Bariloche

Staff Top Fives

Our booksellers' favorite books of the year!

Across 66 vignette-like chapters, Andrés Neuman’s Bariloche tells the story of Buenos Aires garbage collector Demetrio Rota. With melancholic beauty and his trademark emotional depth, Neuman chronicles Rota’s life, alighting on moments past and present, memories bucolic and brutal, to offer a stirring, rich portrait of an individual life awash in loneliness and hauling around so many discarded dreams. Matching the novel’s mournfulness is the sheer magnificence of Neuman’s prose, as well as the Argentine-Spanish author’s impressive capacity for compassion. Bariloche is a near-perfect sketch of imperfect people — tender and touching in its telling and further proof of Neuman’s massive storytelling talents. Recommended By Jeremy G., Powells.com

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, Andrés 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.

"The literature of the twenty-first century will belong to Neuman and a few of his blood brothers." Roberto Bolaño

"Andrés Neuman has transcended the boundaries of geography, time, and language to become one of the most significant writers of the early twenty-first century." Music & Literature

Andrés Neuman (1977) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he spent his childhood. The son of Argentine émigré musicians, he lives in Granada, Spain. He has a degree in Spanish Philology from the University of Granada, where he taught Latin American literature. He was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and was included on the Bogotá-39 list. He is the author of numerous novels, short stories, poems, aphorisms, and travel books. His first novel translated into English, Traveler of the Century (FSG), won the Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, and was selected among the books of the year by El País, El Mundo, The Guardian, The Independent, and Financial Times; it was also shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and received a Special Commendation from the jury of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His second novel translated into English, Talking to Ourselves (FSG), was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and for the Best Translated Book Award, shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and selected as the first among the twenty top books of the year by Typographical Era. His last book in English is Fracture (FSG). His works have been translated into twenty-two languages.
 
Robin Myers is a poet, essayist, and translator. Among her recent publications are Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter, 2020), The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press, 2020), and The Science of Departures by Adalber Salas Hernández (Kenning Editions, 2021). Forthcoming translations include The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills (Deep Vellum), Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave), and Tonight: The Great Earthquake by Leonardo Teja (PANK Books). She was a winner of the 2019 Poems in Translation Contest (Words Without Borders/Academy of American Poets). Robin's poems have appeared in Yale Review, Poetry Northwest, Washington Square Review, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Mexico City, where she is working on a book of essays about translating poetry and a collection of poems.