10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Try a New Dance, Lance, December 27, 2008
This review is from: Tango: An Argentine Love Story (Paperback)
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this book proves the reverse
may also be true---words can be as richly evocative as any image.
TANGO's words march across the page like vivid snapshots. It takes
you deep inside the culture of the dance, of Buenos Aires, a very
Italian city, to exotic corners of Argentina, like Iguazu and
Patagonia, to gaucho country, and barrios (or neighborhoods) all over
Buenos Aires. It never lacks for some visual detail to keep your
kinesthetic interest--whether the author is describing tango dancers
in La Boca who dip their soles in paint and dance on a huge canvas or
what the exotic parts of Argentine cattle taste like or what her many
dance partners smell like--(be thankful it's not scratch-and-sniff).
Be prepared for every known sense and some not yet named to be
aroused when you read TANGO, a love story with many facets.
The book opens when life takes some unexpected turns, and the author
rises to the challenge. She packs up a few suitcases and with only a
bare bones plan, takes off for Buenos Aires, Tango Mecca, Paris of
South America, a city that never sleeps. Her love life has fallen
apart, the gauntlet is thrown. That's the bad news. It's also where
the good news starts. She shows how we all rise from the ashes, new
life is always on the bud. There are a thousand and one ways to
redeem ourselves. Just hop on the bus, Gus. Slip out the back, Jack.
Try a new dance, Lance.
TANGO is a story about sudden travel---not the carefully planned
sort--- to a foreign place literally and figuratively. That is,
sometimes that foreign place is our self. The author is never at a
loss for finding the hidden psychological/spiritual meaning in the
mundane: her residual Oedipal complex in a partner's torso, the
double meaning of tango's precept that we maintain our own "axis" in
tango. Everything goes many layers deep. Indeed tango is more than a
dance, it's a metaphor for everything in life, from internal conflict
to external peace.
TANGO, the "love" story, is occasionally about ordinary romance
between a man and woman; it has forays into sexual love as well as
Platonic idealized love with strangers you meet in a specially
designated place for tango, called a milonga, whom you may never see
again, who "come and go like ripples in a stream."
It is also about love beyond the conventional man/woman type. It's
about love in a community of people who share a passion, in this case
for a dance and its music, which have survived more than a hundred
years through much, including Argentina's last military dictatorship
prohibition of public gatherings. It is also about the kind of self
discovery and bliss that occur when you give yourself over completely
to anything that you love and that requires total presence.
The writing is an exercise in the glorification of the commonplace---
a rundown rickety old monastery, a dying cat, the milonga itself, all
play out poetically in the author's experience. For this reason, at
times it reads like a well-crafted novel.
But even the author admits that, after all, tango is just a dance and
she guides the reader to understanding that the rapture and bliss she
derives from tango is everyone's birthright: "Every `body' has got
tango," she writes. You don't have to know a thing about the dance to
enjoy this book. And if you do, you'll love it because it offers a
measure of one woman's multi-faceted experience and interpretation,
against which to measure your own or another's. There is so much to
ponder and take away---one of my favorite chapters is called Church
of Tango, one in which there is very little tango, but a lot to
contemplate.
TANGO is pure lyricism. Go learn a few steps in a class, but then
pick up TANGO and experience tango like you never have and never will
on a dance floor. Then, realize that all your life, every action,
reaction, interaction, is tango, a dance between two forces, two
polarities--the true currency of life. Savor it, savor it--just like
the dance---in total presence.
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