Imagining Argentina

(Paperback)

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Description

Imagining Argentina is set in the dark days of the late 1970's, when thousands of Argentineans disappeared without a trace into the general's prison cells and torture chambers. When Carlos Ruweda's wife is suddenly taken from him, he discovers a magical gift- In waking dreams, he had clear visions of the fates of "the disappeared." But he cannot "imagine" what has happened to his own wife. Driven to near madness, his mind cannot be taken away- imagination, stories, and the mystical secrets of the human spirit.

Reviews

A harrowing, brilliantnovel.The New Yorker

Apowerful new novel . . . Thorton seems to have weddedhis study of such writers as Borges and Marquez with thy his own instinctive gift for metaphor, andin doing so, created his own brand of magical realismThe New York Times

Remarkable . . . deeplyinventive . . . Thorton has imagined Argentina truly; hisinspired fable troubles and feeds our own intriguing imagining.Los Angeles Times

Imagining Argentina is a slim volume filled with beautiful writing. It is an exciting adventure story. It is a haunting love story. And it is a story for alltime.Detroit Free Press

The writing is crystalline, themetaphors compelling . . . Its central theme is universal.The Philadelphia Inquirer

In a time when much North American fiction is contained by crabbed realism, Thorton takes for his material one of the bleaker recent instances of human cruelty, sees in it the enduring nobility of the human spirit and imagines a book that celebrates that spirit.The Washington Post Book World

A powerful firstnovel and a manifesto for the memorializing power of literature.The New York Times Book Review

Aprofoundly hopeful book.The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Author Bio

Lawrence Thorntonis an award-winning novelist best known for Imagining Argentina, his first novel, which received a number of literary prizes, including the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award, the PEN American Center West Award for Best Novel of 1987, a nomination for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Shirley Collier Award from UCLA, and the Silver Medal of the Commonwealth Club of California. He also received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Thorntonwas born and educated in California, where he lives with his wife.