Böcker av Andres Neuman

Originally published as Una vez Argentina by Editorial Anagrama, 2003. Revised and expanded edition published by Editorial Alfaguara, 2014.

"The poems in Love Training are intimate in focus and scale: taut and contemplative, they ruminate on family, exile, romantic love, and the vagaries of human perception. Love Training, which gathers poems from several of Andrâes Neuman's books into a single unified collection, is divided into three sections. The first, the titular "Love Training," focuses on family (and its history), loss, relationships, love, and a sense of anchoring in the world. The second, "Fictions of Sight," are associated with questions of perception, perspective, and creativity. And the third, "I Don't Know Why" - which is the first phrase of every poem in the section - is a whimsical set of interconnected poems that ask unanswered questions; it serves as a kind of coda to the book. While Andrâes Neuman is a celebrated and widely translated novelist, he is also a lucid, sensitive, incisive - and quite prolific - poet. Love Training is the first English translation of his poetry"--

"Demetrio Rota, a garbage collector from Buenos Aires, sleeps in the afternoons and assembles puzzles at night before leaving for work. His daily life is mediocre and he keeps his balance through sheer exhaustion. However, through the puzzles, Demetrio inspects and sorts through his own memories. At the end of the journey through his history, the present seems to devour him, until he's left with only the emptiness of himself and his daily misery. A parable of memory and deterioration, Andrâes Neuman's Bariloche juxtaposes the astonished memories of youth with a skeptical conscience; the impossible idealization of nature or first love with the moral and physical suffocation of the big city; being uprooted with returning to one's origins, with a language fascinated by both lyricism and rottenness"--