Once Upon Argentina
One day, a young man receives an unexpected letter from his grandmother, kicking off a literary adventure that brings home to him everything he has not seen.
Once Upon Argentina relates the lives of the narrator’s relatives – a group of people from all over the world gathered in a land where immigrant traditions merge and thrive. The lives of these relatives intersect, like a set of Matryoshka dolls or a hall of mirrors, as the personal and social stories of twentieth century Argentina converge.
Beyond these tales of hardship and triumph, Andrés Neuman’s novel experiments with the nature of the autobiography, encompassing prenatal memories, expanding the autofiction genre with a new voice and twist. Merging present and past, collective experiences and his own, the narrator explores a genealogy populated by unforgettable characters, offering us the story of the construction of a country, his Argentine childhood, and his early literary discoveries.
With extraordinary delicacy and intensity, combining elegy, tragedy, and humor, Andrés Neuman reveals a world as real as it is fantastic, as strange as it is our own. Once Upon Argentina is a coming-of-age tale, a political novel, and a love letter to the absent ones.
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 Things We Don’t Do, Sensitive Anatomy, and Fracture. His works have been translated into twenty-two languages.
Nick Caistor is a prolific British translator and journalist, best known for his translations of Spanish and Portuguese literature. He is a past winner of the Valle-Inclán Prize for translation and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4, Times Literary Supplement, and the Guardian.
Lorenza Garcia has lived for extended periods in Spain, France, and Iceland. Since 2007, she has translated over a dozen novels and works of non-fiction from French and Spanish.
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