100 books like The Tunnel

This is a concise noir with clear and simple prose. There is no metafiction, magical realism, or non-linear narrative to contend with. The protagonist, Mr. Machi, is a terrible person, almost psychopathic, a symbol of everything that is wrong in Argentina. The book is a critique of unbridled capitalism and its status symbols. To kick things off, Machi finds a dead body inside the boot of his beloved BMW and from there the action and the hilarity don’t stop. Told from the point of view of Machi, we have an uncomplicated antihero, a person completely without redeeming features. According to legend, the author still works as a subway station cleaner.

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.   

Argentinians in 1950s Paris argue about art and philosophy. They fall in and out of love to a jazz soundtrack. The novel itself is in love with the modern city and the secret patterns of chance. Prefacing it is a ‘table of instructions’ in which the author writes that "this book consists of many books, but two books above all. The first can be read in a normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56... The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter."

There’s an exhilaration of structure, a deadpan formal playfulness that still thrills. It’s the book that taught me the most about reading. And, not entirely coincidentally, it’s the book that made me realise I was going to become a writer.

Paradoxes—a 2010 translation of his 2001 work—was an important addition to the emerging literature on anarchist cultural politics—a literature that began with a fellow Argentinian historian Dora Borrancos, who wrote Anarquismo, educación y costumbres en la Argentina de principios de siglo (1990). My book built on this emerging exploration of anarchists outside the workplace. Paradoxes explores anarchist newspapers, culture, plays, meetings, and other activities radicals used to promote anarchism while also offering entertainment and relaxation. Suriano is not myopic. He notes that in a time when other forms of entertainment like cinema emerged, workers had competing forms of commercialized amusement to pursue. This book—like other cultural histories—breathes life into old histories of anarchism that often were boring “ABC histories,” i.e., stories of one union acronym after another.

Argentinian masterpiece written in 1956 and only recently published in English in 2016, Zama is told from the POV of a minor Spanish official colonizing Paraguay. The alienation of Don Diego de Zama reads like a horror story—taut and psychological, he’s both villain and victim of the systems he perpetuates. Zama was adapted brilliantly into a film by Lucrecia Martel in 2017, which is how I learned about the book. I expected the film to have radically adapted its source material, but what I discovered instead was a novel from the 1950s that felt incredibly fresh and modern. 

In November 1915 Hudson was in the care of nurses in a Cornish convent hospital, much burdened by news from the Western Front. ‘Shall I live to see peace on earth again?’ he asked Don Roberto Cunninghame Graham in a letter.

"To me nothing is left but memories, and I’m here putting some of my boyhood’s days in a book which will have a certain interest because it gives a sort of picture of the country and people before it began to be civilised."

He was writing a memoir. A combination of Don Roberto’s missives, fevered dreams, and possibly medication sparked Hudson’s visions of his Pampas childhood. He asked his nurses for paper and pencils and began to scribble what would become his acclaimed memoir, Far Away and Long Ago. Virginia Woolf said she greeted the book "like an old friend". It remains a classic of its genre.

In this fascinating study, Chasteen examines the historical experiences that molded Latin American popular dance from an Atlantic perspective. It delves into the “deep” history of Latin American culture and analyzes the development of dancing culture in its socio-historical context. This is not only a well-researched, but also a well written and oftentimes funny book that is broadly accessible. It is a must-read for any new scholar interested in the field of Black performance culture. Although the focus is on Latin America, Chasteen’s study reveals connections that are also of great importance to understanding the historical development of Black dance culture in North America.

Maybe the weirdest and most beautiful collection of stories in my house full of books.

In “The Circular Ruins,” a man dreams up another man, only to realize that he, too, is a dream. “The Library of Babel” imagines a world containing every possible book, most of which are nonsense but some of which, if only you could find them, contain the most profound truths ever written. “Funes the Memorious” imagines a boy paralyzed by a perfect memory, one that retains every single detail of every event ever experienced.

Every sentence of these stories is bizarre and fascinating, with a richness that leaves me understanding them differently with every re-read.