I finally finished this. It’s a slow-moving meditation on a life lived on the river. Or, a sort of half-life. It was first published in 1962; this translation from Spanish is by Jon Lindsay Miles (he writes about the experience here). I loved the Argentinian setting, and the language, and the strangeness, all of which are bound up with the river, yet it kept me at arms length, and took me ages to finish.

The distance was created by Conti’s nearly all-male cast, all men of mystery, all men of few words. It irked me that the only two women in the book were an ‘old woman’ and a ‘whore’, both downtrodden/barefoot/pregnant. It didn’t help that one of these inscrutable men (‘the man’)

‘was always maddened by this willingness of whores. There’s nothing quite so chilly nor more distant than a whore.’

Quite.

I’m looking forward to my next read.