Pretérito perfecto

Every city wants to have a Joyce. Every city wishes to be material for a novel. And every city, I think, wants an Italo Calvino to be born. That is, a dreamer who writes the invisible city of their memory. The city of Tucumán already has its first Italo Calvino and its subtropical Joyce. That dreamer was Hugo Foguet.

The stories of Pretérito Perfecto narrate the vicissitudes in Tucumán. Buenos Aires, the traditional center of Argentine novels, does not appear. Foguet, the sailor, turns his back on the port. He travels back and forth from Europe. This intellectual and cultural trip enables him to create a novel from the North of Argentina that leaves aside the vices of folkloric regionalism. Pretérito Perfecto begins the urban novel in Tucumán: the characters go through the city of dreams and reality.

Foguet’s novel is a sea of words, quotes, places, characters, memories. It is an unceasing verbal device, an unusual verbiage machine. The reader of the novel is overwhelmed by a feeling of constant flowing of words appearing and disappearing. They will certainly devour the pages of Pretérito perfecto.