Tango: An Argentine Love Story

I've read half a dozen memoirs that could be called "My Tango Year in Buenos Aires." This (and "Long After Midnight in Nino Bien") are my favorites. It's well-written, it's candid, it's bright, it's funny. It's part travelogue, part healing journey, part tango-love. There might be more rumination on letting go than some people might care for: it's my own opinion that tango doesn't offer much of a road to spiritual growth, even though it is more fun than anything I've ever tried, except of course, racquetball. I read this book in two days, and was sorry when it was over.

This book was a delicious read, well written and satisfying on many levels. For starters, it is my favorite kind of travel writing because it penetrates the underlying character of a place and its people, in this case Buenos Aires and the world of tango. But the book is also an absorbing story of the author's personal journey, one in which she heals her troubled soul/heart as she toggles between the pursuits of tango and zen meditation. Her exploration into these two mind-body disciplines and the bridge she finds between them is fascinating. Occasionally she tosses out nuggets of hard won wisdom that she extracts from both, but never takes herself too seriously. She is in fact quite funny with her self-deprecating humor. Yet when she talks of others she does so in a spirit of kindness and generosity.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this book proves the reverse may also be true---words can be as richly evocative as any image. TANGO's words march across the page like vivid snapshots. It takes you deep inside the culture of the dance, of Buenos Aires, a very Italian city, to exotic corners of Argentina, like Iguazu and Patagonia, to gaucho country, and barrios (or neighborhoods) all over Buenos Aires. It never lacks for some visual detail to keep your kinesthetic interest--whether the author is describing tango dancers in La Boca who dip their soles in paint and dance on a huge canvas or what the exotic parts of Argentine cattle taste like or what her many dance partners smell like--(be thankful it's not scratch-and-sniff). Be prepared for every known sense and some not yet named to be aroused when you read TANGO, a love story with many facets. The book opens when life takes some unexpected turns, and the author rises to the challenge. She packs up a few suitcases and with only a bare bones plan, takes off for Buenos Aires, Tango Mecca, Paris of South America, a city that never sleeps. Her love life has fallen apart, the gauntlet is thrown. That's the bad news. It's also where the good news starts. She shows how we all rise from the ashes, new life is always on the bud. There are a thousand and one ways to redeem ourselves. Just hop on the bus, Gus. Slip out the back, Jack. Try a new dance, Lance. TANGO is a story about sudden travel---not the carefully planned sort--- to a foreign place literally and figuratively. That is, sometimes that foreign place is our self. The author is never at a loss for finding the hidden psychological/spiritual meaning in the mundane: her residual Oedipal complex in a partner's torso, the double meaning of tango's precept that we maintain our own "axis" in tango. Everything goes many layers deep. Indeed tango is more than a dance, it's a metaphor for everything in life, from internal conflict to external peace. TANGO, the "love" story, is occasionally about ordinary romance between a man and woman; it has forays into sexual love as well as Platonic idealized love with strangers you meet in a specially designated place for tango, called a milonga, whom you may never see again, who "come and go like ripples in a stream." It is also about love beyond the conventional man/woman type. It's about love in a community of people who share a passion, in this case for a dance and its music, which have survived more than a hundred years through much, including Argentina's last military dictatorship prohibition of public gatherings. It is also about the kind of self discovery and bliss that occur when you give yourself over completely to anything that you love and that requires total presence. The writing is an exercise in the glorification of the commonplace--- a rundown rickety old monastery, a dying cat, the milonga itself, all play ou

If you're not a dancer of Argentine tango now, you'll want to become one after reading this book. Ms.Cusamano takes on a odyssey through the bustling streets of Buenos Aires and deep into its many dark dance halls, teeming with people, all of them waiting with bated breath to attain the breathless "tango moments", those precious seconds when one transcends dance and enters a zen like trance where such things as time, gender, past and future seem to vaporize. This is a deeply personal book, rich with profoundity, humor, and poignancy. The author is very brave to bear her soul to the reader showing a life that is full of great triumphs and glorious falls from grace. It reads more like a novel, except it's all true! Thank God!