Tango: An Argentine Love Story [Paperback]

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this book proves the reverse
may also be true---words can be as richly evocative as any image.
TANGO's words march across the page like vivid snapshots. It takes
you deep inside the culture of the dance, of Buenos Aires, a very
Italian city, to exotic corners of Argentina, like Iguazu and
Patagonia, to gaucho country, and barrios (or neighborhoods) all over
Buenos Aires. It never lacks for some visual detail to keep your
kinesthetic interest--whether the author is describing tango dancers
in La Boca who dip their soles in paint and dance on a huge canvas or
what the exotic parts of Argentine cattle taste like or what her many
dance partners smell like--(be thankful it's not scratch-and-sniff).
Be prepared for every known sense and some not yet named to be
aroused when you read TANGO, a love story with many facets.

The book opens when life takes some unexpected turns, and the author
rises to the challenge. She packs up a few suitcases and with only a
bare bones plan, takes off for Buenos Aires, Tango Mecca, Paris of
South America, a city that never sleeps. Her love life has fallen
apart, the gauntlet is thrown. That's the bad news. It's also where
the good news starts. She shows how we all rise from the ashes, new
life is always on the bud. There are a thousand and one ways to
redeem ourselves. Just hop on the bus, Gus. Slip out the back, Jack.
Try a new dance, Lance.

TANGO is a story about sudden travel---not the carefully planned
sort--- to a foreign place literally and figuratively. That is,
sometimes that foreign place is our self. The author is never at a
loss for finding the hidden psychological/spiritual meaning in the
mundane: her residual Oedipal complex in a partner's torso, the
double meaning of tango's precept that we maintain our own "axis" in
tango. Everything goes many layers deep. Indeed tango is more than a
dance, it's a metaphor for everything in life, from internal conflict
to external peace.

TANGO, the "love" story, is occasionally about ordinary romance
between a man and woman; it has forays into sexual love as well as
Platonic idealized love with strangers you meet in a specially
designated place for tango, called a milonga, whom you may never see
again, who "come and go like ripples in a stream."

It is also about love beyond the conventional man/woman type. It's
about love in a community of people who share a passion, in this case
for a dance and its music, which have survived more than a hundred
years through much, including Argentina's last military dictatorship
prohibition of public gatherings. It is also about the kind of self
discovery and bliss that occur when you give yourself over completely
to anything that you love and that requires total presence.

The writing is an exercise in the glorification of the commonplace---
a rundown rickety old monastery, a dying cat, the milonga itself, all
play out poetically in the author's experience. For this reason, at
times it reads like a well-crafted novel.

But even the author admits that, after all, tango is just a dance and
she guides the reader to understanding that the rapture and bliss she
derives from tango is everyone's birthright: "Every `body' has got
tango," she writes. You don't have to know a thing about the dance to
enjoy this book. And if you do, you'll love it because it offers a
measure of one woman's multi-faceted experience and interpretation,
against which to measure your own or another's. There is so much to
ponder and take away---one of my favorite chapters is called Church
of Tango, one in which there is very little tango, but a lot to
contemplate.

TANGO is pure lyricism. Go learn a few steps in a class, but then
pick up TANGO and experience tango like you never have and never will
on a dance floor. Then, realize that all your life, every action,
reaction, interaction, is tango, a dance between two forces, two
polarities--the true currency of life. Savor it, savor it--just like
the dance---in total presence.

This book was a delicious read, well written and satisfying on many levels. For starters, it is my favorite kind of travel writing because it penetrates the underlying character of a place and its people, in this case Buenos Aires and the world of tango. But the book is also an absorbing story of the author's personal journey, one in which she heals her troubled soul/heart as she toggles between the pursuits of tango and zen meditation. Her exploration into these two mind-body disciplines and the bridge she finds between them is fascinating. Occasionally she tosses out nuggets of hard won wisdom that she extracts from both, but never takes herself too seriously. She is in fact quite funny with her self-deprecating humor. Yet when she talks of others she does so in a spirit of kindness and generosity.

This book is a very quick read, and I must say that it kept me wanting to read it all the way through. I loved every bit of the book that was about dancing and Buenos Aires. I absolutely love Argentina, and reading this book was like re-visiting my time there. On the downside, this book is the typical type of "memoir" that has recently become popular where someone has a unique experience, then decides to write about it (Eat, Pray, Love is the perfect example of this, and I thought that book was nearly worthless). I think there has to be some level of egotism involved to think that others would want to read about your experience, and that ego often shows up in an annoying sort of way in the book. As other reviewers pointed out, the author is a bit excessive in her self-praise. Clearly, she is a good dancer, but it would have been much more enjoyable to read if this part had been understated. I admit I don't know much about the whole Zen thing, but I always thought modesty was an important part of that way of thinking. The combination of these two (ego vs. Zen)makes for an incongruous narrative.

My three-star rating refers only to the book, and not my complaint here, but I also want to warn other customers that if you are buying this as a bargain book, you may not receive a book that looks very nice (important if you're buying it as a gift). This is probably the first time I've been disappointed in Amazon, but my book arrived looking like it had been buried in the dirt for awhile. The front and back cover had some kind of greasy dirty stuff all over, and the cover is peeling back from itself. Yes, sometimes you get what you pay for, but this book in no way seems new as it is supposed to be.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 14 reviews  3.9 out of 5 stars