Tomás Eloy Martínez, The Tango Singer, 2004

A New York student arrives in Buenos Aires in 2001 in search of Julio Martel, a legendary and highly elusive Tango singer. But while seeking out Martel his real discoveries are of Buenos Aires’s many tragic histories, all somehow intertwined with the random performances of Martel himself, and still behind almost everything there is the ghost of Borges to deal with and the indelible stamp he made on the Porteños psyche. As a story of obsessions and a variety of very erudite madnesses, this book quickly becomes a guided tour of the city’s unwritten and mostly secret past, bringing Buenos Aires alive with an almost dreamlike lucidity. Borges still casts a very long shadow over modern Argentine literature and when the result is beautiful books like this, that is no bad thing.   PY

•  Martínez was shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize in 2005.

Louise Welsh, Tamburlaine Must Die, 2004

Historical novels are often helped by having damn good covers, and this is a case in point. Inside, Louise Welsh has conjured a completely engrossing fiction out of the mysterious last days of the 16th Century playwright Christopher Marlowe, as he is forced to find out who is imitating one of his most famous characters, Tamburlaine, with the intention of sending Marlowe himself to the gallows. Welsh employs a playfulness with language that reads with great conviction (even her use of the Anglo-Saxon ‘fuck’ is legitimate); nor does she go in for endless florid detail, instead getting down to a very robust kind of sketching that captures her characters with merely a few bold strokes. It reads like a fast and fleeting look through a window into the past, the dialogue is excellent, the pacing perfect and the end result memorable.   PY

Susan Hillmore, Malaria, 2000

Whereas humanity is often described as a cancer on the planet, Susan Hillmore seems to prefer the analogy of a fever in this not-quite-post-modern descendent of Milton’s Paradise Lost. One of the world’s last surviving baby elephants is separated from its mother and taken to London Zoo as a self-serving political gift from the once-lush fictional island of Mannar, as it collapses into anarchy. The plight of the elephants is symbolic of the all-encompassing decay that seems to grip all characters – arrogant colonials or put-upon locals – all inadequate people, and, it must be said, inadequately sketched-out. Malaria is also only half the story it could have been if it were given a more specific sense of time and place: it has all the feel of being set in a fictional African nation though it is only through the scantest of details that its Asian location later becomes apparent. This was a distraction too far for me, and the dysfunctional setting of this rather uneven story somehow reminds me more of J.G. Ballard than John Brunner, though it really ought to be the other way round.  PY

MORE ON SUSAN HILLMORE :  WIKIPEDIA

Fred Uhlman, Reunion, 1971

A first-person novella about a Jewish German schoolboy who befriends a classmate from an Aryan, aristocratic family with Nazi sympathies. It’s 1933, Hitler has just become Chancellor and official attitudes towards Jews are changing, as is the foundation of their friendship. As a microcosm of the Jewish German experience the book only skirts the edges of the politics, focussing instead on the tensions that pull the two boys apart. In his introduction Arthur Koestler describes the book’s tone well: “There is none of the Wagnerian fury; it is as if Mozart had re-written the Götterdämmerung.” A straightforward tale, but also quietly memorable.  PY

MORE ON FRED UHLMAN :  WIKIPEDIA