Distressed splendor in ‘Tango’

DO not give up hope. The Latin American literary boom, the powerful emergence of Spanish-language Latin American writers that has had no parallel since the florescence of the Russians in the 19th century, is alive and well and living -- in New Jersey.

New Brunswick, N.J., the home of Rutgers University, where Argentine author Tomas Eloy Martinez hangs his hat as director of Latin American studies, is the latest outpost for the Latin American literary effulgence that has been so embraced in the United States since, say, the publication of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s “Pedro Paramo” in 1955.

In “The Tango Singer,” as in his two previous novels, “Santa Evita” and “The Peron Novel,” Martinez’s locale is Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, that most surreal of cities, and the map on which he arranges his phantasmagoric players. Martinez, who has lived in the United States since 1982 and in Venezuela before that, in exile from what he calls the “atrocious dictatorship” in his native Argentina, opens this handbook to the inner life of his homeland conventionally enough. His protagonist, Bruno Cadogan, an American who absurdly thinks Buenos Aires must be something like Kuala Lumpur, a modern city with humidity, gets an academic grant to go to the South American city to hunt for a hard-to-find tango singer believed to be the best ever, better even than the legendary Carlos Gardel. Swiftly we enter a dream country where reality slides into something reminiscent of the work of Czech author Franz Kafka and, above all, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who is a central if spectral figure in “Tango.”

In Martinez’s vision, it is language, sometimes fractured like pieces of plate glass left on the sidewalk after a political demonstration or the reflection of a caffeine-induced summer hallucination, that bends prosaic reality. In this way, the inner Buenos Aires and the concealed Argentina reveal themselves and their harsh history:

“Every time I looked up,” Cadogan says, “I discovered baroque palaces and cupolas in the shape of parasols or melons, with purely ornamental turrets. I was surprised that Buenos Aires was so majestic from the second or third story upwards and so dilapidated at street level, as if the splendor of the past had remained suspended in the heights and refused to descend or disappear.”

The longer Cadogan stays in the great flat city, the harder it is to find the missing tango singer and the more clearly he understands that he is living in a psychological labyrinth the Argentines have created as their dwelling place.

One person Cadogan encounters as he explores the city describes its inhabitants’ well-known “passion for conspiracies”: “How else to explain that the major diagonal street was called The Internationale before it became General Victoria Avenue, or that Berlin Street should figure on some maps as Bakunin, or that a short four-hundred-meter-long road was called Treveris, in allusion to ... Treves, the birthplace of Karl Marx.”

Cadogan discovers soon enough that the passion for conspiracies is based not on paranoia but on experience. Indeed, the longer he stays, the more visible are the old bones of the last dictatorship, with its torture, its disappearances, its atrocious lies. And during his visit -- the year is 2001 -- the presidency and the currency are collapsing, as they so often have before.

At the end of this elegant, tightly controlled novel, Cadogan escapes back to his academic post in New York, leaving behind Argentina and its magnificent, rotting mega-city. But in so doing, Martinez has left the reader with an incisive portrait of human consciousness in one of the most articulate and complicated places in the Spanish-speaking New World at the beginning of the 21st century.

Anthony Day is former editor of The Times editorial pages.