Gesell Dome

by Guillermo Saccomanno, Andrea G. Labinger (Translator)

Overview

Winner of the 2013 Dashiell Hammett Prize

Recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award

"Through a skillful weaving of characters and plotlines, coming together like a completed puzzle, Saccomanno has crafted a monumental novel where individual stories unnerve us while building to the unexpected and explosive finale."—El Mundo

Like True Detective through the lenses of William Faulkner and John Dos Passos, Gesell Dome is a mosaic of misery, a page-turner that will keep you enthralled right until its shocking end.

Opening with reports of a child abuse scandal at an elementary school, then weaving its way through dozens of sordid storylines and characters—including various murders, corrupt politicians and real-estate moguls, and the Nazi past of the city—Gesell Dome chronicles the dark underbelly of a popular resort town tensely awaiting the return of the tourist season.

Two-time winner of the Dashiell Hammett Prize, Guillermo Saccomanno is Argentina's foremost noir writer, crafting incisive, unflinching books that reveal the inequities of contemporary life.

Guillermo Saccomanno is the author of numerous novels and story collections, including El buen dolor, winner of the Premio Nacional de Literatura, and 77 and Gesell Dome, both of which won the Dashiell Hammett Prize. He also received Seix Barral's Premio Biblioteca Breve de Novela for El oficinista and the Rodolfo Walsh Prize for nonfiction for Un maestro.

Andrea G. Labinger is the translator of more than a dozen works from the Spanish, including books by Ana María Shua, Liliana Heker, Luisa Valenzuela, and Alicia Steimberg, among others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781940953380
Publisher:	Open Letter
Publication date:	08/09/2016
Edition description:	Translatio
Pages:	600
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Guillermo Saccomanno is the author of numerous novels and story collections, including El buen dolor, winner of the Premio Nacional de Literatura, and 77 and Gesell Dome, both of which won the Dashell Hammett Prize. He also received Seix Barral's Premio Biblioteca Breve de Novela for El oficinista and the Rodolfo Walsh Prize for nonfiction for Un maestro. Critics tend to compare his works to those of Balzac, Zola, Dos Passos, and Faulkner.

Andrea G. Labinger is the translator of more than a dozen works from the Spanish, including books by Ana María Shua, Liliana Heker, Luisa Valenzuela, and Alicia Steimberg, among others.

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/16/2016
Never was there a cityscape as immersive, or a populace as rife with iniquity, as in Argentinian writer Saccomanno’s noirish Gesell Dome, his first novel to be translated into English. The Argentinian town referred to as Villa is a seaside summer resort spot—but when the tourists leave and only the locals remain, a tangle of outlandish corruption, violence, and dark histories are unveiled. To begin with, there’s the suicide of a pregnant middle schooler, a sexual abuse scandal at a kindergarten, and a devastating real estate development known as the Twin Towers that divides the town. But this turns out to be nothing compared to the secret lives of the three Quiroses brothers: crooked lawyer Alejo, Braulio, and Julián, the Villa’s so-called Kennedys, who do their best to control their constituents. These include the mayor’s unruly son, Gonzalo, whose attempt to blackmail Alejo backfires miserably; Julián’s wife, Adrian (willing to go to absurd lengths for her Pilates studio); and Dante, editor and sole contributor to El Vocero, who, with the help of limo driver Rimigio, chronicles his township’s ills. Tales range from the story of El Muertito, the monster who stalks the forests at night, to whispers of the Villa’s Nazi diaspora. Then there are oddballs such as the loan shark called the Duchess, and cursed painter Claude Fournier, who all have a part to play in the Villa’s mounting intrigues. Like Twin Peaks reimagined by Roberto Bolaño, Gesell Dome is a teeming microcosm in which voices combine into a rich, engrossing symphony of human depravity. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"A choral, savage, and ruthless work, considered to be the great Argentine social novel."—Europa Press

"Like Twin Peaks reimagined by Roberto Bolaño, Gesell Dome is a teeming microcosm in which voices combine into a rich, engrossing symphony of human depravity."—Publishers Weekly

"Cynical and funny: a yarn worthy of a place alongside Cortázar and Donoso."—Kirkus Reviews

"If you enjoy lyrical depictions of iniquity and a sprinkling of philosophy mixed in with your noir fiction, then you'll like Gesell Dome."—San Francisco Chronicle

"By using a narrator who is not shocked, who does not look away from anything, Saccomanno shines a gruesome, graphic light on what people are willing to ignore so that their comfort remains intact."—Kim Fay, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Newspaper articles, ads, and more traditionally narrated segments make up the book, sprawling along without chapter breaks. The effect is like being tied to a stake on Main Street while the personifications of sin parade by, occasionally smacking you as they go."—Eric Shonkwiler, The Coil

From the Publisher

09/15/2016
Writing in the tradition of William Faulkner and John Dos Passos, Saccomanno, winner of the 2013 Dashiell Hammett Prize for noir fiction, exposes the secret life of a seaside resort town south of Buenos Aires, after the tourists have left. The one-way mirror in a Gesell dome that lets researchers watch people acting unawares is the metaphor here for readers observing the vagaries of the locals during the off-season. That this behavior is so savage reflects not only the town's Nazi past but also the less-than-civilized recent history of Argentina itself. A motley crew of loan sharks, skinheads, blackmailers and phantoms informs this novel, and the omniscient narrator alternates with first-person testimonies and articles from the town's weekly newspaper. Dante is its editor and sole reporter, who with his passion for the garbage of other people's lives depends on a limo driver and a unisex stylist for the sordid details that he prints. VERDICT This panoramic catalog of entertaining antisocial behavior, much of which the translator admits, in her excellent introduction, is over the top, is tempered and redeemed by its humor and compassion. An absorbing narrative for sophisticated readers.—Jack Shreve, Chicago

Library Journal

2016-05-31
"He was swollen, deformed, nibbled by fish." And that's one of the luckier residents of Argentine novelist Saccomanno's infernal seaside-resort city, where not much good ever happens.A Gesell dome is a one-way mirror that allows researchers to observe subjects without their being aware of it. So it is with this omnisciently noirish novel, which allows readers to hover over Villa Gesell in the off-season and see the odd doings of the year-round inhabitants. The resort (an actual place), the translator tells us in a helpful introduction, was named after another Gesell, the descendant of German immigrants, but no matter: all kinds of people end up in the beach town for the same sorts of exigencies and accidental reasons as the Europeans who have landed on the Rio de la Plata for the past half-millennium, among them an escapee from the military terror of the 1970s whose daughter, after affairs with drug dealers and sessions in rehab, pleads for her own daughter to find a place in the relative safety of Villa Gesell. "Trabuco kept a jealous eye on her," the narrator tells us, making revelations in fits and starts, "told her that a sinner never gets rid of the vice in her soul and that the Lord must have had some reason for infecting her, because let's not forget that Vicky has AIDS." Vicky isn't the only denizen of the city who's sick, and everyone seems altogether grumpy, perhaps because, under the orderly surface, the whole place is tainted with graft, corruption, and nepotism, all of which run through the city like the sewer line that, the narrator assures us, will never be built, "streets and boulevards gutted with no signs of a single pipe." Moving from character to character, Saccomanno writes with dark lyricism of the shady dealmakers, old-school Nazis, youngsters "with their hormones raging," prostitutes, and other types whom you might expect to find in a grim place and a grim time.Cynical and funny: a yarn worthy of a place alongside Cortázar and Donoso.

Kirkus Reviews