Death of a Tango King (Hardcover, New)

Great news for the two or three fans concerned that Charyn's madly lightsome saga of New York police commissioner/mayor Isaac Sidel may have turned staid in recent installments (El Bronx, 1997, etc.): This freestanding sideshow, dedicated to Paco Ignacio Taibo, the only mystery writer in captivity more gaily surrealistic than Charyn, reads like a collaboration between the two. Charyn borrows Taibo's south-of-the-border setting (Medellin and environs, where the CIA has dispatched Yolanda Ramirez from her prison cell to flush out her cousin, drag kingpin Ruben Falcone), his fondness for disguises (both Ruben and Yolanda's patron, philosophy prof Melvin P. Sparks, change their identities more often than the CIA changes Colombian governments), his borscht-belt view of political intrigue (the fortunes of the Medellin cartel are shaped by environmentalists protesting the defoliation of Ruben's hideaway, where his followers don't launder money but iron it), and his melancholy attachment to the past (Ruben and Yolanda find themselves reenacting the long-ago doomed romance of tango king Guillermo Gaudi and his chica Tulipa Dawn). But loyalists will delight as well in the patented high-speed weightlessness of Charyn's inimitable (and undilutable) prose. Logic flags, of course, but never invention, as Charyn, for better or worse, outdoes his own wildest fantasies in the shaggiest tale of Greenpeace-endorsed drug trafficking ever committed to paper. (Kirkus Reviews)

Yolanda's a convict, caught by the cops while her boyfriend was robbing a bank. Now all the Hell Sisters at Harrington Hills prison farm are in love with her. Their leader wants to "marry" her. Yolanda has to find a way out. She's been taking a philosophy course in jail from Melvin P. Sparks, a Cornell professor who talks to the female convicts once a week about ecology, in galoshes and a torn shirt. But it's only a disguise. He's actually a member of the Christian Commandos, a ragtag group of environmental rangers who aren't quite soldiers or spies.

Yolanda happens to be the cousin of Ruben Falcone, king of the Medellin cartel. The rangers want to meet with Ruben, who's hiding in the jungles of Colombia, while a dozen agencies destroy the rain forest tracking him. Sparks helps Yolanda get out of jail, whisking her off to Mandellin to find her long lost cousin.

And so begins a journey that takes Yolanda into a crazy, comic heart of darkness, where nothing is ever as it seems, where a druglord can be a minister of environment, where Yolanda dances in a hundred rumbeaderos with different tango kings--all of them marked for death--and where she's sucked into the current of a world she only half understands. Death of a Tango King is a sad, funny, and disturbing novel about the coming of a new century, where the distance between right and wrong is not only irregular, but also hard to find."

General

Imprint:	New York University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	March 1998
First published:	March 1998
Authors:	Jerome Charyn
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 22mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover - Trade binding
Pages:	246
Edition:	New
ISBN-13:	978-0-8147-1575-8
Categories:	Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > Modern fiction Promotions
LSN:	0-8147-1575-3
Barcode:	9780814715758

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