Bogotá airport, immigration form in hand. Tourist, migrant, businessman? Andrés Neuman ponders the descriptors, unsure which to tick. He opts for the second. ‘I’d like to be a migrant.’ The decision is telling, and frames much of what follows in this curious, delightful, if disjointed book.
Neuman is hot property in contemporary Latin American literary circles. A former winner of Spain’s prestigious Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, he is tipped (by Roberto Bolaño, no less) to be one of a select ‘handful’ to take up where the ‘boom’ generation of Márquez, Cortázar, Fuentes and Borges left off.
His widely acclaimed novel Traveller of the Century (his fourth book, but the first to be translated) propelled him to the attention of the English-speaking world. Suitably, given the title, it also sent him on a breakneck book tour of Latin America and the Caribbean, which he describes in How to Travel Without Seeing.
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