return

Author's name: Alberto Manguel

In Rome, Nestor Fabrice receives an invitation that disrupts his quiet life as a street vendor. He sets off for Buenos Aires for a brief visit to the lands of his boyhood. Upon arrival, he embarks on the perilous path leading to the realm of the afterlife. Everything in the city is hostile to him, and his favorite places disappear as fate stubbornly insists on bringing him back. His old friends, whom he encounters on his travels, seem like fleeting ghosts, reminding him that he, too, disappeared on a terrible day of demonstrations violently suppressed by the police—but not inside a police cell, like them. But if a return to Rome is currently not possible for the protagonist, it is possible for Alberto Manguel, who returns to the language of his adolescence to explore, in this fictional novel, the dark years of Argentine history.