Discovering Bolaño

In a recent copy of the New Yorker that made its way here to BA (thanks to Ian's mom), I stumbled upon a short story called The Insufferable Gaucho. It's the story of an honorable old lawyer from BA who ends up hunting rabbits in the pampas. I loved it: I laughed, I cried.

I'd never heard of the Chilean author, Roberto Bolaño (pic'd), so I went looking for his work at our local bookstore. There was much to choose from, but I figured I'd buy El Gaucho Insufrible to revisit the charming gaucho in his original language and sample the collection's other short stories. Ian and I are now fighting over the book. It's that good.

Roberto Bolaño died in 2003, so imagine my surprise to see one of his books included in the New York Times' "10 Best Books of the Year" today. I was looking for my friend Rebecca Barry's debut, Later, At the Bar, but Bolaño's The Savage Detective (recently translated into English) edged her out. It must be damned fine to beat Later...

The NYT review back in April of this year opened with these words: "Over the past few years, Bolaño's reputation, in English at least, has been spreading in a quiet contagion..." Too bad Bolaño isn't alive to enjoy this new wave of success.

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Other Places Have Deer Hunting Season

Yesterday, here in Buenos Aires, Simon Wiesenthal Center director Efraim Zuroff launched Operation Last Chance, a round-up of still suelto Nazi war criminals around the world. Why launch that here? Well, up near the top of the Nazi list is Dr. Aribert Heim, now 93, the former camp doctor of Austria's Mauthausen death camp, where Simon Wiesenthal himself was almost killed in 1945. According to a story in the Telegraph (UK), Heim was known for injecting patients with lethal drugs and carrying out operations on prisoners without anaesthetic because he was "bored". The nasty bugger is thought to be in Argentina or Chile.

As we've noted before, while Argentina's open immigration policies are a breath of fresh air after the U.S.'s "Fear All Foreigners" strategy (even before 9/11), after so many Serbian, Cosa Nostra, and Nazi killers have turned up here, one would hope the country would get a little more selective, no?

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Camping in the pampas

A revelation: Camping in the pampas is a convenient way to keep toddlers far from city traffic + let them tip sippy cups wherever they want (outside the tents). In sum: 6 adults + 5 children under the age of 4 put up 4 tents for 1 night. Henry's still obsessed with Dr. Seuss's "The Foot Book," but gauchos in trucks, hot-air balloons, grilled steak, other kids and wide-open spaces distracted him enough to give us some breaks between readings.
(PS: Is the slide show working?)

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Top Ten de Bares Porteños

Recently Buenos Aires's city blog, Pasa en Buenos Aires, pointed to an article put out by the the city's tourism board listing the city's Top 10 Bars. Now, leaving aside the question of who could have paid who to get on a city-published Top 10 lists, it's a good round up. These are not the top bars to get plastered at, not the best places to meet a member of the opposite (or same) sex. They are, instead, the best of the classic--from the überfamous but still beautiful Café Tortoni to the billiard salon Los 36 Billares to the underground nightlife cool of Bar 12 de Octubre. So what makes a Buenos Aires café unique? As Horacio Spinetto, architect and author of the 2000 book "Cafés de Buenos Aires," explains here, Buenos Aires cafes and bars are like those of Paris and Madrid: not only places to meet up with friends, but places where you can order one coffee and sit for hours, reading a newspaper or a book, and not be disturbed. Cafes are Buenos Aires's living room, and my favorite classic living room is Bar Montecarlo (corner of Paraguay and Ravignani). The place--along with mozo extraordinaire Juan Antonio Moyá (above)--didn't make it onto the top 10 list, but did make it into the accompanying photo gallery

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Buenos Aires Goes Bronson

In a crime world version of "If you want something done right, do it yourself," clients and waiters at the Palermo bar/eatery Madagascar went all Charles Bronson and chased down two thieves who'd pretended to be restaurant clients and then stolen a purse from a pair of French tourists. As we've noted far too many times, there was a spate of restaurant invasions (or at least more reporting on them) last year. Whether this current case means the tide has turned, or merely that one should not fuck with the French, is open to question. But the thieves definitely lost--because of the beatings they received, they had to be attended to by an ambulance before being shipped off to the police station.

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Out With The Old...

A nearby home soon to be a tower

As both Cintra and I have noted before (and everybody who lives here knows without reminder), Buenos Aires is going through a building boom that feels more like an erasure of the past than an improving of living conditions. As opposed to cities like Portland, Oregon, where clearly defined land-use and zoning policies lead to a lot of renovation of old buildings and backfill of empty lots, Buenos Aires has opted for a simpler plan: Out with the old and in with the new.

Since we've moved to our PH in Palermo, at least four beautiful, albeit battered, old buildings have been sold. One has already been knocked down and replaced with a seven-floor anono-tower. Another two more are set to be demolished soon. So when I saw the signs for a auction of the interior finishings in the above building, I had to go.

It was a dive into Buenos Aires's wonderful, decrepit past, replete with all the flourishes--the wood boiserie, the soaring staircase, the pinotea and black-and-white tile floors--that one expects in classic cafes and the like. But these details were being sold to the highest bidder and a herd of house remodelers, architects and mere hangers on (i.e. me) follwed around the auctioneer as he went lot to lot. A friend of mine bought the boiserie (left) for 750 pesos, the whole stairwell (below right) went for 1,300. And the bathroom above? Who knows, but it's a pure period piece.

The house had seen better days--much better days--but it will be sad to see it drop. While I understand capital's inexorable march, I like to hope against hope that conserving the past could win out against making a buck, at least once in a while. One can only hope that the tower that replaces it will be interesting. I'm sad to say that judging from the other buildings around I expect to be disappointed.

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For Henry fans

We have 53 seconds of video to prove what I wrote last week: Henry walks! The boy started crawling proficiently before he hit 7 months, so we've been wondering when this bipedal stage would begin. Now that he's up and even more mobile, we're glad he took his time. (Gotta run...)

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Pepe Nacho in a nutshell

Ah, José Ignacio. We had wind, sun, warmth, a dramatic storm, hail, cold winds...all over the course of a weekend on the little peninsula northeast of Punta del Este. Quique update: He walks! He calls all liquids "agua" and he got his ninth tooth--a molar.

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