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Tango for a Torturer
 
 
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Tango for a Torturer [Paperback]

Daniel Chavarria (Author), Peter Bush (Translator)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Book Description

May 1, 2007

Aldo Bianchi, a former Argentine revolutionary now living in Italy, travels to Havana, where he meets the beautiful Bini, a sultry student with great charm and panache working the hotels. Bianchi soon discovers via his liaison with Bini that his nemesis, the Uruguayan military torturer Alberto Ríos, is living under a false identity in Cuba. Putting his tropical holiday on hold, Bianchi goes on the hunt for his sadistic enemy.

Daniel Chavarría authentically portrays the sensuousness and skullduggery of contemporary Havana, a city that offers erotic thrills to pleasure-seeking tourists, even as it hides villains in its humid embrace. While Ríos thrives on bribery and corruption, Bianchi is driven by a desire to see justice done. Tango for a Torturer is a sexy and political thriller chock-full of bawdy humor and chilling evocations of the evils wrought by Latin American military dictatorships.

Daniel Chavarría, a former Tupamaros who hijacked a plane to fly himself to Havana in 1969, is a Uruguayan writer with two passions: classical literature and prostitutes. For years he was a professor of Latin, Greek, and classical literature, devoting much of his time and energy to researching the origins and evolution of prostitution. He has won numerous literary awards around the world, including the 1992 Dashiell Hammett Award and the 2002 Edgar Allan Poe Award. His novels Adios Muchachos and The Eye of Cybele are also published by Akashic Books. He lives in Havana.


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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. A one-time Argentine revolutionary exacts an inventive revenge on the ex-military man who once did him a horrible wrong in this superior crime novel from Uruguayan author Charvarría (whose 2001's Adios Muchachos won an Edgar). While visiting Havana, Aldo Bianchi, now in his mid-50s and living in Italy, falls in love with Bini, a spectacularly beautiful, not particularly monogamous 27-year-old woman. In the midst of his efforts to talk her into marrying him, he discovers that the now retired Uruguayan military officer who tortured him and killed his girlfriend years earlier is living in Havana, enjoying a happy life under the false name Alberto Ríos. Intent upon seeing harsh justice done, Bianchi employs every trick he can, including Bini's personal charms, to lure Ríos into a complicated trap. The author, who lives in Havana, brings to his novel a superlative narrative sense, keen feel for human behavior in desperate situations and a deep understanding of the nature of dictatorships. Charvarría is as adept at comedy as he is at tragedy. (May)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Sultry, sensuous, mysterious Havana is the locale for this unusual political thriller. Argentine-born Italian businessman Aldo Bianchi meets Bini, a beautiful, headstrong Cuban hooker, and becomes a 55-year-old satyr. For Aldo, this is a stunning development, because as a young man, he and his girlfriend were tortured by "Triple O," an infamous torture specialist trained by the U.S. government; that horror affected his relations with women. Through Bini, Aldo learns that Triple O is living in Havana under an assumed name, and he launches a convoluted plot—hinging on a pair of two-toned Florsheim shoes—to get his revenge. What makes this novel unusual is that it is by turns bawdy, funny, dark, cheerful, learned, and madcap, populated with memorable characters and filled with the sense that Havana is a must-see travel destination. Chavarria knows his subject, too: a revolutionary in South America in the 1960s, he fled to Cuba in 1969 and taught classical literature at the University of Havana. Devotees of Paco Taibo III will love Chavarria, as will readers who travel vicariously with the help of the burgeoning ranks of international crime novels. Gaughan, Thomas

Product Details

  • Paperback: 341 pages
  • Publisher: Akashic Books (May 1, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1933354194
  • ISBN-13: 978-1933354194
  • Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #176,228 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Persuasive Slice of Cuban Life, May 11, 2007
This review is from: Tango for a Torturer (Paperback)
Is it the tropical climate? Is it the tradition of Latin American literature? I don't know. All I know about Cuba is derived from "I Love Lucy," so take that into account when I say that Daniel Chavarria's "Tango for a Torturer" comes across as an authentic slice of life in Cuba.

Alberto Rios, a military torturer living the retired good life in Cuba is spotted by Aldo Bianchi, one of his former victims, who plots to frame him for a man's death. Helping him is his mistress, Bini, who's incredibly hot but also emotionally unstable.

It's set in Cuba, but Castro makes as much an appearance as George Bush would in my life. He's background noise. Instead, we're given the native's tour, of people scraping by from day to day, working at their jobs, making a little money on the side, staying out of trouble and taking time to live the good life when they can afford it.

But there's some political moments. Rios (aka Triple O) is a psychotic who made torturing political prisoners his career. Reading that he perfected his craft at Devil's Horn, Fla., and Fort Paramount, Ga., raises the point that the uses of persuasion (as Rios would put it) wasn't institutionalized by Bush, no matter what Seymour Hersh says.

Chavarria loves to take little side trips with the story. There's Dr. Azua, the defense attorney, a Cuban combination of Perry Mason and Nero Wolfe, who infallibly determines the guilt or innocence of his clients by laying hands on them. Then there's the homicide detective, Captain Bastidas, called in to investigate the hit-and-run death of a bicyclist in the rain. I can tell you much about his life, but he plays his role early on and doesn't show up again.

What would a New York editor make of this? Would she read the nine pages devoted to a surprise party for Aldo, or the 11 pages at the end describing another party, this time in prison, and suggest they'd be cut back? There's also plenty of backstory about Rios and his career as a torturer (or as he would tell himself, as an expert in the science of persuasion), about Bini's life, from a little girl to doing time in prison and her work as a mistress. Are all these details really necessary?

But I wouldn't cut a word. Maybe they do things different in another country. Perhaps it's the reader, trained to read books with tight plots, minimal digression, and endings that seem drawn more from genre fiction -- the biter biting, the worm turning, the fatal weakness lifting the lever of tragedy -- than from the concatenation of events. Whatever. Reading this takes you out of the country and into a very different but familiar world. It's a cool book.
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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
savoury rolls, florsheim shoes
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Alberto Rios, Orlando Ortega, Buenos Aires, Baltasar Paris, Juan Pedro, Aldo Bianchi, Servio Tulio, Hemingway Marina, Triton Hotel, Captain Bastidas, Captain Horror, The Iliad, Copacabana Hotel, Fifth Avenue, Ferrari Testarossa, Latin America, Navy Engineering School, River Plate, John Volzov, Major Ortega, Signor Bianchi, Emilio Letelier, Major Mariano Robles, Shake It Rosy, Foreign Affairs
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