Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance

The writing in this book is pure magic. Lloyd Jones knows how to create characters but even more so knows how to conjure up tension and passion that seems to come alive off the page. This is a story of people that are pretty ordinary, but who live extraordinary lives based upon their ability to connect with someone else by teaching them to dance the tango. The tango plays such a key role it is as if it is another character in the story. It is like a "germ" that remains hidden for years inside the body and then exerts itself years later to in turn affect someone else. I think of Henry Graham, a minor character in the story, but who years later and miles away (France, 1929) as a TB patient manages to make a few moments memorable to many as they watch him dance with another patient. I thought "Mr. Pip" was excellent. This novel is equally as engaging.

I was very pleased with the order. It came quickly and in perfect condition.

Lloyd Jones' HERE AT THE END OF THE WORLD WE LEARN TO DANCE follows a love affair that spans continents and decades that began during World War I in a cave in New Zealand when a young girl named Louise and a German piano tuner named Schmidt, whom she had hidden to save his life, dance a tango that lasts three minutes and fall immediately and forever in love. "She feels the piano tuner's hand arrive at the small of her back. The hand gives a little shove and resettles." Years later Schmidt's grandaughter, the sensuous Rosa, tells of Louise and Schmidt's great love affair to a much younger dishwasher-- he is 19; she is 36 and married-- Lionel who is besotted by her and who works in her restaurant where she teaches him the tango after hours. Jones' novel teems with love, passion and ultimately great sorrow as, according to Ernest Hemingway, every love affair is tragic because it eventually ends in death. Louise and Schmidt's love story conjures up Hemingway's A FAREWELL TO ARMS, McEwan's ATONEMENT, Joyce's beautiful short novel THE DEAD, Marquez' tale of love in old age LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, even some of Robert Browning's poetry: "grow old along with me," for example. Jones' haunting story of missed connections and love in old age really has no bad characters. Billy, for instance, the husband Louise leaves for Schmidt, is as decent a character as you are apt to find in any novel. In Louise's obsession, she goes to Buenos Aires where she never learns the language, hates Christmas because she always has to spend it alone and likes to meet Schmidt in later years on Sundays by the waterfront because she can see the horizon that reminds her of rural New Zealand. She has forsaken much, but she is saved from what Jones describes as a "wallpaper life." His description of her-- and much of his writing-- read like a prose poem: "Louise was usually the first one there [the waterfront]. There she is, sitting on a bench waiting for Schmidt to extricate himself from his comfortable apartment. . . He always hoped to see her first. Sometimes he did, and these days hobbling on bad knees he stops to squint into the untrustful distance, admiring the view. The way the river air pushes her skirt against her legs. To his eyes Louise is still young, forever young; the sight of her still excites." Throughout these two love stories that have many parallels there is always of course the throbbing tango. Highly recommended.

I loved this book. I've read a number of books about tango, and enjoyed them all, but this is my favorite. (Second favorite: Long After Midnight at Niño Bien.) Good story, engaging characters, and a wonderful take on how Argentine tango can affect you in ways you hadn't imagined before you took your first lessons. Peter Silverman, Ashland, Oregon