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Martín Kohan Argentina
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Martín Kohan was born in Buenos Aires in 1967. He has so
far published several novels, short stories and a study of Eva Perón in
collaboration with Paola Cortés Rocca. Kohan is known as a writer of articles
in scientific and other media. He teaches literature at the University of
Buenos Aires.
From
what age onwards can one start to torture a child?
In Dos veces junio (“June, twice”), when returning to his office, a
young recruit finds this question written on a notepad conveniently placed
beside his telephone. The nameless first-person narrator, chauffeur of Dr.
Mesiano, a military doctor, gives no thought to the content of the question.
Yet the matter proves to be urgent, and only his revered boss can resolve it.
It is June 1978, and Argentina is suffering under a dictatorship.
Four
years later the narrator has become a medical student and his suspicions are
confirmed: the child Dr. Mesiano’s sister is bringing up as her son, is in fact
the son of a woman prisoner he had met at a torture centre. Kohan provides this
information subtly, as if in passing, and it is his great skill to have avoided
the role of plaintiff. Instead of displaying the nightmare of dictatorship, he
merely hints at it. He drives the action on by maintaining the tension to the
very end. The many small insertions about apparent trivialities - anecdotes
about the military, details about a soccer team, technical data on bathroom
weighing scales - merge to form a coherent whole, and in doing so, divide the
text into short numbered chapters which make rational thought seem absurd,
while at the same time functioning as page-turners.
The
key event in the novel Segundos afuera
(2005) also has to do with sport. In 1973 the local newspaper in Trelew, a
small town in Patagonia, celebrates its 50th anniversary, and each section is
given the task of reporting on an event that took place in 1923, the
newspaper's inauguration year.
The
sports editor Verani and the cultural reporter Ledesma soon come up with their
themes. That year, a boxing match took place in New York which caused a bit of
a sensation: although the Argentinean, Firpo, boxed his opponent, reigning
champion Dempsey from the US, out of the ring, but was not declared the winner
after ten seconds according to the regulation. Instead, Dempsey came to after
seventeen seconds and won the match.
Ledesma,
by contrast, is completely taken by a guest performance that year in Buenos
Aires by the Viennese Philharmonic of Mahler's First Symphony, conducted by
Richard Strauss.
The
dialogues between these two journalist colleagues are a source of considerable
amusement. While the educated Ledesma spouts all he knows about Mahler's
friendship with Strauss and his session with Freud, Verani, the embodiment of
good common sense, the "vox pop", sabotages all attempts to glorify
artists.
The
two events in question suddenly become linked by a note that Verani finds, by
chance, in the margin of a newspaper in the archives: on the night of the
boxing match, a dead body was found in a hotel, on the same floor on which only
the members of the Viennese orchestra were staying. Was it suicide or murder?
Were bets taken on the result of the boxing match?
The
twist at the end of the novel is as surprising and amusing as Kohan's narrative
strategy of linking his figures and perspectives to produce a perfect mosaic.
Represented for Sudamericana,
Argentina
La pérdida de
Laura,
Buenos Aires: Tantalia 1993, 127 p.
El informe, Buenos Aires:
Sudamericana 1997, 249 p.
Los cautivos,
el exilio de Echevarría, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana 2000, 170 p.
Dos veces
junio,
Buenos Aires: Sudamericana 2002, 188 p.
Brazil: Amauta 2005 ● France: Seuil ● Germany: Suhrkamp 2009
Segundos
Afuera,
Buenos Aries: Sudamericana 2005, 231
p.
Brazil: Companhia das
Letras ● France: Le Seuil 2007 ● Germany: Suhrkamp 2007 ● Italy: Einaudi ● UK: Serpent’s Tail