Abel Posse

In this book, Abel Posse recounts his time as a consul in Venice from 1973 to 1979, where he writes his novel, Daimon, while working as a diplomat.

His home is frequented by artists and creators, including Ernesto Sábato, who faces death threats from the Triple A; Rómulo Macció; Alejo Carpentier; and Manucho Mujica Láinez, with his lordly Buenos Aires bearing. There are banquets and cocktails for Andy Warhol and Jorge Luis Borges, who is welcomed as the writer an exhausted Europe may not be able to produce. The consul witnesses the adventures of Joseph Brodsky, expelled at the age of 22 from a Soviet gulag and imprisoned by a delicious Venetian aristocrat. Among marble palaces built on mud, everything happens with a certain irrelevant joy, but passion – and even drama – remain. The splendour of that mobile universe of tourists and art devotees provides the perfect backdrop for this subtle, ironic, and sometimes melancholy tale, where the public and private (and even the very private) are intermingled in a game Abel Posse dominates with absolute mastery.