The Review of Contemporary Fiction

All Night Movie, by Alicia Borinsky, translated by Cola Franzen with the author
reviewed by Joseph Dewey

Alicia Borinsky. All Night Movie. Trans. Cola Franzen with the author. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2002. 204 pp. Paper: $15.95.

There is something tantalizingly audacious about a tango, the paradox of bold passion and playful immediacy despite the intricate choreography and demanding execution. Such is the feel reading Alicia Borinsky’s intoxicatingly playful, highly irreverent mood-piece on the erotic chaos and chilling nightworld of contemporary Argentina. With guerrilla insouciance and giddy confidence, Borinsky challenges the picaresque genre, playing through a madcap array of narrative asides, capturing a culture in chaos, indeed a culture feeding upon its own chaos, a cartoon culture suspended uneasily between comic-opera irony and self-inflicted apocalypse. Here characters appear for a quirky narrative turn or two and then tumble back within the enfolding narrative’s furious rush toward (appropriately enough) nonclosure (a promise, at the end, that more will follow). Prostitutes ply their trade in phone booths, renegade nuns search for an iconic adolescent (afflicted with leprosy, maybe) known only as the Scarred Girl, nefarious politicos scheme and posture, crusading journalists cling to the idea of truth somewhere in such murkiness, a cult of girls devoted (apparently) to the memory of Eva Peron wander the back streets—and at the center (if such a carnival fantasy can have such a steadying thing) is a murder trial that closes, appropriately, in a dismissal by reason of insanity. Structurally diced into fragmentary chapters that frustrate the need for conventional linearity, the novel justifies its own momentum without the hokey intrusiveness of sustained plot and character development. Like the seductive tango so richly involved with its own elaborate flourish and so intensely aware of its own energy, the narrative propels rather than engrosses, mesmerizes rather than involves. To capture such a defiant hybrid of comic and ghastly, the pitch-perfect translation sustains the game. It is an absorbing read, at once lyrical and harsh, erotic and barbaric—it is, like the tango itself, both intimate and cool.