I also nominate
The Tango Singer by Tomás Eloy Martínez. I would love to travel to Argentina someday. This book sounds interesting and captures the culture and history of Buenos Aires.
From Goodreads:
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A hypnotic novel in which an American student's quest to find the greatest living tango singer leads him deep into the labyrinth of Argentina's past. It is 2001, and inflation is spiraling out of control in Argentina as Bruno Cadogan, an American graduate student specializing in Borges, arrives in Buenos Aires. 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.
Cadogan finds lodging in a boarding house rumored to be the setting of the famous Borges story "The Aleph," and soon finds himself drawn into the tangle of legends surrounding the singer's life. As the economic tension grows and the city hovers on the verge of riots, Bruno 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.
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About the author from Goodreads:
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Martínez has also been a teacher and lecturer. He taught (1984-87) at the University of Maryland. In 1995, he took a position as distinguished professor and director of the Latin American Studies program at Rutgers University, New Jersey. He wrote columns for La Nación and the New York Times syndicate, and his articles have appeared in many newspapers and journals in Latin America.
He has published a number of books, one of which, Santa Evita, has been translated into 32 languages and published in 50 countries. He was awarded the Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson fellowships, and won the 2002 Alfaguara award for the novel Flight of the Queen. His works deal primarily (but not exclusively) with Argentina during and after the rule of Juan Domingo Perón and his wife, Eva Duarte de Perón (Evita). Martínez died in Buenos Aires after a long battle against a brain tumor.
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About the translator from Wikipedia:
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Anne McLean is a Canadian translator of Spanish literature. She began to learn Spanish in her late twenties and developed her language skills while living in Central America. Some years later in England, she took a master's degree in literary translation. McLean has translated a number of Spanish and Latin American authors, including Julio Cortázar, Javier Cercas, Evelio Rosero, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, and Carmen Martín Gaite, among others.[
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