Las islas

by Carlos Gamerro

Buenos Aires, 1992. Hacker Felipe Félix is summoned to the vertiginous twin towers of magnate Fausto Tamerlán and charged with finding the witnesses to a very public crime. Rejecting the mission is not an option. After a decade spent immersed in drugs and virtual realities, trying to forget the freezing trench in which he passed the Falklands War, Félix is forced to confront the city around him and realises to his shock that the war never really ended. A detective novel, a cyber-thriller, an inner-city road trip and a war memoir,The Islandsis a hilarious, devastating and dizzyingly surreal account of a history that remains all too raw.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, The World, Novels, Historical Fiction

620 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Carlos Gamerro nació en Buenos Aires en 1962. Es Licenciado en Letras por la Universidad de Buenos Aires, donde se desempeñó como docente hasta 2002. Actualmente dicta cursos en la Universidad de San Andrés y en el MALBA. En 2007 fue Visiting Fellow en la Universidad de Cambridge y en 2008 participó del International Writers Workshop de la Univesidad de Iowa. Es autor de la versión teatral de Las Islas que se estrenó en el Teatro Alvear de Buenos Aires, con dirección de Alejandro Tantanian.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

Wowzers!

Carlos Gamerro's The Islands - Latin American magical realism meets William Gibson cyberpunk, Tana French detective novel, Vertigo-like psychological thriller, simmering over the trauma of war, in this case, Argentina's 1982 Malvinas/Falkland Islands War.

If this combination strikes you as a tad dense or ponderous, please be aware generous helpings of Mikhail Bulgakov absurdist humor and thigh-slapping Monty Python-style comedy pepper many scenes.

We're in 1992 Buenos Aires. The tale's narrator is a coke snorting computer hacker by the name of Felipe Félix who also happens to be a Malvinas combat vet. Félix is roused from his mid-morning slumber and summoned to meet with business mogul Sr. Fausto Taánmerl in his office of mirrors atop a gleaming Puerto Madero skyscraper.

With Felipe's summons we hear echoes of the novel's opening line: “A fly caught in the web, while the spider, replete from its last meal, takes a while to reach him, can have a pretty good time of it if he relaxes while he waits.”

The opening line, in turn, relates to the book's epigraph taken from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, citing how the inferno is already here with us and we can escape suffering in one of two ways: 1) accept it, become part of it, so much so we no longer see it as an inferno; 2) recognize who and what are not the inferno and give them space to endure. This second choice demands constant vigilance and apprehension.

I can assure you, The Islands also requires a reader's complete attention. Is Carlos Gamerro warning us this phase of Argentine history, both for the characters in the novel and readers of the novel, is also a kind of inferno?

Consider this question in light of what the author himself said about his novel during an interview: "I want to make difficult stuff as easy as possible for that reader, but what I’m not prepared to do is discard something because it will be hard to understand or stomach. In that sense, the beginning of The Islands is a bit of a warning. It begins with a guy who has preserved one of his turds and lives in a tower made of mirrors and buggers his own adult son."

The guy with his turd is no ordinary guy, he's the above mentioned Sr. Fausto Tamerlán and his preserved turd is no ordinary turd, it's the very bodily excrement (gold nuggets included) Tamerlán discharged at the time when he took over supreme control of his family business.

Likewise, Tamerlán buggering his adult son is no ordinary buggering but something out of Naked Lunch (Carlos Gamerro counts William S. Burroughs as a prime influence). "Sailing over the general viscousness, the two bodies had lost their original human shape and were now expanding and contracting like exposed organs in a vivisection, swelling transparent to bursting point one moment and collapsing into voided, crumpled bags the next, and, like decomposition in time-lapse, they quickly mingled and merged."

One reason I included this above quote: to underscore the author's dramatic shifts of register. We'll be laughing at a bit of over-the-top absurdity or what comes across as a Laurel and Hardy skit (in one hilarious scene, there's a fat sales manager, "his tubby fingers started fidgeting, Hardy-like with the tip of his tie") but just when we're beginning to settle in, ready for the next laugh, we'll be hit by, for example, an attractive lady recounting weeks of torture that left scars all over her youthful body, so much excruciating pain she was actually thankful when her torturers unzipped their pants as a first step to raping her.

Back on the reason why Tamerlán called Felipe. The Argentine superman (Tamerlán's own appraisal of his personhood) needs the super hacker to perform a feat of computer magic: dig out the names of more than two dozen witnesses to his son's crime of pushing an unknown somebody out the window to his death, a pushing through a window in the very room where they are standing.

Felipe thus takes on the role of Philip Marlowe (or, if you like, Antoinette Conway or Harry Hole) with the skills set of a cyberpunker. However, the major force Felipe encounters throughout Carlos Gamerro's 550-page saga: the harrowing memories, both his own and others' memories, of events in 1982 revolving around the Malvinas.

The Islands is a ferocious novel, a challenging novel, a novel nearly impossible to summarize or categorize. After wrestling with the various possible ways I could conclude my review of this novel, I've decided to simply turn it over to Carlos Gamerro, as per the following direct quotes:

"We're ready for a new existence outside time, outside the body, and they want to keep us prisoners in here! When personal virtual reality exists, we'll all be able to live in any world we like and write its laws. Only then will we be free!"

"The town, which had lasted just seventy-four days, would attain eternal life through him, and I was standing before someone who'd found a purpose in life and given himself to it body and soul, to the exclusion of all else, rejecting other realities as, deaf to any voices but the ones that reach him from the shores of his promised land."

"I always find it easier to invent than to copy, maybe because the unpredictability of the video game is better suited to random outcomes and the open possibilities of the imagination than to reproducing the frozen past."

"I'd become so immersed in cyberspace that I believed its electronic stimuli were the only sustenance I needed; it was inconceivable to interrupt my trance and attain to the demands of the flesh."

"I'd always been amazed how easily people are killed in films: bang and you're dead, bang and you're dead...The video game has perfected this: people don't even die; they just go out, no screaming, no lingering agony or spilled guts, no blame or grief or disgust."

"It would all happen so fast that Verraco would relive every minute of those seventy-four days in one or two hours of game-time, the way they say a drowning man relives his whole life dissolved in the water filling his lungs."

"Without us, Man today would still be much the same as he was two hundred thousand years ago. We introduced inequality, and inequality is the engine of change. Without us, progress and civilization simply wouldn't have existed."


Argentine author Carlos Gamerro, born 1962

[Francisco del Amo · Rating 5 out of 5]

¡¡¡Es excelente!!,
Los fanáticos de Amis, Burgess, Caicedo o Asís van a darse un panzada.

Te lleva hasta las venas de la última Argentina y te imprime en la cabeza escenas y personajes inolvidables: el bestial Tamerlán y su representación de los noventas, la última locura de la dictadura descripta desde las heladas trincheras llenas de colimbas, sus consecuencias que derivan con nuestro protagonista en el Borda y diez años más tarde el deambular de los ex combatientes, la elaboración de un videojuego fascinante (donde se puede ganar la guerra), la investigación principal teñida de accionar policial setentoso y la historia de la torturada Gloria y la chance de un futuro posible sin que la rana se convierta en príncipe.

A pesar de ser ficción cuenta más de la real guerra de Malvinas y sus efectos que cualquier otra aproximación.

[Tuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

a fantastical novel of veterans of the malvinas war, massive ptsd, and our hero is one, he still has part of his helmet in his head. he gets wicked headaches. he's also an expert hacker in 1992. so then he gets a job as a 'pi' for a rich rich man who is looking for all the witnesses to his youngest son's keffuffle in where , just maybe, his son murdered another man by throwing him out the 30th floor window of his office, while 25 or is it 26, people watch.
antics begin.
the city, the river, the islands, and of course the torturers, all conspire against our fella felipe felix completing his task, alive. and asks the important question, if your reality is a murderous, insane, implacable horror show run by sadists and nazis, is it so wrong to be one yourself?
for all noir fans.

[Verena Wachnitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shocking. Thrilling. Fabulous. Disgusting. Amazing. Terrifying. Absorbing. Heartbreaking. Carlos Gamerro has written an unforgettable novel, bizarre at times, revolting as well. I almost gave up after the first 150 pages. There are scenes I wish I could unread... (as an avid reader of Henry Miller, Bukoswski, etc. my bar on explicit content is I think quite high!). But... there is also so much more. The underlying story is a thriller, a murder mystery... But it constantly goes back to Argentina's tragic recent history, the military dictatorship, the Dirty War, and most central of all the Falklands War/Guerra de Malvinas - of which the main protagonist is a veteran. As an Argentinean I also enjoyed the vocabulary and multitude of cultural references. Not sure how much of that gets lost in translation...

[Kobe Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

just makes me wish for a sci fi Pynchon-like

[Micaela · Rating 5 out of 5]

una joya absoluta, quizá la mejor novela de los 90.

[Cristian Dorelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hoy recuperé mi cuenta de GR después de más de un año. Lo último que estuve leyendo era esto.

En este momento de emoción por la cuenta nueva solo voy a decir que si Gamerro le saca a este libro las 150 o 200 páginas que le sobran sería muchísimo más leído, las parte tediosas son muy tediosas peor muy tediosas. A su vez, las buenas son buenas buenas. Solo al final pude decir que todo lo engorroso valió un poco la pena, con los buenos flashbacks.

[Kevin Tole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carlos Gamerro is a well known and respected Argentinean writer with a large ledger of interviews out there. ‘The Islands’ was first published in Spanish as Las islas in 1998. This is the first English translation of his book and contains an excellent preface by the similarly respected Jimmy Burns as well as an afterthought by Gamerro. It comes courtesy of the excellent andotherstories publishing house which appears to go out of its way to unite excellent translators (in this case Ian Barnett) and non-Anglo writers to make us the readers aware of the greater scope of literature (that’s how I got here). It’s a brick coming in at 545 pages and according to Gamerro has had the best part of 100 pages trimmed out whilst translating in collaboration with Barnett and in the process of turning the book into a play.

It is fundamentally concerned with fairly recent Argentine life and in particular with the Malvinas conflict and the internal Dirty War that preceded it under the military dictatorship of the joint chiefs of staff of the armed forces. The coup happened in March 1976 and the ‘colonels’ held power till December 1983. The coup gave rise to a vicious uncompromising dirty war of torture, execution and disappearance of up to 30,000 Argentine people who were seen as undesirable to the regime in whatever way they wished to say. As the economy deteriorated through the coup, General Galtieri who had risen to become president ordered the invasion of the Malvinas / Falkland Islands in April 1982 in an effort to unite the country and deflect growing criticism of the junta. These events are well covered in Jimmy Burns’ 'The Land That Lost Its Heroes: How Argentina Lost the Falklands War'.

Gamerro is covering most of this ground in this novel. And it’s a wild romp which is almost impossible to categorise as a novel. There are plenty of synopses of ‘the plot’ out there and on this site and I don’t really want to go through it blow by blow suffice to say that it involves the memories of heavily PTSD’d veterans of both the Dirty War and the Malvinas War, centred on a detective novel / rite of passage of Felipe Felix, a Malvinas veteran now hacker recruited to find the 25 witnesses to a murder. The opening chapters are written simply but contain a brooding feeling of danger that will fill subsequent pages and give way to various styles and systems as the novel proceeds, the one uniting voice being that of Felipe.

That simplicity soon changes! Cyberpunk, grunge, stream of consciousness, drug-fuelled mad detective, lust for power, Freudian psycho-ride. They’re all there thrown into the melting pot. At one point I wondered if this was just a better written Spanish Edward St. Aubyn(thank god it’s not). But it IS confused and confusing as the mirrors-that-become-glass to present a kaleidoscopic rant through near history, human rights and conflict, where paranoia and neuroses and psychoses are everyday phenomena within a world that distrusts and kills its own citizens. Paranoid ramblings to ex-combatants who are assumed to be as mad as the rambler. The detective frontage is merely that – something to hang the whole series of cyber/psycho-punk rants on and does contain the glimmer of the believable mad plutocrat set on establishing a Buenos Aires of the Third Millennia. Do we accept Snr. Tamerlàn as Marlowe's Tamburlaine? The sense of the surreal continues through the PTSD’d veterans forever reliving their experiences of the war which has left them shattered beyond any hope of normal forward life; Ignacio with his never-to-be-finished model of the islands; the tattoos of the Island map as the thighs and vulva ready to be penetrated by the erect phallus of Argentina; history as a video game where the losers get to win, where the vanquished second time round get to extract their nemesis on their former conquerors. At times it is like an over-the-top visceral melo/psychodrama as Felipe falls into a psychosis of self-hate and loathing remembering that he could have done something other than just stand by and watch the horror unfolding in front of him, where day and night no longer matter. It feels like gutter trash writing, Pynchon-esque (a writer I have very little respect for) and of course William S. Burroughs with its drug-fuelled rambles and chop-ups. These sections are everything I hate about Pynchon and Burroughs.

Thankfully, though both of those writers are name-checked by Gamerro, it is more than that. It is an alternative scenario; the scene in the mirror of events that never happened but which might just have happened had the coin landed the other way up. History written by the winners and the losers getting to make their own myths that no one wants to listen to.

Between these walls, painted that government-issue canary yellow that, even fresh, looks thirty years old, on this synthetic mustard-coloured carpet pocked with small black craters from cigarette ends, and studded here and there with smooth patches of greying chewing gum, under the mind-numbingly lethargic light in which several outdoor plants were doing their unenthusiastic best to survive, on the sturdy wrought-iron desks upholstered in liver-brown PVC that stood like colossi supporting the unstable accumulation of folders, minutes, memoranda, reports, correspondence, magazines, leaflets, circulars and press releases that, like the walls of a gorge, displayed the different geological eras of official activity, had been devised some of the most brilliant alternatives to the second and final military occupation of the Islands, which for now didn’t look very likely.

As can be seen Gamerro is good at the dark, the subversive, the all-encompassing hell that covers everything in its surreal-yet-normal blanket. The espionage centre is the epitome of a dumb show of dis-employed un-empowered realists going through the motions for the benefit of a minority of powerful lunatics. And actually after several hundred pages of this the prose style begins to grate... and once you’ve admitted that to yourself, well..... to a certain extent it’s a downhill course if anything could be at all worse than the narcissistic parasite of the Nobel wannabe Pynchon.

It IS hyper-reality. Tamerlàn as some ultra-Freud portrayed as the root of all evil, the megalomaniac psychotic, of the mad minority in charge of the blind(ed) majority. He is a cipher for mad power that Argentina had come to represent through the Dirty War and the Malvinas. He is there also to spiel drug-fuelled crazy mythological ideas which are enticing and at the same time ridiculous like a hippy’s need for the mystic. He is Hitler, Nietzsche, Goebbels and Mengele all in one. And it’s over the top. And it really sucks! And if Tamerlàn is bad then Marroné is even worse following after the obligatory sub wank-mag fodder sex scene. There IS the ghost of a great novel in here of Argentina pre and post Malvinas but instead Gamerro assaults us (maybe utterly deliberately and for effect) with layer on layer of gutter trash ergot that is both hack and predictable and perverse. It’s like having someone who CAN write but can’t be arsed to follow through or indeed edit. Forget realism. It’s not even magical surrealism. It’s just Pynchon-ed out. Gutter trash vomit of punk-esque froth. Clearly the writer is capable, but the form becomes overwhelming – or perhaps the form and its continual shape-shifting becomes almost banal hyper-text as if trying to deliberately shock the reader. Perhaps that is what Gamerro wanted. Perhaps that’s what the publishers wanted.

But there is more. AND better. And that begins around the time we take a mad taxi ride across town with another veteran cab driver who wants to talk but doesn’t know where the fuck he is or how to get to where you want to go. There is a step-up here in the insight and the quality of the writing. There’s less of the wild ergot cyber-punk gobshite. There is clever observation not made-up drivel and this continues through the very visceral Falklands sections. The fact that Gamerro was NOT a conscript on the Falklands makes you aware that this guy CAN write. The scene in the abattoir with the trampled cows is like a sledgehammer moment of horror and repulsion when the scales finally fall from your eyes. Vignettes. Is it a book of vignettes? And then finally there is Gloria. Tortured, impregnated by her torturer, deeply disturbed yet normal. Sensitively written. But wait a minute.... we can’t have that ... cue another drug ramble. Tell me this. Is there any point in trying to describe the experience of being under the possession of a narcotic influence to anyone that has never been under the influence of a narcotic? I have never read a believable piece of writing about tripping or drug-induced states from the likes of heroin or Ecsatsy – it just comes across as mad silly rambling. (apart maybe from Burroughs and heroin – and as an aside how David Cronenberg got it RIGHT in his film adaptation of The Naked Lunch)

It’s all in there.... some utterly great writing obscured by some utter dross. From ‘Parque Chas’ onwards there is an upward curve with the great generally outdoing the dross, with excellent observation matched to clear concise writing without the trowelling on of the cyber-punk. And there is a sense that each of the chapters, whilst being each part of ‘The Islands’ is in itself a short story of its own. And perhaps the novel is best seen as a set of short stories. But that would exclude the overall sense of madness and surreality that Gamerro wants us to attempt to comprehend that was Argentina and the experience of Argentineans through the period.

This book is not to be ignored. It attempts to do something which is extremely difficult as to be genre-busting. To do all those things Gamerro has clearly had to compromise. I suppose you just have to put some of your senses and literary sensibilities on hold at intervals and accept what is coming like the inevitable wipe-out wave that will fling you off the surfboard. Sometimes this is very hard to do. Like me and Pynchon. But Gamerro continues that wonderful trend in Argentinean writers from Borges, through Bioy Casares and Arlt and onto Cortázar and Aira. Magical realism it ain’t (errr ... thank fuck!). It is a way of conceiving a reality which is beyond the text, a guttural, visceral sense of prose and writing.

We look like something out of an El Greco dream

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

some of the genre fiction influences don't always work, and there's a few too many 'contemporary americanisms', but also a lot of good stuff in here. especially good are all the bits about nazis and wacky argentianian nationalist theories and the diary that's a parody of anthropological writing about 'savages' but it's about the falkland islanders.

[!Tæmbuŝu]

KOBOBOOKS

Reviewed by The Guardian (10 Jul 2012)

[Brian Byrne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating read. The gritty realism of the battlefields recollections and slum descriptions contrasted with the surreal decadence of the towers. His writing is compelling and once I started, made the book hard to put down.

[Jonathan Hockey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Certain parts of it I really liked, other parts were a bit more meandering for me. Overall a very interesting read though.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Felix Felipe is an Argentinian Falklands war veteran who in 1992 (10 years after the invasion) , with a reputation as a hacker, and living with a part of his helmet embedded in his skull is 'invited' by two heavies who arrive on his doorstep to meet a local businessman in his remarkable twin towers (gold and silver with floors and walls made of two way mirrors). In that meeting the very strange and threatening Tamurlan tells him he is employing him to find the 26 witnesses who saw his son throw a person out of the window of the tower. The witnesses in the other tower at a pyramid selling talk.
Thus ensues a magical adventure which , as the introduction by a war reporter suggests is like a Heart of Darkness but I also felt combined that hypnotic and sinister aspect with the drug fuelled writing of hunter S Thompson and the surreal traps of Kafka. So while this was a challenging read in many ways I put it down having a headache ( Felix suffers from dreadful headaches) from trying to follow the plot but also having really enjoyed the story and the aspects of the book that particularly expressed the Argentinian view on a war that was such a source of English jingoism and Tabloid tub thumping in the 1980's.
There are some great scenes such as Felix creating a video game for the head of police ( whose computers he wants to hack ) in which the ex officer in the army can replay the war with an Argentinian victory, and Felix returning to an asylum where he had been housed post war to trap a villain secretly recording the ravings of a mad veteran. Felix also has veteran friends who he relies upon including one building a model of the Malvinas to help a reinvasion , and a disabled friend whose birthday is celebrated with a hoard of veterans singing and stamping to the neighbours consternation.
Interestingly the book also brings into the story the question of Nazi immigrants to Argentina post www2
Some aspects therefore show how the loss of the Islands was a humiliation for the Argentinians and a constant thorn in the veterans side but the book also touches on more difficult issues including the torture of women and civilians by the ruling military junta , and the experience of soldiers in the Falkland trenches with freezing cold, starvation , terror of bombing and the invading English and in one vivid scene the treatment by officers of their own men. The writing in these sections reflect the experience of war and loss and was as good as any writing on war I have read.
As I said this is not an easy linear read but in it's telling of a story from a perspective that I have not seen before or considered I felt it was unique. I would encourage anyone who picks it up to give it a go and while it may not be everyone's cup of tea I felt that despite some reservations with style that this was a book that I will not forget in a long time and one in the end that I really liked and out of which I gained a lot of information about a war and its effect on a country troubled by dictatorships and loss which deserves to be properly revisited.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have immense admiration for Carlos Gamerro whose The Busts of Eva Peron I loved and Open Secret I am in the process of purchasing. When I stumbled upon this novel I couldn't not buy it. Who could resist a novel described on its back cover as:

"A detective novel, a cyber-thriller, an inner-city road trip and a war memoir,The Islands is a hilarious, devastating and dizzyingly surreal account of a history that remains all too raw."

And the history is very much still alive for those of us in the UK who can remember the war over the Malvinas/Falklands and how victory helped entrench Margaret Thatcher in power in the UK. Thatcher may be a hero to many but there are some of us who have hated since she acquired the nickname Thatcher the Snatcher back in 1971 (that the nickname was probably unfair is irrelevant. Like Marie Antoinette and 'Let them eat cake' Thatcher Snatcher tells a greater truth, because what she stole from generations in the 1980s was more than free school milk).

Before I say where I think the novel fails I must praise some particularly wonderful parts of this phantasmagory of a novel (just to be pedantic I must insist that a novel first published in 1998 about events in 1992 and a war that ended in 1982 is not a historical novel). As an anti-war novel and in its depictions of the nightmare young conscripts find themselves in it is good as any of the great novels written about ordinary American soldiers in Vietnam. Indeed at times the horror of mechanised battle is told with all the shocking power of those great grand daddies of anti war novels Henri Barbusse and Eric Marie Remarque. It also has one of the most powerfully affecting descriptions/accounts of what being tortured really means, not S&M porn but the mental destruction of personality. It is obscene, how could it not be, I would never call for such things to be banned but I find it both absurd and disturbing that these emotionally eviscerating scenes (for the readers as well) get almost no mention in the English language reviews though so many obsess over a paperweight made out of a turd encased in perspex.

There are marvellous things in this novel but I feel there is too much, detective novel, cyber-thriller, inner-city road trip, war memoir as well as a bildungsroman of a nation and its veterans as they come, or fail to come to terms, with a lost war. I won't say that the account of the Falkland Islanders the Kelpers written like anthropological report on a 'primitive' tribe isn't brilliant, so are the fantasies of a missing giant armadillo stuffed with gold or lost legion of Argentine troops hiding on the Falklands awaiting the call to rejoin the reconquest like Barbarossa or St. James at Clavijo. They are just too much, even for those like me for who these years are a shared, if different, memory.

A brilliant but flawed masterpiece which I don't regret reading for a moment. I would recommend also reading the review from The Guardian at the time the English translation was first published (2012): https://www.theguardian.com/books/201....

[luchadelabici · Rating 3 out of 5]

Impecables los capítulos referidos a la guerra de Malvinas...
En todo el relato, ubicado 10 años después, Gamerro se pasa en descripciones, sin duda se podría contar la misma historia en muchas menos páginas.
Pese a esto, Las Islas es una gran novela, la mejor que leí sobre Malvinas... la guerra, la vuelta a Buenos Aires de los sobrevivientes, las secuelas que deja en los soldados y como sigue desplegando su violencia 10 años después.

[Jonatan Sotelo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Llegué a este libro después de quedar fascinado con "La aventura de los bustos de Eva". La verdad es que el argumento está bueno, el desarrollo de los personajes también. PEro me pareció un poco pesada por varios momentos, con excesos de descripciones. Creo que le sobran muchas páginas a esta obra.

Punto destacado: el final. Excelente, te lleva directo a la vida de los que fueron a Malvinas, a esas historias y a los que volvieron.

[Nicolas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Que novela “rara” . Por momentos me gustó muchísimo y por otros no podía conectar con la mezcla de temas. Los capítulos que hablan sobre la guerra, los más realistas, me parecieron brillantes. El resto, algo inverosímiles
Igualmente creo que es una novela que súper vale la pena leer.

[Seba Rodriguez · Rating 5 out of 5]

No creo que lea algo mejor que esto en el año. Obra Maestra es quedarse corto.

[Naiara Mancini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Felipe creó el juego en dos noches, merqueado, cómo Fogwill Los Pichiciegos.

[Sebastián Barberis · Rating 3 out of 5]

muy crudo, con algunas partes muy densas y algunas brillantes.

[Guillermo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Esta novela está escrita con bronca, en un frenesí furioso, y es desenfrenada. Pero estos atributos no hacen buena literatura en este caso. Cada suceso está forzado hacia la demasía. Es demasiado, dice a cada rato el lector. Entonces se va deformando lo que parece una novela de acción, pasa a otro género, a la sátira quizás; los sucesos se exageran y resulta un poco grotesco todo. Si Felipe Félix se relaciona con una chica, una señora madre en realidad, ¿es necesario que además sus hijas gemelas tengan el síndrome de Down? Después, muchas páginas después resulta que hay una razón buena, pero en ese momento, en la página 300 aparece como una exageración más. Porque hay por todos lados: por más que el viejo Tamerlán sea el epítome del déspota, y sus empleados acepten ser esclavos, no es posible construir una torre de treinta pisos donde todas las paredes sean de vidrio y desde el piso más alto se pueda ver hasta la planta baja. Estos excesos, y otros no menos importantes, le quitan credulidad al lector. Tamerlán es increíblemente malvado, ¿hacía falta que su papá sea carcelero en un campo nazi? Los otros excesos nefastos son los discursos gratuitos. Todos los personajes tienen su discurso para decir, que no aporta más que alargar los capítulos.
Pero justo en la mitad de la novela aparece un personaje nuevo, el mayor X. Y se pone la cosa mucho más entretenida. Porque por donde pasa el mayor X la novela es perfectamente creíble. Es raro porque este personaje también está en el borde de todo: torturador, violador, casado con una de sus víctimas, enloquecido combatiente en Malvinas, autor de un diario insano, perdido para el resto del mundo, inventor de la leyenda del Tatú cordobés, y así. Gamerro se despacha con todo, no se guarda nada. Pero, ya lo dije, así como por donde pasa la familia Tamerlán la novela es un plomo, por donde pasa el mayor X es atrapante.
También en la segunda mitad se evoca la guerra de Malvinas, y algunos sucesos están bien narrados, desde la tristeza que da esa guerra de perdedores. Y los combatientes que sobrevivieron también están bien pintados. Los soldados y los oficiales. Todos desbaratados por esos tres meses de frío y muerte. Cuando con sus FAL y sus FAP el grupito de Felipe Félix defiende la casa de la novia porque "vuelven los ingleses", en su locura, ese triunfo contra la banda de los malos, es una recompensa apropiada. Absurda pero victoria al fin. Y si en su fantasía es la revancha, que lo disfruten. ¿Qué culpa les cabe? Pobres soldados.

La catarsis es la eliminación figurativa de emociones especialmente pena y miedo, a través de la palabra. Este libro parece escrito con urgencia, en un rapto incontenible. Por su edad Carlos Gamerro podría haber combatido en Malvinas, pero no estaba reclutado; la ferocidad de la novela sale entonces de sus dotes de escritor y no de una experiencia personal; es razonable, y lo contrario hubiese sido atractivo pero improbable.

[Erika Schoeps · Rating 1 out of 5]

I won this book in a Goodreads First Reads giveaway.

I don't know what this book is. It's a confusing, whirlwind of a mess. There are a ton of complicated, confusing plot threads, and I couldn't keep them straight. Also they appeared to be combining but I was never sure how they were even connected. I quit 100 pages in, when I got into the ridiculous battle scenes. Page after page of grandiose virtual battle scenes that had no purpose to the plot, and was literally just the character playing a video game and suffering a minutely described migraine. I felt like this book was simply going for shock value as the character ate his own vomit repeatedly and even slurped it off the floor, described in painful intricacy. Seriously? By the way, the entire book is written in a style of unnecessary detail, as every object and event is written with insane detail. All I was doing was slogging through descriptive words as I waited for the actual plot to kick in. The only redeeming quality I found was the character development. The characters were enjoyable to read about, and were portrayed through behavior and action instead of painful description.

Don't read this book. What a horror.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received this book in goodreads giveaway and it took me the better part of a year to complete it. That was a mistake as the plot is convoluted and I probably re-read sections more than I would have had I have just say down and worked my way through it the first time around.

I thought the book with its fantastical, metaphorical flourishes would appeal to me but I confess I didn't really like it at all. Despite being fascinated by Argentina and the Falklands war and the military junta of the time with all of its crimes and horrors, I just couldn't get into this book and it was a step too far for me to enjoy it.

[Pete Camp · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some extremely strange passages in this book set in Buenos Aires . Right from the fist chapter in which the story’s antagonist sodomizes his grown son. That would probably be enough to make someone stop reading but it’s a good story and well written. There is quite a bit of the Falklands, called Malvinas in Argentina, war throughout the book, the main character is a veteran of the short war and has episodes of PTSD and as a souvenir of his service has a piece of his helmet permanently embedded in his skull. Plenty of drug induced scenes permeate the story as well. Good read just maybe a little too long

[Ms.Caprioli · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book in Spanish, so my review is in Spanish as well.

Debo reconocer qué no sé lo hubiera leído de no ser por la recomendación de mi amiga Andrea. Me resultó un libro raro, estoy acostumbrada a leer ficción histórica mucho más lineal. Con la excusa de seguir las pistas de una investigación pseudo policial, vamos descubriendo cómo la Guerra de Malvinas dejó tantas pero tantas cicatrices en el inconsciente colectivo de los argentinos. Me temo que podemos terminar el libro pero no quitarnos de la cabeza los traumas de una guerra que no debimos haber peleado.

[Cande · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro que me costó terminar pero que por momentos no había forma de soltar.

Un retrato de la Argentina en los 90, con personajes tan arquetípicos como inusuales. Un veterano de Malvinas es contactado por un magnate millonario para tapar un asesinato. En el fondo, un sistema político lleno de corrupción, el sueño de recuperar las islas y muchas cosas más

[Stas]

http://www.svobodanews.ru/content/tra...
acc. to the Russian story in the link above, an English translation is coming out just now. But where is the English listing on Goodreads. Damn you Amazon, my dark cloud-computed overlord.

[Lucas Rentero · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una extraña novela donde nuevamente se mezclan ciudad, historia, angustia y locura como no sucedía desde los años 30. Un cocktail clásico en version contemporánea.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reviewed this at Necessary Fiction in July 2012.

[Debbie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought that I would find this interesting - it was awful.