Winter Quarters
In this racy sequel to Osvaldo Soriano’s acclaimed novel, A Funny Dirty Little War, a worn-out boxer and a has-been tango singer meet at the provincial town of Colonia Vela, the setting of A Funny Dirty Little War, to open a local junta-backed festival. Strangers to each other, they soon become friends, trying to go the distance against the local thugs or at least survive. Soriano’s gritty, Chandleresque prose builds a harrowing picture of a society in the grip of a bizarre and terrifying struggle.
“A black comedy set in the fictional Argentinian town… where loudspeakers and miliary oafs dominate life, described in Soriano’s ironic and bitterly funny style, like Nathanael West dipped in acid and rolled in broken glass.” Annie Proulx writing in BEHIND THE TIMES
“Here is the direct, satiric voice that has become the author’s trademark, a voice that has echoes of Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, and Raymond Chandler…. Mr Soriano’s translator, Nick Caistor, does a remarkable job of making the novel’s Argentine street language comprehensible….” NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“Every ringside epithet fits in a story that pulls no punches -– and manages to convey the decadence of a military regime, the pathos of friendship and the callousness of politics as vividly as a life-and-death struggle on the ropes.” THE NEW STATESMAN, London
Cover by Argentinian Oscar Zarate