There were times in Argentina

For about a century, Argentina was a promised land that dreamers from all over the world immigrated to, until a series of dictatorships made it a country from which to immigrate. These are exactly the years in which the book of Andres Nauman takes place, who was born in Buenos Aires and emigrated from there with his family to Spain. From an unfinished letter written to him by his grandmother Blanca, the narrator embarks on a journey through time. He returns to his hometown, "the place where I am no longer but I am still there", and writes a letter within a letter, a memory within a memory. Before us is the story of the 20th century in Latin America and not only in it, but also a personal, intimate story of one family and one continuous exile experience: Jews from Belarus, French from Bourges and people from Lithuania, Poland and Galicia, who came together in one family, a family that lived in Argentina for two or three generations until they were forced continue on her way. In intimate, moving and funny writing, Nauman returns to the place and time that made him a writer and immigrant "within the language", a situation that, as he says, undermines "the foundations of inner speech. That is, the very state of writing." On his way to complete his own grandmother's unfinished letter, he brings to life a whole world of unforgettable family characters, from Leonardo the dandy, through Hakubo, the hat merchant with engineering dreams, to Lydia, the art dealer with a natural sense, and a host of other characters of entrepreneurs, adventurers, revolutionaries and dreaming "Once upon a time in Argentina" is a coming-of-age story, a political novel and a love song for those who are no longer. A tour of the intricacies of a family tree that unfolds over real and fantastic territory, foreign but universal. A book that makes us wonder about the meaning of identity in the frenetic world in which we live.