Not just any puzzle will do they all have pictures showing the lake, forests and mountains of Bariloche, a small rural town on the other side of Argentina. In a stark, semi-vacant apartment, he sits and occupies himself with jigsaw puzzles. However, back home, we see a different side of Demetrio. Every day, he goes to the depot where he and his work partner cruise the empty streets of the Argentine capital, removing unsightly rubbish before the rest of the city starts its day. It’s a much shorter and simpler book than his IFFP-shortlisted work though, and is centred on the life of Demetrio Roja, a rubbish collector in Buenos Aires. As you may have noticed, I’ve read a lot of tricky books in my time (many this year alone), so why is today’s book, a 150-page first novel, one of the most difficult I’ve ever read? Well, there’s a simple answer to that – there’s a lot that’s lost in translation…īariloche is the first novel of Argentine-Spanish writer Andrés Neuman, he of Traveller of the Century fame.
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