Mempo Giardinelli

The most Argentine “American Noir”

Resistencia is “a small American town accidentally located in north-eastern Argentina,” dominated by suffocating heat, primary passions and amorality. In this charged atmosphere, Alfredo and Griselda love each other. Or, to be more precise, they desire each other. That’s why they decide to get rid of her husband. This is the first in a long series of crimes: a neighbour lady, the pizza guy who gets the wrong apartment, two police officers performing a routine check, a mobster dwarf. In short, anyone who crosses their path. In his own words, Alfredo, a cynical, brutal man who’s had enough of everything and everyone, recounts the unique couple’s escape, a rampage of blood and lust shadowed by the memory of a past full of violence and characters similar to himself, in the midst of a corrupt country.

“A perfect road movie. A tenth circle of hell Dante himself wouldn’t have dared to imagine. The infernal course of this novel achieves a sort of surreal centrifugal motion. Dark, effective and breathless, it has a touch of humour that completes the whole.” D. Cr., Le Martin, Paris

“Characters immersed in unstoppable machinery, as if they weren’t truly responsible for their actions. A noir novel, but a profound noir, as unfathomable as the stagnation Argentina’s been submerged in the past twenty years.” Jean-Louis Aragón, Le Monde, Paris

“Full of rhythm, humour, depth, fluidity and intensity, Giardinelli’s style gives the reader no respite, and is reminiscent of our Hemingway, Faulkner, Chandler, Miller and Carver.” Kent Stoen