Bruno Folner's Last Tango
At the heart of Bruno Fólner’s Last Tango is the moral issue concerning the matter of death with dignity, and whether the act of euthanasia is a crime or a final expression of love. The reader learns in the initial pages of the novel why the protagonist fled to Brazil and decided to stay by pure chance in the coastal town of Praia Macacos, where he checked into the Pousada da Baleia with a laptop, false passport, Victor Hugo’s Les miserables, and $34,000, for an indefinite stay with no departure date. We learn that the character’s real name is not Bruno Fólner, an alias that pays homage to his favorite writer William Faulkner, and that he is 64 years old and has just made the second most important decision of his life, to fulfill an old fantasy of reinventing himself and starting over.
Mempo Giardinelli is an award-winning author of novels, short stories, essays, and children’s fiction, and a journalist. He lived in exile, in Mexico (1976-1984), where his first works of fiction were published. He has taught Latin American literature at universities in Argentina, Mexico, and the United States.
Giardinelli has garnered many prestigious awards for his works of fiction and essays, among them the Premio Rómulo Gallegos (1993), which is the most important literary award in the Spanish-speaking world. His works have been translated to twenty-six languages.
Rhonda Dahl Buchanan is a Professor of Spanish and the Director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at the University of Louisville. She has translated the narrative fiction of the Argentine writers Ana María Shua, Perla Suez, Tununa Mercado, and Mempo Giardinelli, and the Mexican writer Alberto Ruy Sánchez, among others, and is the author of numerous critical studies on contemporary Latin American writers.
