Heart of Tango by Elia Barcelo

Heart of Tango

Elia Barcelo

A short romantic love story told in poetic prose. I was slightly disconcerted by the changing characters and time setting but felt compelled to keep reading, intrigued to discover how things would resolve themselves. Natalia is a Spaniard living in Buenos Aires with her widowed father hoping for love and marriage, finding both but tragically not with the same man.

Extract
And then I saw her. At the far end of the gallery, to the left, between a horrid landscape of the pampas and an incongruous scene of ladies in mantillas and gentlemen in top hats leaving High Mass, there she was, looking at me from the obscure depths of an oil painting framed in heavy, gilded wood. Her eyes shone as they had at the milonga, half closed in pleasure, as if she were listening to the beat of a tango that was being played only for her in the solitude of that dusty museum...
Parallels
  • The Lost Life by Steven Carroll
  • Chocolat by Joanne Harris