Summary

“Álvaro Rousselot’s Journey” opens with the narrator suggesting that perhaps the famed Argentine writer, Álvaro Rousselot, was either “much more complicated than we had imagined” or “simply another victim of chance” (77). The story begins with Rousselot at age 30 publishing his first book in 1950, Solitude—which was then published in French as Nights on the Pampas. In 1957, a film adaptation of the book, titled Lost Voices, is released by a Frenchman named Guy Morini. At first, Rousselot considers himself “a victim of plagiarism” (79).

He does not take legal action and soon publishes his second novel, The Archives of the Calle Peru. He then publishes his third novel, Life of a Newlywed, which is misinterpreted, to great success, as a comedy rather than a drama. While vacationing in France, Morini releases another film, The Shape of the Day, which is a “better, that...