Der Tangosänger

"Restless in Manhattan, NYU graduate student Bruno Cadogan heads to Buenos Aires, the city of his dreams, where the inflation crisis of 2001 is beginning to spiral out of control. Cadogan is on the trail of Julio Martel, an elusive tango singer rumored to be even better than Carlos Gardel, the greatest singer of the 1920s and '30s. Martel has never recorded and his strange, powerful performances, at seemingly arbitrary sites around the city, are always unannounced." With the help of El Tucumano, a friend he makes at the airport, Cadogan finds lodging in a cheap boardinghouse rumored to be the setting of the famous Borges story "The Aleph," and soon he is drawn into the tangle of legends surrounding Julio Martel's life. As the economic tension grows and the city hovers on the verge of riots, Bruno circles ever closer to an encounter with the singer himself. He also begins to believe that Martel's increasingly rare performances are in fact far from random - that they instead form a map of the darkest moments in the city's past.