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Mario Diament Argentina
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Mario Diament was born in Buenos Aires
in. Today, the renowned journalist and dramaturg lives in Florida/USA. His most
recent play, Cita a ciegas („Blind Date“), is being staged in Europe and
America and beside numerous national prizes, it was awarded the Curtain Up! in
the United States of America.
With Martín Eidán, Diamant has presented his
debut novel. Himself a passionate reader of crime fiction, and as a dramaturg,
accustomed to defining his characters through storyline and dialogue, he has
succeeded in writing a spellbinding thriller. Its 50-year-old protagonist is
gripped by the sudden urge of escaping his settled life. Instead of returning
to his wife Marta and daughter Sabrina after researching in Mexico, the
journalist flies to San Francisco, where craftily, he obtains a false passport
by the name of Eidán, a palindrome of the word“nobody” in Spanish. With his new
identity, he travels to Prague, a place he associates little more with than the
name of Franz Kafka. While indulging in amorous adventures in the snowy city
and falling for the beautiful and unattainable Nina, he also meets the
mysterious genealogist Nathan Heller, who with his studies of family trees
shows him that no one can leave the past behind– it will forever catch up.
A random search on the internet seems to prove this:
When Eidán discovers that a stranger is publishing articles under his name, he
is gripped by curiosity and disquiet and drawn back to Buenos Aires. What or
who could lie behind this puzzling stranger? Obviously not his wife: Instead of
searching for him, she is experiencing her own Indian Summer with an ex-lover.
Eidán is drawn deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of his own and the alien
identity, without ever tiring the reader. This book should be taken on holiday.
As the publisher claims, it is perfect “airport literature”.
The adventures
of Eidán, portrayed by Diament so precisely, are endless. Though essentially an
adventure story, it would not do the book justice reducing it to this genre.
The adventures of Eidán are the tip of the iceberg of something larger and more
complicated, concealed beneath the surface and involving the greatest of all
mysteries: Who we really are.
Jorge Fernández Diaz, La Nación
Original
editions and rights sold:
Novel:
Martín Eidán, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana 2006, 287
p.