Carlitos Way: Vida de Carlos Nair Menem
Victoria De Masi

NONFICTION | 2016 | 239 pages

Carlos Nair Menem was the village of Formosa’s best-kept, well-known secret: everyone in the town he grew up in, himself included, knew that he was the son of Carlos Saúl Menem, who would become the president of Argentina, and Martha Meza, a teacher who would become a government representative. But nobody said that in public. At the age of eighteen, he filed a paternity suit for his father, who, despite seeing him regularly (behind the backs of Zulema Yoma and his children Zulemita and Junior), denied it over and over again. Carlos Nair only received the last name Menem in 2008, and even so, he needed to go through custodians to talk to his father. In the new century, he became a familiar face on reality shows on TV, but he quickly moved on to news channels—linked to drugs, accidents, weapons, robberies. His life describes a dizzying parable: from a happy childhood to an adolescence marked by his mother’s suicide; from innocent pranks with friends to marginalized life in the Buenos Aires suburbs.

The author followed him from the year 2012: she interviewed him in Mendoza and Buenos Aires; watched him eat ice cream, drink mate, laugh, boast, strut, get arrested. She interviewed his brothers, his grandmother, Zulema Yoma, his aunt, his childhood friends. The result is the deeply alive, and at times sad, portrait of a quick, wounded, furious man.

RIGHTS: spanish TUSQUETS