Translation Rights TQE / Far From Where

On La novia de Odessa:

«The most beautiful book that I have read in a long time. »  Chris Marker, Libération

«At least five of these short stories are gems. »  Allan Massie, The Scotsman

«With a mix of personal and family memories, secrets told to him by friends and a systematic historical analysis, Cozarinsky draws destinies representing the “political horror” that can be traced throughout the entire 20th century. »  Rene de Ceccatty, Le Monde

On El rufián moldavo:

«An admirable rescue feat… The prints exquisitely exhumed by Cozarinsky will not be forgotten. »  Anderson Tepper, The Times Literary Supplement

On Vudú urbano:

«This book is like his films: converted, diverse, perverse in that it does not follow the mainstream… it always works against the current. »  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

January 1945, the end of World War II. A young woman wrapped in a heavy military cape that hardly protects her from the cold escapes through Polish and Czech territories. She arrives in Vienna and then manages to reach Geneva, where “some friends”, a powerful Croatian member of the church and a Hungarian Franciscan monk, will be able to help her… Three years later, in 1948, she has started a new life in Buenos Aires. It has not been easy, she still needs to improve her Spanish, and she works hard in a restaurant kitchen to make a living; she lives in Frau Dorsch’s boarding house, but none of the other guests, mostly Rumanian and Hungarian emigrants know how she managed to escape from Europe…

The young woman is haunted by a dark past and only the innocent questions of her son Federico, conceived in Buenos Aires at the end of 1948, keep her from forgetting it once and for all. “Stories are not made up, they are inherited,” wrote Cozarinsky in his novel El rufián moldavo, and when Federico becomes an adult and takes control of his own destiny, he will close the circle of that hidden life with his own escape which will be an embarrassment for many surprising reasons.

If, as Novalis wrote, “the novel rises from the holes and crevices of History”, Lejos de dónde sprouts from a huge crevice in European History: Nazi crimes and the hiding of identities to avoid punishment. He does this with great skill, weaving surprisingly parallel biographies and bringing about coincidences that are as fragile as the boundaries between good and evil.

Edgardo Cozarinsky was born in Buenos Aires in 1939. In 1974 he moved to Paris and, since 1988, he lives between Buenos Aires and the French capital. He is a film director as well as a writer, and has directed numerous movies such as La Guerre d’un seul homme, Le violon de Rothschild, Fantômes de Tanger, and Ronda nocturna, all of which blur the limits between fiction and documentary and which have won awards and been paid homage in the Musee du Jeu de Paume in Paris and in the most prestigious international film libraries. Among his most outstanding literary works are the essays Museo del chisme (Gossip Museum, 2005), El pase del testigo (The Next Witness, 2001); the books of short stories Vudú urbano (Urban Voodoo, 1985) – with  a prologue by Susan Sontag and Guillermo Cabrera Infante –, La novia de Odessa (Odessa’s Girlfriend, 2001), and Tres Fronteras (Three Frontiers, 2006); and the novels El rufián moldavo (The Moldavian Scoundrel, 2004) and Maniobras nocturnas (Night Maneuvers, 2007).