The Hotel Fakir

Adam Smolka, BSc Hons 1969

The hypnotic music of Argentine Tango and the fusion of mind and body induced by the dance will not let go. In the beginning, as obsession sparred with reason, I fended off surrender by posting on a Facebook page vignettes of life at the shifting interface between Tango fantasy and reality.

The stories were set in cities where I had found Tango: Beirut, Barcelona, Charleston, Lviv, Orlando, San Diego. Men and women I met while dancing inspired my characters. Instead of rummaging through expository psychology, I sketched them in broad strokes, seeking to capture their inner life through dialog, or simply by recording chance details and gestures.

In keeping with Martin Amis’s argument that writers need to be “stalled adolescents”, the vignettes invariably find the narrator in thrall to a beautiful woman, both of them mesmerized by Tango’s melancholy bandoneons.

If you want a sense of what Tango does to you, how it infiltrates and nurtures your neglected waking dreams, just step through the lacquered black door of The Hotel Fakir, ask Ignatio for a glass of Malbec, and let the tropical flowers and Tango take you away. You too will dream all day about Tango.

ISBN: 148405251X