Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collections
Publication
Booket (2013), Edición: Literature: history & criticism, 160 páginas
Description
The lives of two men are intertwined in a casual encounter in the Pittsburgh's airport. Claudio, a literature professor is flying to Buenos Aires. Marcelo, a businessman, tells Claudio the story of his experience while staying at a hotel in Buenos Aires. Soon, they each go their separate ways never to see each other again. However, in the same hotel, Claudio will discover the fine line between reality and fiction, the territory in which love and death coexist.
User reviews
LibraryThing member FPdC
Beautiful. Sad. A great little novel by the famous spanish writer.
LibraryThing member thorold
We've all been there: you're stuck in an airport somewhere for a few hours, you've got a pile of books and your laptop and you're looking forward to enjoying a bit of peace and quiet, and then someone (a stranger, an acquaintance you normally avoid...) pops up and engages you in conversation, and
In the case of Muñoz's narrator, a Spanish academic on his way to a Borges conference in Buenos Aires from the US college where he teaches, the culprit is a businessman who identifies him as a compatriot from the copy of El Pais sticking out of his pocket. "I will never return to Buenos Aires," he tells the narrator, and proceeds to explain why. The story - of a transient fling with a woman he met in a crumbling grand hotel there - isn't a particularly long or complicated one, but both the businessman and the narrator know how to stretch out the tension with cunningly placed digressions and reflections on airports, America versus Europe, the way narrative works, the hotel trade, and so on. And of course the narrator eventually gets to Buenos Aires and discovers something that puts the whole story he was told into a quite different, and very Borgesian light.
Apart from a lot of allusions to Borges (some of which I was able to spot), there's also a Treasure Island theme running through the book, introduced by Borges's sonnet "Blind Pew", and there's also a satirical subplot of campus intrigue. We've been fearing the worst ever since we discovered that the narrator's institution is Humbert College, in Humbert Pa., where he lives on Humbert Lane and attends colloquia in Humbert Hall, and we know he's in trouble when he meets his nemesis, the redoubtable Professor Ann Gadea Simpson Mariátegui, the Terminator of New Lesbian Criticism, "who displays the surnames of her ex-husbands like a head-hunter's trophies"...
A clever, entertaining little book that sneaks in a very RLS-ish plot under a smokescreen of postmodernism.
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you know you aren't going to be able to get rid of them until your flight leaves and/or they've told you the story of their lives. (Mutatis mutandis for the old version of this social nightmare with wedding guests and albatrosses.)In the case of Muñoz's narrator, a Spanish academic on his way to a Borges conference in Buenos Aires from the US college where he teaches, the culprit is a businessman who identifies him as a compatriot from the copy of El Pais sticking out of his pocket. "I will never return to Buenos Aires," he tells the narrator, and proceeds to explain why. The story - of a transient fling with a woman he met in a crumbling grand hotel there - isn't a particularly long or complicated one, but both the businessman and the narrator know how to stretch out the tension with cunningly placed digressions and reflections on airports, America versus Europe, the way narrative works, the hotel trade, and so on. And of course the narrator eventually gets to Buenos Aires and discovers something that puts the whole story he was told into a quite different, and very Borgesian light.
Apart from a lot of allusions to Borges (some of which I was able to spot), there's also a Treasure Island theme running through the book, introduced by Borges's sonnet "Blind Pew", and there's also a satirical subplot of campus intrigue. We've been fearing the worst ever since we discovered that the narrator's institution is Humbert College, in Humbert Pa., where he lives on Humbert Lane and attends colloquia in Humbert Hall, and we know he's in trouble when he meets his nemesis, the redoubtable Professor Ann Gadea Simpson Mariátegui, the Terminator of New Lesbian Criticism, "who displays the surnames of her ex-husbands like a head-hunter's trophies"...
A clever, entertaining little book that sneaks in a very RLS-ish plot under a smokescreen of postmodernism.
Show Less
Language
Original language
Spanish
Original publication date
1999
Physical description
7.48 inches
ISBN
8432220612 / 9788432220616