All Night Movie

by Alicia Borinsky, Cola Franzen (Translator), Luisa Valenzueka (Foreword by)

An irreverent picaresque, All Night Movie follows the adventures of a young woman determined to conquer the world. A rogues' gallery of labor union leaders, cultists, lesbians, murderers, ne'er-do-wells, prostitutes, and visitors to a disconcertingly erotic telephone booth accompany the picara as she pushes the limits established in patriarchal postdictatorship Argentina. With lyric prose, Alicia Borinsky creates a hypnotic kaleidoscope of voices--a tantalizing and illuminating mix of the pop culture, politics, sexuality, tango, and cinema of an enigmatic society that celebrates its own demise.

Genres: Literary Fiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published December 18, 2002

About the author

Alicia Borinsky, born in Buenos Aires, is a novelist, poet and literary critic. Alicia Borinsky is professor of Latin American and Comparative Literature and Director of the Writing in the Americas Program at Boston University. Her critical work has helped frame the discussion about the writers of the Latin American Boom or Boom latinoamericano, an important movement in Latin American literature. Among her other scholarly achievements is the introduction of the figure of Macedonio Fernández—Borges’s master—to a wider reading public, the exploration of the intersection between literary theory, cultural and gender studies and numerous works about poetry, Latino writers and World literature.

Alicia Borinsky has won several awards for her work, including the Latino Literature Prize in 1996 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001. Literary critic and Professor of English at Princeton University, Michael Wood, said of Low Blows, "Low Blows is a book of surprises, full of turns of language and imagination which constantly catch us off guard. This is why it is so strange that we should finally know where we are, and why we are lucky to make it back to the once familiar world. We are so used to solemn failures of sight that we scarcely know what to do with lightness of glance and many-angled vision." Peter Bush, Director of the Centre for Literary Translation, writes, "No one else writing today can quite emulate her cartoon prose, a shotgun marriage of comic and camp, the Borgesian and the Barthesian." Acclaimed Argentine author of Santa Evita Tomas Eloy Martinez, writes, "Alicia Borinsky is unique, with an Argentine ear perfectly attuned to tangos and boleros...Her All Night Movie renews and transforms the genre of the picaresque novel. Borinsky is the reincarnation of Macedonio Fernandez and Julio Cortazar, as a daring and seductive storyteller in skirts." Argentine author Luisa Valenzuela writes, of Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer,The reward does not consist in the suspension of disbelief. It consists in another belief that will open wide the doors for us to go out and play." Marguerite Feitlowitz, Professor of literature at Bennington College, author of "A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of torture" is quoted in the back cover of "Golpes bajos/Low Blows" Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, March 2007 saying that "No one working today writes like Alicia Borinsky, whose words explode off the page. The voices in her work arise organically, and their accents and articulations, textures and quirks, are integral, authentic. Each of these voices (and there are scores) has its own palpable history: we feel it, even when its detailed particulars are withheld".

Reviews

[Caeg Wold · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the exit there is a telephone booth with a seat and if you know what’s coming you’ll wait for me there until I show up but you’ll have to be patient, get some cash together because my lessons do not come cheap. He said all this without moving his lips. She knew it. She was good at these things and besides there were some clues such as the unmistakable trickle of saliva coming down the left corner of his mouth.

—

In the booth even the tulips were changing color, black no longer suited them, now they were tinted a nuptial rose, they swayed, the petals grazing each other with an almost catlike purr, a summery luminous sound. Matilde Felipa had grown smaller. Timidity and desire had seeped into her body and almost without realizing it the very idea of Lucía had transformed her. She was now a woman of short stature, chubby, with ankles slightly swollen, flabby muscles, in need of a massage. He, out of the corner of his eye, recognized that shed been losing her arrogance of the first days and continued to apply the treatment that now went on days and nights: he gave her recipes for getting rid of malaria, nits, for preparing a vegetarian stew, also guitar classes and moments of great erotic inspiration alluding to patriotic holidays. Pascual Domenico was patient. The years of conjugal servitude had prepared him well. He could wait and keep on waiting. This time he didn’t want to leave anything unfinished. He knew that Matilde Felipa had not yet reached his exact size and continued with his harangues until one evening when a bus strike had left the stores vacant and there were signs of a rainy autumn, he looked her straight in the eyes and, seeing that she was blushing, knew she was ready to give the right answer.

Tell me, cutie pie, what’s your name?

Lucía, sir.

—

That was the main thing that made me realize that I was face to face with a grown-up daughter, an adult. A woman who wears a raincoat is somebody to be reckoned with. Not a sweet little thing type who jumps into a taxi at the first drop of rain. And a gray one, you get it? Nothing colored, gray, to hide spots, experiences, all that.

[Jeanette]

recommended by alberto manguel
she is an Argentina author