Kiss and Tango: Looking for Love in Buenos Aires (Hardcover)

by Marina Palmer (Author) "Where am I going?..." (more)
Key Phrases: Buenos Aires, New York, Juan Carlos (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
When 30-year-old Palmer announced she was abandoning her Manhattan apartment, ditching her stressful advertising job and leaving the unhappy singles scene to take up professional tango dancing in Buenos Aires, her upper-crust parents were understandably dubious. Of course, the tango isn't just a dance—it's a grand metaphor for sexual pursuit. Beginning with a nod from the man, signifying his desire for a particular woman, tango continues in a series of moves resembling stylized foreplay. After a few agonizing years of trying to combine her Manhattan day life with a tango nightlife, in 1999, Palmer moved to Argentina. She spent almost every night until dawn dancing at various venues, occasionally bringing home a partner, and her trials on the dance floor—aching feet, battered shins—were only compounded in the bedroom. After absorbing five years of diary entries, readers will feel at home with Buenos Aires street life and almost accustomed to the retrosexual politics of the tango scene, so when Palmer says things like, "I wish all men knew how I long to be treated like an object," they sort of know what she means. Although feminists may bristle, other readers may well enjoy Palmer's engagingly reckless spirit.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Marina Palmer's chatty memoir of her adventures in the Argentine capital arrives at what seems to be a propitious time. HBO has shelved "Sex and the City," "Desperate Housewives" is in reruns, and the American appetite for vicarious sensuality is being only partly sated by a new series that features ballroom dancing. "Dancing With the Stars," in which professional ballroom champions pair with vaguely familiar "celebrities" to trip -- make that stumble -- the light fantastic, has been a hit since it began airing last month. So Kiss & Tango, a frank, explicit diary of an attractive young woman's many amorous and terpsichorean couplings, seems ideally poised to fill a gap in the zeitgeist.

Palmer, "Greek and American by birth, English and French by education," discovered tango dancing in January 1997, during a two-week visit with a cousin in Buenos Aires. She had little idea what to expect on her initial visit to a milonga (a party where folks gather by night to mingle, flirt and dance). At 2 a.m., her cousin escorted her to what looked like a sports club or gym. Once inside, she took in "a brightly lit dance floor filled with a swirling mass of rotating bodies that were pressed together so tightly, they looked like a can of sardines come alive." Still, Palmer was instantly smitten, a process she describes in language that sounds more painful than enchanting. The beautiful music, she breathlessly recalls, "wrenched my soul from its socket." Her first tango lesson a few days later proved equally transformative: "I felt myself lifted up into a cloud. I was at one with myself and everything around me. It was a moment of pure happiness. Happiness as I've never felt before."

Such ecstatic moments were rare back in the States, where she lived a "nightmarish existence as an account executive at a large New York agency." Determined to retain a bit of that bliss, Palmer returned home and signed up for tango lessons at three different studios. Soon she became a milonguera, a tango addict who goes out dancing every night of the week. But all the whirling and twirling only reminded her of what she lacked. "I don't know when it started," she noted in March 1998. "But it has hit me hard. This craving for a tango partner. One my own age. One I might conceivably fall in love with. . . . I can't imagine my life without the tango. . . . It's true what they say: You do not choose the tango. It chooses you."

Her epiphany led to a radical departure. "It was all so clear, so simple," she realized. "I was going to quit my job, move to Buenos Aires, and find myself a partner." Her parents, who lived in London, were not enthusiastic about her new plans. "I didn't put you through Cambridge for you to throw it all away like this," sighed her dad, a well-off banker. Eventually he agreed to subsidize her to the tune of $2,000 a month. Palmer arrived in Buenos Aires in March 1999, envisioning a career as a professional tango dancer. This is a little like showing up at La Scala and demanding a role in "La Bohème." But Palmer was 31, about 10 years older than the partners favored by male tango pros, and mature enough to know that she would have to work hard. As in extremely hard. She took ballet lessons three times a week to improve her flexibility, studied tango with various local masters and hit the milongas every night.

A veteran traveler who had already lived in five countries, Palmer had little difficulty picking up the local Spanish. "I've noticed that you don't even need to understand that much to get the gist of what somebody is saying," she observed. "Which proves that most of the words we use are superfluous." Alas, this sage perception had no detectable influence on her method of diary-keeping. She can't resist telling everything, even in instances where a mere hint would be sufficient. Her wordiness is often leavened by a dry kind of wit, though. For example, she recalls her visit to a decaying tearoom where "retro globe lights hang like bunches of grapes from the ceiling, except they are not retro because they have not been replaced since 1966." But then she goes on to add, "Neither have the dancers, by the looks of them."

That last little zinger shows the dangers of her warts-and-all approach. One of Palmer's most persistent and disturbing blemishes is her lack of appreciation for anyone who's been on Earth long enough to reach retirement age. "You know how old people go stale?" she lamented in a passage dated Jan. 27, 1998. "No matter how much cologne Armando [an aspiring suitor in his sixties] doused himself with . . . it couldn't cover up that sickly sweet smell of putrefying flesh." All Argentines frequent cafes, she noted in September 1999, "even the old, who in other countries have the decency to stay out of sight." Elsewhere, she describes an elderly female dancer as an "old bag." Of retired men, "It goes without saying that the very idea of them having sex in the first place is yucky."

If it is true, as Palmer notes, that "political correctness has not made it this far south yet," it's also true that she didn't bring any with her. But she did tote plenty of baggage, most of it involving her failure to land Mr. Right. Although she soon learned to glide across the dance floor with confidence and considerable grace, her attempts at romance met with many a misstep and pratfall. She bedded several promising studs -- their romps are recorded in unsparing detail -- but they seldom pleased her. The few who left her satisfied usually wound up leaving her altogether. The problem, she concludes, is that "in the eyes of . . . men, I'm not wife material. I'm not even girlfriend material. They take one look at me and think: SEX!" It's no wonder, really, since her mates' myopia was oddly congruent with her own philosophy: "If you can't beat 'em, you might as well go for a roll in the hay."

And so it goes, through an exhausting and intermittently interesting succession of ballroom and bedroom partners. Palmer notes near the end of her three-year sojourn, "I remember every face and every name of every man I have ever danced with." I doubt that most readers will be able to say the same. Her crowded dance card left me scrambling to remember the differences between Julio, Javier, Diego, Frank, Pablo and all the other beaus fortunate enough to behold Palmer's flashing fishnet stockings and stiletto heels at close range.

While the author's private melodramas unreeled, events in the outside world loomed in far larger dimensions -- with far starker consequences. Only when such developments threatened to inconvenience her did she catalogue them in her diary, briefly mentioning the destabilizing Argentine currency, the turmoil in the executive branches of the government, the violent unrest in the streets. Mostly she focused on more intimate subjects, such as wondering "if people realize how difficult it is to dance tango while on the brink of orgasm." Readers with enough stamina to stick with Palmer to the end can rest assured that she will tell them just how challenging that is.

Reviewed by Jabari Asim
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (June 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060742925
• ISBN-13: 978-0060742928
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #516,270 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing and shallow, February 10, 2006

By	A. C. Marsh - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was so looking forward to this as I had just returned from my own solo vacation to Argentina and I thought this book would be a fun read and reminder of my trip. What a disappointment. Marina Palmer claims to have passion for the tango, but she only tells and not shows us this. She comes off as being a spoiled, narcissistic spoiled girl of 19, not a woman in her 30s. Her cliche-ridden prose merely describes her sexual conquests and illustrates her utter inability to form both friendships and relationships of substance. Argentina and tango have been done a real injustice by this shallow memoir.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Make no mistake, Ms. Palmer demonstrates NO authority on the subject., February 2, 2006

By	I Hate Amazon "contributor" - See all my reviews

After a long period of reservation about whether I wanted to write an unkind review for something, or give a product more attention than it deserved, I couldn't restrain myself any longer after seeing the author on a television program speaking as if she was a representative of the dance and of the scene in Buenos Aires. This bothered me terribly because, as evidenced by this book, she is nothing but a wide eyed, patronizing, privileged tourist. It's bad enough that she is a terrible writer--her descriptions are riddled with cliches (more than once she describes a crowded dance floor as being packed "like a can of sardines") and her explanations of tango terms and customs for non-aficionados are awkwardly shoehorned into the narrative--thereby belying the "diary" format--or briefly used to introduce sections as a heavy handed thematic primer. As for her "authority," it is essentially reduced to name dropping of people and places which are more legitimately established in the tango scene. Okay, up to this point it's just a bad book, no big deal. What really gets me is her utter narcissism and exploitation of the culture and tradition that define this great city. Of course, the premise of the book is of a dissatisfied woman in New York who rushes off to BsA to find romance and adventure, but the hope (for the reader) is that somewhere along the way, she will shed her exoticism of the culture and come to a deeper understanding and appreciation of it and be able to convey that to us. Unfortunately, that never happens. Throughout the book the narrator remains steadfastly self-indulgent. For example, near the end she describes the lockdown of the banks and the forced conversion of pesos, which threw the country into chaos and dropped the majority into poverty. Yet her primary concern was that she would be unable to do her street performance. Such callous disregard illuminates two things very clearly. First, she is a very unlikeable narrator. Secondly, she is NO porteña. I cannot give a lower recommendation.

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Sex and the Spoiled-Little-Rich Girl, September 11, 2005

By	Cherie Magnus (Buenos Aires, Argentina) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Sorry to bring a little reality to the heavy-breathing enthusiasm, but I had hoped this book would be a little bit about tango.

Instead it's the tale of a spoiled thirty-year-old (!) "girl" who talks her wealthy family into supporting her whim of becoming a professional tango dancer in Buenos Aires. Along the way to the realization two years later that it will never happen, she seduces and sleeps with every Argentine male she can get her hands on, even the delivery boy.

Without previous dance training (she worked in advertising in New York), she had a fantasy of dancing on stage, and at the same time, of finding her "Other Half of the Orange" who also is a Tango God.

Set up comfortably in a luxury apartment and spending her parents' $2,000 U.S. per month on tango classes, shoes and cafes con leche, she brings man after man to her bed, and sometimes two at a time, and doesn't spare us the details.

The book only gets interesting at the end when the Economic Crisis hits Argentina in 2001, but running from the turmoil, Marina quickly escapes to her relatives' elegant country ranch far from the disquieting events in the city. And then, giving up the dream, she returns to the States.

The writing is full of cliches, the lovers are indistinguishable, the women invariably turn out to be "bitches."

So I'm still waiting for someone to write about Argentine Tango in Buenos Aires. Slutty sex is everywhere.