The core of this novel is a story of mad love, a love that drags two
marginal characters from Buenos Aires to the most novelistic experiences
halfway across the world. Their story sparks the imagination of an old writer
who has grown bored of life, and it encourages him to reinvent himself. His
story will germinate, as a seed carried by the wind, into the relationship of a
young couple taking its first steps into love. “Stories are not made up but
rather inherited,” is what Edgardo Cozarinsky wrote in his first novel. In Dinero para fantasmas,
stories open up successively, much in the way of Chinese boxes that contain one
another. They are inherited by characters whose brief encounters draw the plot
of the novel, somewhere between experienced and imagined love, between the
desire which has remained alive for years and that which explodes in the people
who are starting to test out life.
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).