By
Peter Moss
1 min read
By
Peter Moss
By Marcelo Birmajer
Toby Press, £14.99
‘Almost all good jokes about paranoid people converge on a single, serious doubt. Is paranoia a state of alienation which imagines dangers where there are none, or a state of lucidity which perceives real dangers invisible to everyone else? All paranoid people who are not psychotic will claim the second explanation; the wives of paranoids will go for the first.”
Such wry observations have seen young Argentine author and screenwriter Marcelo Birmajer labelled “the Woody Allen of the Pampas”. Stuff and nonsense: Birmajer is much the more concise writer of the two. His Jewishness is grounded in deep knowledge and a real empathy for his faith, and, more to the point, Woody Allen, who famously never leaves the city, wouldn’t know the Pampas from a hole on Fifth Avenue.
The three musketeers in question are three young Argentine Jews who effectively signed their own death warrants when they joined the left-wing Montoneros guerrilla group in the dark days of the “Dirty Wars” of the ’70s and ’80s. But one, Elias Traum, survived and made it to Israel. Twenty years later, he returns to Buenos Aires finally to mourn his two friends and perhaps offload a secret or two.
