The Foreigners
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3.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
A glittering, energetic novel about three women-each experiencing an awakening in the gloriously conflicted and sexy city of Buenos Aires.
Buenos Aires is a city of Parisian affections and national anxiety, of amorous young lovers, seedy ports, flooded slums, and a dazzling social elite. Into this heady maze of contradiction and possibility enter two women: Daisy, an American divorcée; and Isolde, a beautiful, lonely Austrian. In Buenos Aires, Isolde finds that her blond European looks afford her entrée to the kind of elite, alluring social world she never would have had access to in her home country, but her ascension also sets her up for a long, surprising fall. Meanwhile, Daisy joins forces with Leonarda, a chameleonic Argentine with radical dreams of rebellion, who transfixes Daisy with her wild effervescence. Soon, Daisy is throwing off her American earnestness and engaging in a degree of passion, manipulation, and risk-taking in a way she never has before. Buenos Aires has allowed her to become someone else.
Against the throbbing backdrop of this shimmering and decadent city- almost a character in itself-Maxine Swann has created a stunning narrative of reawakened sensuality and compulsive desire that simultaneously explores with remarkable acuity themes of foreignness, displacement, and the trembling metamorphoses that arise from such states. From the award-winning, critically celebrated author of Flower Children, The Foreigners is a startlingly bold and original, unforgettable next novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Three women navigate modern life in Buenos Aires in Swann's elegant third novel (after Flower Children). Daisy, a lonely American divorc e with no direction, moves to the city at the suggestion of a friend. To fight the isolation, Daisy explores and encounters fascinating characters, like Gabriel, a medical student turned male gigolo ("the beautiful thing is that it annihilates the whole problem of desire," he says of his work) and Isolde, an Austrian migr with a lust for social status. Daisy forms a mercurial friendship and an obsessive bond with Leonarda, a young Argentine involved in an underground society trying to create "a strategy of happiness" in order to "alleviate the anxiety of uncertainty" in the country. The city itself, attempting to recover from a recent economic crash, is locked in its own battle for identity and gives Daisy freedom to disappear and flourish anew, at least momentarily. Though the city invites inhabitants to lose themselves for a time, it can also confine those who wish to escape. Whether native or foreigner, each character is displaced and wrestles with the outcome. With lyricism and observational skill that recalls early Joan Didion, Swann brings Buenos Aires to life.
