that it is actually difficult to find that many similarities between the books. Las viudas de los jueves struck gold with its detective story set in the secret spaces of a gated community (with plot sometimes yielding to the portrayal of the infamous life of the rich and secluded, a major part of the book’s appeal), but Elena sabe was more about disease than crime and Las grietas de Jara was more about the growing pains of its middle-aged protagonist than the suspense of its enigmas. She does perform clever variations of the crime fiction pattern, with shades of noir even, and she develops in all these books an evolving craft for fleshing out interesting characters and weaving plots full of twists and turns in all the right places, but that is where similarities end, and in all other respects her writing is uncompromising – say what you want about it, but it is neither copycat nor written to please. And yet, readers can’t get enough of her. In Argentine literature, this is as rare as a unicorn playing jazz guitar. In a tutu. On the moon.

Betibú is rare, also, because Piñeiro makes her career and reputation a centerpiece in the story through Nurit Iscar (a strange name indeed, and an anagram for “satiric run”, but if there is a meaning behind it Piñeiro is yet to reveal it), “the queen of detective fiction,” a washed-out crime novelist who stopped writing after a catastrophic attempt at a romantic tale and a scathing review it got in El Tribuno, the country’s leading newspaper. The setting of the story, which begins with an apparent suicide in a country club (the husband of a woman who had been murdered on the same house, a not-at-all-veiled allusion to the García Belsunce case) and takes place mostly within its well-guarded boundaries, also looks back on Las viudas de los jueves, but reverts the perspective: this time, the outsiders are looking in and treading foreign ground as workers or temporary guests which are not used to the Kafkaesque security routines, feel baffled by the mechanics of the lifestyle and cannot fully grasp the web of prejudice and perverseness behind it all.

The plot revolves around those deaths and the dark secrets behind them, but also about El Tribuno and the role of the press. An old-school crime journalist, Jaime Brena, has been demoted to writing absurd stories on “general interest” trivia, and his role is now filled by an unnamed youngblood who knows everything about Google and nothing about police sources and digging up stories beyond the official version. When the suicide makes headlines, Brena watches from the sidelines as the kid botches the coverage of a case he had first investigated. Nurit is then called by the newspaper’s sinister editor (and her former lover) to set up shop at a loaned house inside the country club and write a daily feature on the case, as a crime novelist. Power games will unfold, along with discussions on leather-sole vs. online journalism, how information gets thwarted and slanted, what interests get in the way of its dissemination and how crime stories transmogrify in a country where corruption rules and there are essentially no clean guys.

At first sight, one feels tempted to think that Piñeiro is not a stylist – her prose does not offer those gleaming passages that leave you in awe. But then you realize that her writing just flows, and that you have devoured the 345 pages (generous type, spacing and margins lend a helping hand here) in a couple of days. This happens only when a story grabs you by the neck and is delivered in a language that works for the tale rather than for its own sake, and is the mark of an author confident enough to rely more on the mechanics of storytelling than the fireworks of verbal flare.

But it is not all narrative muscle here: the story has a heart as big as a house, and is filled with humour – some of it wry, much of it at the expense of Piñeiro and the literary scene (including a delightful jab at a particularly dimwitted so-called book reviewer). It is clear that the writer is exorcizing some of her own demons in the figure of Nurit Iscar and several other features of the book, but she pulls it off without putting herself on the spot or being self-condescending and never lets herself get in the way of her novel – another jazz-playing unicorn in a literary scene so utterly dominated by mountain-sized egos. The book does slacken in some chapters burdened with too much exposition (although there is much effort put on making that exposition integral to the plot) and the retelling of a hazy marihuana night is not that satisfactory, but it is a solid read regardless.

Claudia Piñeiro’s writing career, which actually started in the early 90s when she was a young and dissatisfied corporate accountant, gained momentum a decade later in her mid-40s, and the results speak for themselves. If attention has been put in recent years on young writers and some biographical gimmicks (He works on TV and discovered spirituality! She was an anorexic!), her meteoric rise reminds us that, deep down, it’s all about the story and how well you tell it, and that certain qualities in writers must be allowed to blossom if the writing is to stand on its own merits.

Publicada en el Buenos Aires Herald el 16 de septiembre de 2011

Mi reseña de Kryptonita, de Leonardo Oyola

What if...?

Kryptonita, by Leonardo Oyola. Random House Mondadori.

It’s night in the emergency room of the Paroissien hospital in Isidro Casanova, a nasty BA suburb. A nochero (the “unofficial” doctors who for a price cover the shifts of the professionals who are supposed to be on duty) is about to end his third day on his feet and can think of nothing but going home and swallowing a handful of pills to get him into a sleep that is anything but peaceful. It has been an eventful night, but it is about to get worse: a patient comes in with a strange wound on his back and several dangerous friends in tow. It is Nafta Súper, one of the most dangerous thugs in the area, and his friends are the other members of his gang. The ER is cleared of patients and doctors, the police surrounds the hospital, and the doctor is given clear instructions: keep Nafta Súper alive until daybreak, or you’re dead. But Nafta Súper is no ordinary human... in fact, neither of his friends is.

“Elseworlds” are a well-established tradition in comics and graphic novels, one which sets known heroes in alternative settings (a swashbuckling pirate Batman, Superman as Tarzan, Green Lantern in the Far West, etc.), and Leonardo Oyola’s Kryptonita is an open tribute to superheroes through a very Argentine elseworld. Here, Nafta Súper is Superman and his ‘associates’ are members of the League of Justice (Wonder Woman, Batman, Green Lantern, etc.). There are reconstructions of their backstories, and even retellings of some of their most famous adventures (like the 1992 Death of Superman DC series), and the representation is true even for their rivalries and secret weaknesses.

This is but one of the pop references in the novel, full of allusions to 1980s rock/pop and cumbia and suburban street codes. For that alone, this would be a rarity in a literary world that has more knowledge of French philosophers than the inside of a villa miseria. But, for Oyola (the author of Chamamé, Gólgota and Siete y el tigre harapiento, among others) you could call it par for the course: he specializes in fast-paced suburban stories where crime, action and violence meet fantasy and magic, steeped in an atmosphere of pop and rock references and strong characters with very deep roots in the real world. He has been called a noir novelist, and has in fact won the top prize at Gijón’s Semana Negra in Spain, but his palette (albeit dark) has many more shades than that.

And Kryptonita is the perfect example, a stew where all the ingredients could only come from his pen. The story is straightforward (Nafta Súper has been betrayed by his nemesis, they must get through the night fighting the police and so on), but the fact that there is “something else” to these characters turns it into something else. By the same token, he is turning the tables on the old dilemma of Argentine crime fiction, which is by definition noir because down here cops, criminals, judges and Government are hard to tell from one another (as in El secreto de sus ojos or Claudia Piñeiro’s Betibú, to name but two recent popular examples that put this conundrum up front and centre): if this is what happens with local detectives, what would happen to an Argentine superhero? If you take Krypton’s last son out of Smallville, will he grow righteous and uphold the law? Or will he make his own? For this discovery alone, and for bringing this into a literary arena that has no Michael Chabons to embrace its pop heroes, this is a book worth reading.

But, fast-paced and hardhitting and inventive as the stories are, there are moments when the tale breaks loose and flies away from Oyola’s hands, burdening a plotline that would benefit from being straight and fast as an arrow with lengthy detours into flashbacks and backstory. The detours themselves are gripping, the fictional universe is solid and the voices he uses to tell them are worth exploring, but when several 10-page chapters take you away from the main plot in a 215-page novel there comes a point when the reader says “this is good stuff, but take us back to the dying man on the surgery table and the bonaerense cops armed to the teeth outside.”

If the writer is the father of the novel, you could say that at times Oyola is an over-indulgent dad who cannot get enough of his talented kid and refuses to rein them in or edit the output. And a wild imagination telling a wild tale needs a steady hand to control it and bring it into shape, or the force of the narrative potential ends up working against the effectiveness of the story itself: if Tolkien left so many notebooks with unfinished side stories of the Middle Earth and Susannah Clarke featured the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel in some short stories of The Ladies of Grace Adieu, it was because they could see the potential of the imaginary world they had created but were also aware that all those stories did not fit in the framework of the novels (and those were much lengthier books than Kryptonita).

It must be said, too, that this would have been an area for a good editor to finetune. A proper editor would have helped tighten the narrative strings for Oyola’s powerful prose and explosive imagination to come to its fullest, but, alas, the editing work on this edition is borderline shoddy, to the point of spelling howlers such as “exploción” (page 175) making it to the printed page. Unfortunately, a cursory glance at another September release from the same publisher shows similar flaws, which do not speak of the writer (errors happen) but do speak to the fact that someone in that publishing house is asleep at the wheel (they are there to stop the errors from making it into bookstores).

But none of this takes away from the fact that this is a remarkable book, one that cries for relatives: if this were the first of its kind and we could one day fill a shelf with likeminded stories by Oyola and other Argentine writers, I for one would call myself a happy reader and Argentine literature would be much the richer. This is not Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay yet, not quite Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, but it’s a very good first step in that most promising direction.

Publicada en el Buenos Aires Herald el 30 de septiembre de 2011