100 books like Like Flies from Afar

The painter Castel meets Maria, the only person in the world capable of understanding him and his art. They start a relationship, but he becomes obsessive and wants her to live for him only. Castel describes his mind as a dark labyrinth in which occasional flashes of lightning illuminate dark corridors. The increasingly paranoid painter murders Maria and the novel takes the form of his prison-cell confession. Unable to understand why he committed the crime; he is at a loss how to justify himself. Sabato’s tortured protagonist is up there with Camus’ Meursault and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Femicide is a huge problem in Latin America, and Sabato was praised for being able to recreate the mind of a monster. However, I found Castel somewhat sympathetic.

More about hiding out and the lead-up to the final shoot-out than the bank robbery at the start, this novel is based on a real case from the 1960s. After they rob a bank in the Province of Buenos Aires, Dorda and Brigone, escape with the money over the Rio de la Plata. They find a bolthole in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, a country much like Argentina culturally and historically, but with fewer hysterical tendencies. Not happy about this are the politicians and police officers involved in the robbery and anxious for their cut of the loot. Piglia does a good job of recreating Argentina in the 1960s. Despite some stylistic pretensions and his overwriting of the main characters, the author manages not to get in the way of the story.

An atheist doctor, a former priest with wavering faith, and a whiskey-sodden British consul in sweltering Northeastern Argentina. The Honorary Consul has all the elements of a classic Greene novel. The author in his autobiography ‘Ways of Escape’ said it was his favourite work. Over the river from the small town of Corrientes is Paraguay and the American backed dictator, General Stroessner. In a muddle up Charlie Fortnam gets kidnapped by Paraguayan rebels hoping for an exchange of prisoners; the American Ambassador was the real target. The British government isn’t eager to get involved, Charlie is a sixty-year-old ‘honorary’ consul and alcoholic. Worse still he has recently married Clara, a young prostitute – not a becoming image at all. 

An Agatha Christie-style mystery set in Buenos Aires. At two in the morning, Pancho Soler returns drunk to his apartment building on Santa Fe Avenue. He presses the button for the lift, and it arrives with a surprise inside: a beautiful blonde woman, sitting upright, but dead. Many of the suspects who live in the building are recent immigrants from Europe and, as the novel is set in the 1950s, their memories and secrets from WW2 are still fresh. Boris, a Bulgarian chemist who worked for the Nazis, is the most entertaining of the lot. There are the usual red herrings and revelations in the search for the murderer. The young Argentinian detective is a little flat by Christie's standards, but this is a satisfying whodunnit.   

Horrifying, brutal, sinuous, and uncanny, this one floored me. It evokes the peril of girlhood and womanhood with unwavering intensity.

Each story is fresh and unexpected, yet also timeless, rich with wisdom and mythology centuries old. Steeped in painful history, past atrocities twine with the present to nightmarish effect.

Mariana Enríquez is part of a new vanguard of Argentine and Latin American Gothic writers alongside Samanta Schweblin. Their writing, born from real-world horrors, is among the most thrilling discoveries I’ve made in years. 

This edited volume does a lot of things, allowing authors who have published in Spanish to advance their arguments in English as well as establishing conversations among historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists. Some authors focus on the production and consumption of culture, like Matthew Karush with his examination of the Afro-Argentinean guitar player Oscar Alemán, and Rebekah Pite’s chapter on food history. Ezequiel Adamovsky and Eduardo Elena essays center on race and class during the foundation of Peronism as a political movement, and representations of skin color in politics since mid-twentieth century. While Peronism has never openly challenged conceptions of a White Argentina, some non-white Argentineans sought Peronism as a space to challenge ideas of whiteness.

There is no U.S. equivalent to the comic strip “Mafalda,” a strip centered around a young, middle-class girl and her entourage of neighborhood friends set in mid-1960s Buenos Aires. The strip itself only lasted a decade but its afterlives continue to reverberate across Latin America and throughout other parts of the world. Today, the face of Mafalda—the strip’s namesake—can be found with a speech bubble protesting any number of injustices. It is probably no exaggeration to say that this is the most important comic strip ever written, and one whose appeal lies both in its simplicity and the subtle depth of its political humor. Published here in translation, Cosse, a noted scholar of cultural and social history, has written a biography of the strip and its characters as a way not only of understanding the crisis of Argentina’s middle classes, but the ways in which the mass media transform objects… show more.

Anyone who aspires to an understanding of Latin American democracy must read the work of Guillermo O’Donnell, who almost single-handedly set the terms of the key debates over a period of thirty to forty years; and the only possible reason for this not being my 1st pick is that it is a collection of essays, not a monograph. O’Donnell was a passionate scholar, and both his passionate engagement and meticulous scholarship are amply illustrated in the discussions here of the vicissitudes and possibilities of democracy in Latin America, his wide survey encompassing everything from democratic struggles against authoritarian regimes to the flaws arising in the new democracies from defective institutionalism and extreme social inequalities. Read and admire.

This book also centers on a post-dictatorship period, looking not only at accountability for the thousands that were killed or disappeared during Argentina’s military junta, but also at the struggle for social and economic rights amid an economic crisis in the 1980s.

Adair centers her book on the Raúl Alfonsín presidency to look at the various challenges he faced, and the demands that citizens placed on his government to ensure basic needs. The book is also imminently readable and filled with moving anecdotes about citizens’ struggles during this period. 

Neither novel nor travel book, this classic journey defies category.

Purportedly a quest for a scrap of giant slothskin, which the author finds in a cave in southern Chile, it zig-zags through time and space, alighting on travellers from Magellan to Butch Cassidy, while trampling down conventional boundaries.

“Everyone says: ‘Are you writing a novel?’ No, I’m writing a story and I do rather insist that things must be called stories. That seems to me to be what they are. I don’t quite know the meaning of the word novel.”