The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Death of a Tango King by Jerome CharynDavid Seed
Jerome Charyn. Death of a Tango King. New York Univ. Press, 1998. 242 pp. $21.95.
This is Charyn’s first novel to diverge from his New York series centered on police officer Isaac Sidel. But even here New York gives us our point of departure. A Latina prison inmate, Yolanda, is given a chance of release when a visiting professor invites her to join an organization called the Christian Commandos, a bank of free-ranging ecologists. This episode sets a keynote for a novel where nobody is quite what s/he seems. The professor is not accredited, his organization is not quite civil servants and they operate in a “no-man’s-land.” The plan is to take Yolanda to meet her long-lost cousin Ruben Falcone, now king of the Medellín drug cartel. For her to turn informant? she asks. No, to protect the Colombian forests which the security agencies are destroying in their pursuit of Falcone. Yolanda is trained apparently for covert action and then taken to Colombia and from this point on the novel becomes increasingly fantastic. Yolanda’s role is as a well-meaning witness to the extremes of Colombian wealth and poverty, and to the shifting relations between the rival drug barons. With the rapid pace typical of Charyn’s narratives, she hears of Gaudi the legendary tango dancer turned political boss; Bailen the novelist turned president; and above all meets her cousin Ruben, the most fantastic of them all. He is an artist of guises, shifting in a flash from thug to latter-day Robin Hood, a companion with equal ease to street urchins and the president of the United States. If Ruben is Charyn’s Kurtz whom Yolanda encounters on her journey into the heart of darkest Colombia, he remains as ambiguous and elusive as his prototype. [David Seed]