The Bride From Odessa

Oct 10, 2024 4:24 AM

Author:Edgardo Cozarinsky

Set in Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Vienna, Budapest and Odessa, both before and after the Second World War, Edgardo Cozarinsky's stories belong to the spirit of Borges and to a great Argentine cosmopolitan tradition: that of the uprooted exile, the plaything of History, who, set down in a strange but proud land, looks back nostalgically to the Europe of his ancestral memories.

Cozarinsky's characters are writers, lovers, scholars, artists and dreamers. An ambitious young Jew, about to marry and embark for a new life in Argentina is accosted by an unknown woman who departs with him to Buenos Aires; a pianist in a Buenos Aires nightclub finds himself drawn back to Germany in 1937; an Argentine-American Jew travels to Lisbon to unravel the threads of his grandparents' wartime affair...

They are all travellers of a kind, characters who inhabit a secret land, without frontiers.

Reviews

Cozarinsky writes superbly of exile, love and death in the Argentine capital, and we are lucky to have him. He has been beautifully translated by Nick Caistor

—— Independent on Sunday

He creates a shadowy world of uprooted characters whose lives are shaped by the history of the 20th century... Alive, moving and perceptive

—— Daily Telegraph

Occasionally you come across someone you have never read before and discover that the work is so good it dispels ennui and restores your faith in imaginative literature. The Bride from Odessa is just such a book

—— Scotsman

The finest book I have read for a long time

—— Chris Marker , Libération

Exiled, like so many Argentinians, Edgardo Cozarinksky has many a diaspora behind him: that of the Russians, that of the Jews; and that of the Argentine people. And this is precisely the theme of his short stories, which all bear witness to the odyssey of these travellers without a country

—— René De Ceccaty , Le Monde

A profound knowledge of the cultures of Mittel-europa, of the literatures of France, the United States and Britain translated into Buenos Aires vernacular, gives Cozarinsky's narratives a fiery intellectual strength and a powerful originality

—— Alberto Manguel

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