Help mr.p find a book, please

November 11, 2011 7:08 PM

A work of fiction (preferably) that takes place in Beunos Aires? mr. p offers bonus points for anything having to do with astronomy or railroads.
posted by puddinghead to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (8 answers total)

Borges?
posted by thelonius at 7:22 PM on November 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras sounds like a good candidate:

It's 1976, and people are disappearing in Buenos Aires. The delightful family whose company we enjoy in this warmhearted Argentinean novel are struggling to be happy against the current of the times--the political and moral chaos following the coup de etat, the myriad kidnappings, shootings and bombings, as friends, business partners, uncles and neighbors disappear, one by one.

The tale unfolds with disarming simplicity. We're confined to a 10-year-old's limited understanding. We learn just enough to understand that his parents are fleeing for their lives, trying to enjoy their children for as long as they can before the danger becomes so great they have to leave them behind.

Told in the course of five school periods (Biology, Geography, Language, Astronomy, History), the sixth grader doesn't hesitate to throw into the narrative his own history of Buenos Aires from when it was little more than a pestilential swamp, along with a short, reverent biography of his hero, the great escape artist Harry Houdini. [...]

As he flees with his family, hiding out in the country, taking on new names and identities, the boy becomes like the hero of his favorite television show, The Invaders, unsure which ordinary face conceals a deadly alien. The reader never learns the boy's real name, because "the people who proved to be heroes back then had no names," Figueras tells us, "and that's how we should remember them."

Bursting with good humor, with a bittersweet, melancholy shadow, Figueras's superb novel amply illustrates that "laughing and crying at the same time is something life teaches you without you even noticing."

posted by Rhaomi at 7:41 PM on November 11, 2011

The Ministry of Special Cases, though lacking in railroads and astronomy, makes up for it with a serious reflection on the Dirty War of the 1970s and its effect on the families that make up the main characters. To be brief and not give anything away, the son of the main couple is "disappeared" one night, and his family falls apart looking for him.

Though it's "just" a novel, I found that Special Cases brought to life some of the era's major issues and questions, with a good balance between explaining the history (so you know what's going on without having extensive knowledge of Argentine history) and remembering that it is a novel (and not getting bogged down in details). Especially if he has been or will go to Bueons Aires, this would be a fascinating book because many of the places in it are real or at least based in reality.
posted by whatzit at 11:17 PM on November 11, 2011

Sorry, no astronomy or railroads that I can recall, but The Buenos Aires Affair is a pretty great little book.
posted by Wolof at 12:09 AM on November 12, 2011

I'm a bit loathe to recommend it because it's a novel that I found intermittently infuriating, but Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch has, among its plus points, nicely realised portraits of its characters' lives in Buenos Aires.
posted by hydatius at 12:41 AM on November 12, 2011

The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt. I didn't find it a particularly easy read though. And I don't remember any astronomy or railroads.
posted by ComfySofa at 7:32 AM on November 12, 2011

Response by poster: Great answers, I can always rely on you. Thanks, my friends.
posted by puddinghead at 12:29 PM on November 12, 2011

Part of Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances takes place in Buenos Aires. And although you won't get astronomy or railroads, you will get meteorology and psychiatry.
posted by tangerine at 11:10 AM on November 22, 2011