Buenos Aires is a literary city: Its residents like to boast about its many bookstores and independent publishers. Samanta Schweblin suggest which books and authors to start with.
Read Your Way Around the World is a series exploring the globe through books.
When I started traveling, I came to realize just how different Buenos Aires was from other literary cities. Maybe we all have similar thoughts about our hometowns, or maybe my revelation is just one more confirmation of the arrogance for which we porteños — people raised in the port city of Buenos Aires — are famous throughout the rest of Latin America.
But that arrogance is also what gives rise to our literature. Around here, we like to boast of being one of the cities with the greatest number of bookstores per capita in the world — and about how, even in the depths of an economic crisis, Argentina has more than 200 independent publishers. One of our great problems, we like to say, is having more people who want to write than people who read.
We grow up steeped in the idea of a city built by European immigrants yearning for the cultures of other continents. “Everything here is a kind of replica of some other place,” the writer Graciela Speranza once said. But the past of this land that was sacked and forsaken for generations now bubbles up all around us.
Maybe Buenos Aires does spend all day navel-gazing, but it’s not out of mere arrogance. It’s a city still trying to understand where it comes from, and what it means to have a past and a future — two fictions we are still hard at work on. Nervous and vital, our literature is constantly dusting itself off, and it doesn’t mind getting its hands a little dirty in the process.
What should I read on the plane?
In the time it takes to read a novel, you can read five stories. If you want to land with a certain big-picture understanding of the place, start with the shortest texts.
On the plane ride over, begin with “The Slaughter Yard,” by Esteban Echeverría, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni — one of the foundational works of Argentine literature. After the first nap, go straight to “The Aleph,” by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Anthony Bonner.
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