Once Upon Argentina tells the sentimental and political story of a family that comes from everywhere, and of a country’s wandering, migratory culture

In the beginning it was Jacobo, born in tsarist Russia, who fled to Buenos Aires and married a young Lithuanian woman named Lidia. Or was it René, a French sculptor who knelt before no one, and his wife Louise Blanche, who left France only to end up in a remote town in northern Argentina.

Descended from these colorful, half-forgotten character, the young narrator of this novel employs dazzling prose to construct a journey through a family tree populated with endearing, eccentric, unforgettable figures, along with an intelligent and personal account of the construction of contemporary Argentina, from Yrigoyen to Menem, through Peronism and the nightmare of dictatorships.

These stories intersect, intertwining like a set of Matryoshka dolls or hall of mirrors, letting the personal and political histories of the twentieth century reflect off of one another. Wit extraordinary delicacy and intensity that combines elegy, tragedy, and humor, Andrés Neuman unpacks a territory as real as it is fantastic, as strange as it is our own.

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