92 Books Like Money to Burn

This is a concise noir with clear and simple prose. There is no metafiction, magical realism, or non-linear narrative to contend with. The protagonist, Mr. Machi, is a terrible person, almost psychopathic, a symbol of everything that is wrong in Argentina. The book is a critique of unbridled capitalism and its status symbols. To kick things off, Machi finds a dead body inside the boot of his beloved BMW and from there the action and the hilarity don’t stop. Told from the point of view of Machi, we have an uncomplicated antihero, a person completely without redeeming features. According to legend, the author still works as a subway station cleaner.

The painter Castel meets Maria, the only person in the world capable of understanding him and his art. They start a relationship, but he becomes obsessive and wants her to live for him only. Castel describes his mind as a dark labyrinth in which occasional flashes of lightning illuminate dark corridors. The increasingly paranoid painter murders Maria and the novel takes the form of his prison-cell confession. Unable to understand why he committed the crime; he is at a loss how to justify himself. Sabato’s tortured protagonist is up there with Camus’ Meursault and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Femicide is a huge problem in Latin America, and Sabato was praised for being able to recreate the mind of a monster. However, I found Castel somewhat sympathetic.

An atheist doctor, a former priest with wavering faith, and a whiskey-sodden British consul in sweltering Northeastern Argentina. The Honorary Consul has all the elements of a classic Greene novel. The author in his autobiography ‘Ways of Escape’ said it was his favourite work. Over the river from the small town of Corrientes is Paraguay and the American backed dictator, General Stroessner. In a muddle up Charlie Fortnam gets kidnapped by Paraguayan rebels hoping for an exchange of prisoners; the American Ambassador was the real target. The British government isn’t eager to get involved, Charlie is a sixty-year-old ‘honorary’ consul and alcoholic. Worse still he has recently married Clara, a young prostitute – not a becoming image at all. 

An Agatha Christie-style mystery set in Buenos Aires. At two in the morning, Pancho Soler returns drunk to his apartment building on Santa Fe Avenue. He presses the button for the lift, and it arrives with a surprise inside: a beautiful blonde woman, sitting upright, but dead. Many of the suspects who live in the building are recent immigrants from Europe and, as the novel is set in the 1950s, their memories and secrets from WW2 are still fresh. Boris, a Bulgarian chemist who worked for the Nazis, is the most entertaining of the lot. There are the usual red herrings and revelations in the search for the murderer. The young Argentinian detective is a little flat by Christie's standards, but this is a satisfying whodunnit.   

Horrifying, brutal, sinuous, and uncanny, this one floored me. It evokes the peril of girlhood and womanhood with unwavering intensity.

Each story is fresh and unexpected, yet also timeless, rich with wisdom and mythology centuries old. Steeped in painful history, past atrocities twine with the present to nightmarish effect.

Mariana Enríquez is part of a new vanguard of Argentine and Latin American Gothic writers alongside Samanta Schweblin. Their writing, born from real-world horrors, is among the most thrilling discoveries I’ve made in years. 

In this book, Laura Alcoba recounts memories of her childhood from the tender perspective of a 7-year-old girl whose parents are being targeted by Argentina’s dictatorship. Laura and her family hide out in a small house on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where a resistance movement is operating a secret printing press behind the façade of a rabbit farm.

Through snippets of conversations that she isn’t meant to understand (but does) and strict rules of secrecy intended to protect her, wonder and curiosity prevail. I loved seeing this hidden world through Laura’s eyes.

As much as any writer I know, Jorge Luis Borges soars in both poetry and fiction. His short stories would make him a candidate for my top five fiction authors, and they make a great bridge to his poetry.

With their profound examinations of the mysteries of selfhood and time, their love letters to the activities of reading and writing, and their reimagining of the past—from his native Argentina to Europe and beyond—Borges’s poems offer endless riches for my mind and my heart.

Protagonist Vera Kelly’s personality is the kind I grew up with in my blue-collar neighborhood. Sample line: “In fact I could tell she wanted to like me, which was probably why my first instinct was to lie to her.” Right on: If you didn’t have a cynical edge, you’d be somebody’s toast sooner or later.

Vera, a tech-savvy spy in the midst of the South American political upheaval of the 1960s, makes no big announcement about being queer, and she doesn’t consider herself some frail victim either. Cheers to that! I can relate.

Although I consider most contemporary novels to be tricked up and dumbed down, this one’s an exception. The writing’s unapologetically smart. I dig it. I’m in Mensa; what can I say?

Anyone who recognizes the title of this book is probably a Risk player. It’s the name of a rather obscure territory in this strategy board game of conflict and conquest, one that I love playing with my kids. The game is an important motif in this Spanish novel by Figueras.

The book, set in Argentina during the 1976 coup, is the enchanting story of a young boy trying to make sense of a world during a time of extraordinary upheaval. It beautifully illustrates how a game can provide an escape from the horrors of real life. By the way, if you want a tip for playing Risk, my mathematical analysis of the game reveals that North America is the best continent to occupy.

Argentinian masterpiece written in 1956 and only recently published in English in 2016, Zama is told from the POV of a minor Spanish official colonizing Paraguay. The alienation of Don Diego de Zama reads like a horror story—taut and psychological, he’s both villain and victim of the systems he perpetuates. Zama was adapted brilliantly into a film by Lucrecia Martel in 2017, which is how I learned about the book. I expected the film to have radically adapted its source material, but what I discovered instead was a novel from the 1950s that felt incredibly fresh and modern.