Alan Pauls. (2015). A History of Money: A Novel. Melville House.

Alan Pauls. 2015. A History of Money: A Novel. Melville House.

Alan Pauls, A History of Money: A Novel. Melville House, 2015.

Alan Pauls. A History of Money: A Novel. Melville House, 2015.

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Pauls, Alan
   • bioText: Born in Buenos Aires in 1959, ALAN PAULS is a novelist, as well as a film and literary critic and essayist. He has worked as a professor of literary theory at the University of Buenos Aires and an editor for the daily paper Página/12. He also founded the magazine Lecturas Criticas. His novel The Past received the prestigious Herralde Prize in 2003 and was made into a movie starring Gael Garcia Bernal.
     
     ELLIE ROBINS is a translator from Spanish and has worked in publishing in the US and the UK.
   • name: Alan Pauls
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   • name: Ellie Robins

publishDate

2015-06-16T00:00:00-04:00

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title

A History of Money

fullDescription

A major new novel from the writer Roberto Bolaño called "one of the best living Latin American writers"
Alan Pauls, one of Latin American literature's rising stars, combines the intimate and the political in a novel that, although it is set in Argentina in the 1970s and '80s, will bring to mind books like Choire Sicha's Very Recent History and Sam Lipsyte's The Ask in its subtle, brilliant depiction of the place of money in its protagonists' lives.
It begins with a body: a top executive of an iron and steel company dies after his helicopter, travelling toward the factory where he is due to meet with striking workers, plummets into the river. The briefcase full of money which he was carrying disappears without a trace. Accident, or assassination? And where is the money?
A History of Money revolves around this event, as does the imagination and memory of the unnamed protagonist of the novel, who returns over and over to it even as he reflects on the role of money in his family and his own life. His parents are divorced: his father is a gambler who plays in all-night poker games and carries around all of his money in a wad of cash; his mother is a socialite who squanders her inherited fortune on a lavish lifestyle. Our protagonist, for his part, pays—in every sense of the word.
And his individual story is echoed in the larger story of Argentina in the 1970s and '80s, where money is everything: promise and punishment, dream and disaster. An intensely evocative novel from one of the world's most exciting new writers.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: New York Review Daily
   • content: "Powerful... Intense... A desolate, delighted history of our impermanent valuations."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Bloomberg Businessweek, Seven Books Worth Your Summer Downtime
   • content: "[Pauls is] a top Argentine writer."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Charles Larson, CounterPunch
   • content: "Profound, unique, utterly compelling and unforgettable. Truly, I have never read anything quite like it, nor been so impressed by a story with such a narrow focus yet at the same time such universal enormity."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Buffalo News
   • content: "A History of Money...offers support for Bolaño's assessment [of Pauls as 'one of the best'], as a dense, rich, slyly poetic and intense imagining of the life of a son, a father, and a mother and through them the life of Argentina."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Maclean's (Canada)
   • content: "Gripping... Exquisite... [Pauls's] gifted storytelling often spins out into witty, beautiful essays."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Library Journal, Ten Key Novels That Will Take You to Other Worlds
   • content: "Distinctive storytelling."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly, starred review
   • content: "This caustic indictment, and the stylistic tour de force through which it's delivered, should help secure English speakers' awareness of Pauls as an important writer."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Booklist
   • content: "An eloquent, cycling chimera of economy, currency, and family strained by overburdened purse strings... The frantic urgency of Pauls' fictional take on a nation in flux will resonate for years to come."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: "Inventive... A pointed commentary on the fragility of money and the oppressive Argentine politics of the 1960s and '70s."
10. • premium: False
    • source: The Lady, five-star review
    • content: "Perfectly pitched... His complex sentences can run to whole paragraphs, swirling out into erudite or humorous digressions... By showing how a country's turbulent political and economic history interweaves with the personal, he gives his story a universal appeal."
11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from March 23, 2015
      The first book published in the U.S. from acclaimed Argentine author Pauls is a stream-of-consciousness novel chronicling a family’s tumultuous relationship with money. The nameless narrator’s mother has left his father and remarried a wealthier man. As the story begins, an executive with a mining company, who is a friend of the narrator’s stepfather, has been sent to deliver a briefcase full of money to a group of striking workers. A bribe? A concession to demands? Payoff for strikebreakers? We never know: the helicopter carrying him crashes, and, though the body is found, the briefcase goes missing. The narrator spends pages evoking the irritating sound the family friend made while chewing crostini, the awful crunching serving as metaphor for a generation’s conspicuous consumption. Such bravura sequences largely take the place of plot—the narrator jumps between reminiscences of his father, reflections on his own life, and stories of his troubled relationship with his mother, darting around time and space, connected by feelings and details but seldom by events. Meanwhile, the economy booms
      and busts, alternately compounding the family’s calamities and enabling their upswings. Pauls tells the story of this dark and politically troubled period in Argentine history almost entirely through an economic prism, suggesting that materialism is the mother of complicity. This caustic indictment, and the stylistic tour de force through which it’s delivered, should help secure English speakers’ awareness of Pauls as an important writer.

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      April 1, 2015
      A man recalls his past through the filter of money-often ill-gotten or badly spent-in this inventive if tangled tale. The protagonist of this second translated novel by Argentine writer Pauls (The Past, 2003) opens his story at age 14, when he witnessed the funeral of a captain of industry who died in a helicopter crash under mysterious circumstances. The man was a family friend, but the narrator here and elsewhere isn't interested so much in intimacies and relationships as financial connections: as he drills deeper into his past, he ponders the dead man's attache case full of cash, his father's lifelong gambling habit, his mother's ineptitude with money, and his own bad investment in a money pit. "Ponder" is the operative term here: Pauls writes in a recursive style built on long sentences with subclauses that aspire to Jamesian girth and gravitas. Credit Pauls for a rhetorical command that keeps these sentences from collapsing (and translator Robins for successfully preserving their integrity). At its best, the strategy conveys the gnarled and interior mental state that such financial fixation produces (in the early sections, the protagonist obsesses over the dead man's irritating crostini-crunching); at its worst, and too often, it's simply digressive, overexpanded navel-gazing. That's all the more frustrating because buried under Pauls' thickets of prose is a pointed commentary on the fragility of money and the oppressive Argentine politics of the 1960s and '70s. And Pauls can sensitively render the way money both bound and disconnected the novel's hero from his divorced parents. But when it comes time to bring the story to a strong emotional finish, the impact of the climax is overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the prose; though short as a novella, it's dense as an epic but without the widescreen effects. A well-intentioned experiment that's hobbled by its longueurs.

13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      June 1, 2015
      

      At the opening of this intensively written novel by a highly regarded Argentine writer making his American debut, a nameless 14-year-old sees his first dead person--a family friend and captain of industry who had a briefcase full of cash chained to his wrist when his helicopter exploded before delivering him to a meeting with striking workers. Later, we meet the narrator as an older, divorced man who "always seems to have his money within arm's reach." In between, the narrator tells his life story through his (and his country's) obsession with cash. Call it crass, but this is Argentina mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Dirty War and hyperinflation sometimes rendered human life and money pretty worthless. VERDICT Distinctive storytelling.

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 15, 2015
      This quick, dynamic novel, the third installment in Buenos Aires author Pauls' History trilogy, follows an unnamed narrator from his teenage years in the 1960s into the late 1980s, decades that coincide with the worst of Argentina's wildly fluctuating exchange rates. The result is an eloquent, cycling chimera of economy, currency, and family strained by overburdened purse strings. The book opens at the funeral of a business executive whose helicopter crashed into a river, taking with it a suspicious briefcase packed with cash. The mysterious circumstances of the chopper's disappearance linger, as Pauls unravels the complicated relationships the narrator shares with his divorced parents. From his father's gambling addiction to his mother's frequent pleading for cash to the narrator's own sinkhole investment in a vacation home that earns the nickname The Pit for obvious reasons, Pauls dazzles the reader with run-on sentences and page-long paragraphs that generate a linguistically rich, money-hungry momentum. Although the mid-aughts recession appears to have passed, the frantic urgency of Pauls' fictional take on a nation in flux will resonate for years to come.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

popularity

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A major new novel from the writer Roberto Bolaño called "one of the best living Latin American writers"

Alan Pauls, one of Latin American literature's rising stars, combines the intimate and the political in a novel that, although it is set in Argentina in the 1970s and '80s, will bring to mind books like Choire Sicha's Very Recent History and Sam Lipsyte's The Ask in its subtle, brilliant depiction of the place of money in its protagonists' lives.

It begins with a body: a top executive of an iron and steel company dies after his helicopter, travelling toward the factory where he is due to meet with striking workers, plummets into the river. The briefcase full of money which he was carrying disappears without a trace. Accident, or assassination? And where is the money?

A History of Money revolves around this event, as does the imagination and memory of the unnamed protagonist of the novel, who returns over and over to it...

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Melville House

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