Tango: An Argentine Love Story

Sense And Sensuality:
If you're not a dancer of Argentine tango now, you'll want to become one after reading this book. Ms.Cusamano takes on a odyssey through the bustling streets of Buenos Aires and deep into its many dark dance halls, teeming with people, all of them waiting with bated breath to attain the breathless "tango moments", those precious seconds when one transcends dance and enters a zen like trance where such things as time, gender, past and future seem to vaporize. This is a deeply personal book, rich with profoundity, humor, and poignancy. The author is very brave to bear her soul to the reader showing a life that is full of great triumphs and glorious falls from grace. It reads more like a novel, except it's all true! Thank God!

Try a New Dance, Lance:
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this book proves the reverse may also be true---words can be as richly evocative as any image. TANGO's words march across the page like vivid snapshots. It takes you deep inside the culture of the dance, of Buenos Aires, a very Italian city, to exotic corners of Argentina, like Iguazu and Patagonia, to gaucho country, and barrios (or neighborhoods) all over Buenos Aires. It never lacks for some visual detail to keep your kinesthetic interest--whether the author is describing tango dancers in La Boca who dip their soles in paint and dance on a huge canvas or what the exotic parts of Argentine cattle taste like or what her many dance partners smell like--(be thankful it's not scratch-and-sniff). Be prepared for every known sense and some not yet named to be aroused when you read TANGO, a love story with many facets. The book opens when life takes some unexpected turns, and the author rises to the challenge. She packs up a few suitcases and with only a bare bones plan, takes off for Buenos Aires, Tango Mecca, Paris of South America, a city that never sleeps. Her love life has fallen apart, the gauntlet is thrown. That's the bad news. It's also where the good news starts. She shows how we all rise from the ashes, new life is always on the bud. There are a thousand and one ways to redeem ourselves. Just hop on the bus, Gus. Slip out the back, Jack. Try a new dance, Lance. TANGO is a story about sudden travel---not the carefully planned sort--- to a foreign place literally and figuratively. That is, sometimes that foreign place is our self. The author is never at a loss for finding the hidden psychological/spiritual meaning in the mundane: her residual Oedipal complex in a partner's torso, the double meaning of tango's precept that we maintain our own "axis" in tango. Everything goes many layers deep. Indeed tango is more than a dance, it's a metaphor for everything in life, from internal conflict to external peace. TANGO, the "love" story, is occasionally about ordinary romance between a man and woman; it has forays into sexual love as well as Platonic idealized love with strangers you meet in a specially designated place for tango, called a milonga, whom you may never see again, who "come and go like ripples in a stream." It is also about love beyond the conventional man/woman type. It's about love in a community of people who share a passion, in this case for a dance and its music, which have survived more than a hundred years through much, including Argentina's last military dictatorship prohibition of public gatherings. It is also about the kind of self discovery and bliss that occur when you give yourself over completely to anything that you love and that requires total presence. The writing is an exercise in the glorification of the commonplace--- a rundown rickety old monastery, a dying cat, the milonga itself, all play out poetically in the author's experience. For this reason, at times it reads like a well-crafted novel. But even the author admits that, after all, tango is just a dance and she guides the reader to understanding that the rapture and bliss she derives from tango is everyone's birthright: "Every `body' has got tango," she writes. You don't have to know a thing about the dance to enjoy this book. And if you do, you'll love it because it offers a measure of one woman's multi-faceted experience and interpretation, against which to measure your own or another's. There is so much to ponder and take away---one of my favorite chapters is called Church of Tango, one in which there is very little tango, but a lot to contemplate. TANGO is pure lyricism. Go learn a few steps in a class, but then pick up TANGO and experience tango like you never have and never will on a dance floor. Then, realize that all your life, every action, reaction, interaction, is tango, a dance between two forces, two polarities--the true currency of life. Savor it, savor it--just like the dance---in total presence.

A delicious read:
This book was a delicious read, well written and satisfying on many levels. For starters, it is my favorite kind of travel writing because it penetrates the underlying character of a place and its people, in this case Buenos Aires and the world of tango. But the book is also an absorbing story of the author's personal journey, one in which she heals her troubled soul/heart as she toggles between the pursuits of tango and zen meditation. Her exploration into these two mind-body disciplines and the bridge she finds between them is fascinating. Occasionally she tosses out nuggets of hard won wisdom that she extracts from both, but never takes herself too seriously. She is in fact quite funny with her self-deprecating humor. Yet when she talks of others she does so in a spirit of kindness and generosity.