Bariloche - (Argentine Literature) by Andrés Neuman (Paperback)

About the Book

"Demetrio Rota, a garbage collector from Buenos Aires, sleeps in the afternoons and assembles puzzles at night before leaving for work. His daily life is mediocre and he keeps his balance through sheer exhaustion. However, through the puzzles, Demetrio inspects and sorts through his own memories. At the end of the journey through his history, the present seems to devour him, until he's left with only the emptiness of himself and his daily misery. A parable of memory and deterioration, Andrâes Neuman's Bariloche juxtaposes the astonished memories of youth with a skeptical conscience; the impossible idealization of nature or first love with the moral and physical suffocation of the big city; being uprooted with returning to one's origins, with a language fascinated by both lyricism and rottenness"--

Book Synopsis

Demetrio Rota, a garbage collector from Buenos Aires, sleeps in the afternoons and assembles puzzles at night before leaving for work. His daily life is mediocre and he keeps his balance through sheer exhaustion. However, through the puzzles, Demetrio inspects and sorts through his own memories. At the end of the journey through his history, the present seems to devour him, until he's left with only the emptiness of himself and his daily misery.

A parable of memory and deterioration, Andrés Neuman's Bariloche juxtaposes the astonished memories of youth with a skeptical conscience; the impossible idealization of nature or first love with the moral and physical suffocation of the big city; being uprooted with returning to one's origins, with a language fascinated by both lyricism and rottenness.

Review Quotes

"Andréeacute;s Neuman has transcended the boundaries of geography, time, and language to become one of the most significant writers of the early twenty-first century."-Music & Literature

"The literature of the twenty-first century will belong to Neuman and a few of his blood brothers."-Roberto Bolañntilde;o

"This is phenomenal."-Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"As the metronome ticks faster and faster between past and present, the narrative grows feverish, rushing, increasingly fragmentary. The effect is kaleidoscopic and dizzying. [. . .] Bariloche is bleakly luminous and fascinatingly fractured. 'Luminous' could well be applied to Robin Myers' translation, too, along with a barrowload of epithets: brilliant, inventive, masterly.-Arabella Bosworth, Asymptote Journal

"Some novels give you a fine sensation of place. Bariloche goes above and beyond that, creating a kind of sensory overload that makes the prose feel both lived-in and alive."-Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

"Neuman punctuates Demetrio's life and recollections with well-considered details, but it is how he expresses them-and particularly here how Myers has chosen to translate them-that makes Bariloche so endlessly satisfying."-Cory Oldweiler, On the Seawall

About the Author

Andrés Neuman (1977) was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and was included on the Bogotá-39 list. He is the author of numerous novels, short stories, poems, aphorisms, and travel books, including Traveler of the Century, Talking to Ourselves, The Thigs We Don't Do, and Fracture. His works have been translated into twenty-two languages.

Robin Myers is a poet, essayist, and translator. Among her recent publications are Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter, 2020), The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press, 2020), and The Science of Departures by Adalber Salas Hernández (Kenning Editions, 2021). She lives in Mexico City, where she is working on a book of essays about translating poetry and a collection of poems.