He lost everything he had, including his identity, only to find it again on the street.
Eliseo Fainzilber is a retired psychoanalyst who becomes homeless after his wife Martina kicks him out of the house. Eliseo was deeply dependent on Martina in every aspect of his life: he lived in her house and was the manager of an antique store owned by her family, even his social life revolved around his wife’s relationships. Martina discovers that Eliseo had become indebted to a loan shark and had put the shop and the family’s assets as collateral behind her back. Faced with monumental deception, Martina decides to leave him on the street.
Homeless, jobless, and penniless, Eliseo’s life is turned upside down overnight. Eliseo is reunited with Eleonora, a former patient, who asks him to return to consult with him. But Eliseo is retired and has no facilities in which to receive a consultation, so he is forced to refuse her request.
Desperate and grief-stricken, Eliseo chooses to commit suicide by throwing himself onto the train tracks, but at the last moment, a homeless man manages to save him and convince him to resume therapy with his former patient.
In a moment of enlightenment and inspired by the Greek Peripatetics, Eliseo comes up with the idea of solving his problem of lack of space by holding appointments out in the open. He summons Eleonora and discovers that, like him, she has lost her place in the world and is a compulsive hoarder who has infested her house with objects. The second patient will be the homeless man who saved his life, a man with a high intellectual background who lost his memory and ended up on the street.
Exposed to the outdoors, Eliseo is the victim of a robbery. But the young thief, at the very moment he is being robbed, suffers a panic attack and becomes his third patient.
Eliseo begins his sessions to help his three patients find the reasons behind their problems. On the one hand, Eleonora discovers that her compulsion to hoard is because each accumulated object symbolizes an offering to her deceased father. The homeless man, on the other hand, realizes that he had condemned himself to amnesia in order to forget that he led his family into a fatal accident, of which he was the only survivor.
Dano, the young thief suffering from panic attacks, had just returned from London where he had started working as a bartender. But the panic attacks forced him to return to Buenos Aires, where he had become a failure, as his father had warned.
The three patients and the analyst, transformed into a small community, will find a common destiny in Martina’s family’s antique shop. The old place, transformed into a picturesque bar where everyone participates, will be where each one finds his place in the universe, also repairing the damage Eliseo had done to his wife.
RELEVANT DATA: The Psychodrome (El psicódromo) is the next novel by acclaimed Argentine author Federico Andahazi; a very kind and hopeful story in which the weight falls on the construction and evolution of the characters.
Federico Andahazi is considered a true reference in contemporary Latin American literature. Throughout his career, he has been awarded a multitude of awards, including the Planeta Award, the Short Story Award of the Second Biennial of Young Art of Buenos Aires, the the Annual Literary Desde la Gente Award, and the CAMED Award.
Thanks to works such as The Anatomist (El anatomista) or The Conqueror (El conquistador), Andahazi has established himself as one of the most prestigious authors of today. His works have been translated into more than 40 languages and millions of copies have been sold worldwide.
What the critics say about the author:
“A wealth of imagination that, with narrative skill, manages to keep the reader in a constant state of suspense.” Antonio Requeni, La Nación
“Cunning master of story subversión.” Jersey Evening Post
“Gifted with an abundant imagination.” Les Inrockuptibles
AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Miniseries, Film, TV Movie.
LANGUAGES AVAILABLE: Spanish.
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