Martín Cullen

I was reminded of Proust’s Combray when reading Martín Cullen’s moving and detailed evocation of a childhood spent among the sophisticated environs of Calle Juncas in central Buenos Aires and on several family estancias during the early 1950s. 
[…] Written in prose that is often poetic […] The Estancia is a valuable record of a society that has now disappeared.

As a distillation of the complex puchero stew that is Argentinian identity – culturally in thrall to Europe long after independence from Spain – The Estancia is unbeatable ... a superb meditation on memory: the past is another country ... this is an immersive, beautifully crafted novel.

Deliciously unsettling ... the voice, whether novelist’s or autobiographer’s, is unforgettable.

Estancia is a marvel of poise and the high classical style... the writing has an incisive photographic clarity…the boy Cullen is a Tintin-like anomaly in his 1920s knickerbockers and beret...taken to France by his great-aunt Tía Tiode, a character out of Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt.

use of language: rich, flexible and incisive … Something new on every page … in the sense of a turn of phrase, an image, an emotion cut at an unexpected angle … a strange work of art, Freudian rococo, opera in the jungle … a book like bottled smoke.

a treasure trove of sensation ... enthralling, and the more so because its demi-Latin locale is nearly familiar yet exotically remote.

This is a dense and deeply satisfying journey into a faded Argentinian world. The narrator has the complexity and sensitivity of a poet and flexes his insight with all the care and ruthlessness of a surgeon’s probing knife. A delightful read

This lush, beautifully written and extremely personal book … the evocation of the Argentinian pampas …  I defy any reader not to be carried away by the beauty of these passages.

A sumptuous tapestry with a haunting personal narrative running throughout… this is not ‘magic realism’; it is literary magic of an old-fashioned order.

The Estancia is the story of a young boy growing up in the upper classes of the Argentine in the 1950s, set against the turbulent backdrop of Peronist rule. Revealing a now vanished society of the families of the great houses of Buenos Aires, their fin-de-siècle lifestyle, and the estancias which fed them, it is an autobiographical novel based on the author’s life. 
Narrated through the voice of Martín, a precocious. ten-year-old boy, it explores his intense and suffocating upbringing. After a childhood trapped and seduced in a domineering household of multiple mothers and an emotionally absent father, Martin believes he has finally escaped when taken on a cruise to Europe by his elderly great aunt. However, despite being freed from the steamy bathroom rituals of his family, the past continues to confront him and a secret surrounding his birth is revealed. 
Accompanying him on his journey of self-discovery, this vividly described panorama of the old New World explores the demise of high society and the incarceration of anyone showing disrespect for the government. Interspersed with flashbacks of his ancestor Ramos Mejia, who lived among the Pampa Indians and settled in the first estancia lands of the region, it is a poignant memoir of a truly unique life.

The Estancia

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Martín Cullen

Praise for The Estancia

I was reminded of Proust’s Combray when reading Martín Cullen’s moving and detailed evocation of a childhood spent among the sophisticated environs of Calle Juncas in central Buenos Aires and on several family estan ...

As a distillation of the complex puchero stew that is Argentinian identity – culturally in thrall to Europe long after independence from Spain – The Estancia is unbeatable ... a superb meditation on memory: the past ...

Deliciously unsettling ... the voice, whether novelist’s or autobiographer’s, is unforgettable.

I was reminded of Proust’s Combray when reading Martín Cullen’s moving and detailed evocation of a childhood spent among the sophisticated environs of Calle Juncas in central Buenos Aires and on several family estan ...

As a distillation of the complex puchero stew that is Argentinian identity – culturally in thrall to Europe long after independence from Spain – The Estancia is unbeatable ... a superb meditation on memory: the past ...

Deliciously unsettling ... the voice, whether novelist’s or autobiographer’s, is unforgettable.

I was reminded of Proust’s Combray when reading Martín Cullen’s moving and detailed evocation of a childhood spent among the sophisticated environs of Calle Juncas in central Buenos Aires and on several family estan ...

As a distillation of the complex puchero stew that is Argentinian identity – culturally in thrall to Europe long after independence from Spain – The Estancia is unbeatable ... a superb meditation on memory: the past ...

Deliciously unsettling ... the voice, whether novelist’s or autobiographer’s, is unforgettable.

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