The crows of memory

NARRATIVE. EDICIONES DE LA FLOR, 2014. 288 PAGES

Behind every great man is a secretary. And a great granddaughter too. If every family is a world unto itself, the one to which the poet Leopoldo Lugones belonged deserves an atlas with ill-defined borders between poetry and cattle prods, psychiatry and incest, a pregnant woman with measles and a young man hanging from a tree in Tigre.

Like a river full of rapids and the occasional lull, this book tells the story of Argentina, or at least the story of Argentina as glimpsed through a keyhole.