11 best books about Argentina to read before your travels
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Loading... - Emilia Castillo
- 20 Jul 2022
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Argentina is a fascinating country known for its fine table wines, Argentinian BBQ and alluring tango dancing. Its history is expansive, dating all the way back to the time of the Incas. Not to mention the landscapes of Patagonia, where the Andes meet the Pacific Ocean, which is brimming with lakes, mountains and jaw-dropping glaciers.
It’s no wonder that Argentina is on the top of many travellers’ bucket lists, and what better way to get in the mood for your adventure than to read a book about Argentina? By diving into an engrossing novel set in Argentina, you feel like you have been transported into another country, as well as getting a better understanding of its landscapes, its history and its culture.
So, when you’re ready, let’s take a look at the best Argentinian novels.
Non-fiction books about Argentina
To fully understand the country and its people, there is no better way to learn about them than to immerse yourself in the pages of a non-fiction novel about Argentina.
1. In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Bruce Chatwin’s classic travel book In Patagonia is probably the most celebrated travel memoir of all time. It received the 1978 Hawthornden Prize and the 1979 E. M. Forster Award, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was also nominated for the 1988 Booker Prize.
As a child, Chatwin stayed with his grandparents who had a cabinet full of historical items that fascinated him, including a “piece of brontosaurus”, which turned out to be from a giant sloth found in a cave in Chilean Patagonia, which he later sold to the British Museum.
Years later, when Chatwin was working as a journalist, he was tasked with interviewing a 93-year-old architect and designer, where he noticed a map of Patagonia on her wall. He told her he had always wanted to go, and she replied “so have I, go there for me.”
And so he did. In 1974, he travelled to Lima, Peru, and then on to Patagonia, where he spent six months travelling around and collecting stories from people he met. He told his editor he was looking for his own “piece of brontosaurus”, but what he actually found was more symbolic than that.
2. The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara
Che Guevara is most commonly known as the Marxist revolutionary minister of Cuba, but before this, he was a mere medical student living in Buenos Aires, his home, who wanted little more than to see the world. With his friend, Alberto Granado, at the young age of 23, he set off on a motorcycle journey across South America with plans to see all the sites they had only ever read about in books.
What they ended up seeing was social injustice, poverty, and ostracised communities. His story revealed how Chilean miners were exploited, how communists were persecuted, and how the tattered descendants of a once-great ancient Inca civilisation had crumbled into ruin.
In the nine months of travelling across the Andes and the Atacama Desert, he finds himself in the Amazon jungle, volunteering as a nurse in a leper colony. It is here where he has the eye-opening experience that teaches him about true social injustice and how society treats and cares for one another. It is a classic coming-of-age tale of adventure, travel and self-discovery.
3. Enduring Patagonia by Gregory Crouch
Patagonia is a vast, expansive network of mountains, lakes and glaciers, that is shared by Argentina and Chile. Here, you can expect year-round harsh weather environments, from gale-force winds to biting snow. It is also a place that has inspired and fascinated explorers for centuries. Ferdinand Magellan and Charles Darwin were some of the most famous explorers to venture here, but even after all these years, the Patagonian Andes still remain a mystery.
And that is why Gregory Crouch decided it was time to unravel it. Over seven expeditions, he braved weather, gravity, fear, and doubt to explore the lands of Patagonia. In this novel, he recounts how he prepared for the expeditions, how he dealt with the tremendous highs and crippling lows, from celebrations of successful climbs to the boredom of forced encampments. If you have ever wanted to explore the mountains of Patagonia, this book is a pretty thorough illustration of it. It also includes more than two dozen colour photographs from his expeditions.
4. The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics edited by Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo
Argentina is a country that is vastly different from any other in South America. Often referred to as “like Europe but not Europe, like Latin America but not Latin America”, the real essence of what makes Argentina’s culture is both diverse and unique at the same time.
In short, Argentina is a complicated country, and The Argentina Reader is the best introductory book about Argentina to break it down for you. It compiles songs, articles, comic strips, scholarly essays and short stories from Argentines, sharing what they know about Argentina’s history, culture, and how it came to be such a paradoxical Latin American nation.
It was once among the richest nations in the world, but all that ended when it entered the twenty-first century, seeing its economy crumble into shambles and its citizens seething with anger and frustration. It covers the Spanish colonial regime; the decades of nation-building after its independence from Spain in 1810 and the progress of economic growth and cultural change that made Argentina, by the turn of the twentieth century, the most modern country in Latin America.
5. Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read
Alive is the story of how an amateur rugby team from Uruguay survived in the Andes after their plane crashed in the mountains between Chile and Argentina on its way to Santiago Chile. This story is so unbelievable, it has to be true – and it is.
This unsettling account of how 45 people, including the rugby team and their friends and family, came to a crash in the Andes, and after eight solid days of searching from three neighbouring countries, no wreckage was found. Ten weeks later, two men came wandering in a remote valley where they met a Chilean peasant on the other side of a river. They threw the peasant a note saying “I come from a plane that fell in the mountains…”
Out of the 45 passengers, 16 survived. They spent weeks in the remote, glacial wilderness camping in the plane’s fuselage. Here they endured freezing temperatures, life-threatening injuries, near starvation, and an avalanche. Their food supplies were thin, and they knew no one was looking for them. This is a remarkable tale of endurance and determination, and one of the most harrowing quests for survival in our history. Read More...
