El amo bueno
Damián Tabarovsky

NOVEL | 2016 | 102 pages

El amo bueno is a novel built over an anarchic plot that manages to keep its events totally secret. Three dogs dig a tunnel in the garden of a house on 14th July Street in Buenos Aires. They sniff around a geography that is neutral and impersonal but nonetheless filled with ghosts. The remains of a textile factory, the smell of an old fire, empty warehouses, spilled gas, all appear as fragments of the history of a city against the memory of its ruins.

At the same time, the novel is a reflection on the banality of art. The voices of Fogwill, Duchamp, the black on black of Malevich, Charlie Parker playing only for a cow, and the echoes of the avant-garde all reverberate here. El amo bueno stages a combat: one between language and the specter of literature claiming its right to die.

RIGHTS: spanish MARDULCE | french NOIR SUR BLANC

El amo bueno happens in the garden of a house in a street of a neighborhood in Buenos Aires: its three main characters (for lack of a better word) are dogs, and at no point is there anything relating to the literature that resembles a souvenir, a sophisticated element that approaches kitsch. Lost as it is in its own folds, among its theoretical digressions and desire to subscribe to the present, this is literature that defends itself.
— Carlos Acevedo, CTXT
Tabarovsky is offering an absolute left wing literary proposal: revolutionary topic and not very acquiescent, and also a revolutionary form... A narrative where the main characters are discourses (Marxism, Judaism, Psychoanalysis, Sociology or History); the actions, thoughts; the plot, discursive counterattack; the endings, more questions or something like “continuing pulling the thread.
— Verónica Nieto, Revista de Letras
Strictly speaking, there is no plot. There is action in progress. There are three dogs, in the insignificance of a garden, that bark at anything that passes by, pointing things out in their nudity, in their nature as mere events. And, because there is narration, things can be what they are as well as something else.
— Silvia Friera, Página 12
El amo bueno is the triumph of writing, of a writing free from any corset of genre, one that fluctuates with absolute freedom between the narrative form, sometimes even bordering in the anecdotal, and the essay or philosophical treaty, without respite. It is an enormous gift for the most restless of readers.
— Antonio Jiménez Morato, blog Eterna Cadencia
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BY DAMIÁN TABAROVSKY:

La lengua en el capitalismo
ESSAY, 2024
Lo que sobra
ESSAY, 2023
El momento de la verdad
NOVEL, 2022
El amo bueno NOVEL, 2016 Escritos de un insomne NON-FICTION, 2016 Una belleza vulgar NOVEL, 2011 Autobiografía médica NOVEL, 2007 La expectativa NOVEL, 2006 Literatura de izquierda NON FICTION, 2004 Las hernias NOVEL, 2005 Bingo NOVEL, 1997