In this autobiographical novel, Neuman looks back at his childhood years in Buenos Aires and traces back his family roots to see how his ancestors — French, Creole and Galician on his mother's side; East European Jews on his father's — came to be living in Argentina, how his parents decided to migrate to Spain when he was in his early teens, and how all that ties in with 20th century Argentinian history.

It makes an interesting, lively and very varied book, full of reflections on national identity, on growing up between different languages and cultures, on the way families and social circumstances push us in certain directions (and the way some people manage to push back and go a different way), on politics and football (not so much religion, though), music, chess and ice-cream, on the box where the young Andrés kept his porn stash, on the occasional frightening collisions between settled bourgeois life and political violence, and on many other things.

It's maybe a a little bit too skittish in the way it jumps around between the serious and the trivial, and it's a little frustrating because of the way it refuses to follow any of the characters through beyond 1991. But all the same, I found it an engrossing and rewarding book. ( )

Proprio un bel libro che narra una favolosa saga familiare! Immigrazione, dittatura, musica, calcio in Argentina! C'è di tutto!! ( )

En el principio fueron jacobo, nacido en la Rusia de los zares, huido a Buenos Aires y casado con una joven lituana llamada Lidia, o René, un escultor francés que no se arrodillaba ante nadie, y su esposa Louise Blanche, quienes dejaron Francia para acabar en una remota población del norte argentino. De esos antepasados fundadores desciende el joven narrador de la novela, quien nos ofrece un inteligente y personal relato de la construcción nacional de la Argentina contemporánea, de sus aprendizajes de infancia y de su propia iniciación como escritor. Así, combinando elegía, tragedia y humor, Andrés Neuman despliega ante nuestros ojos fascinados unterritorio tan real como fantástico, tan extraño como propio.