El contrabando ejemplar

Pablo, an aspiring writer with few scruples, travels to Madrid to recover the manuscript left behind by his friend and mentor, Eduardo, upon his death. It's a book that was never finished but which aimed to explain the inexplicable: the unfortunate fate of Argentina, which during the 17th century shaped its economy with a clandestine trade system so sophisticated and institutionalized that it was known as "exemplary smuggling." Determined to appropriate Eduardo's impossible novel (a literary undertaking that is simultaneously a tribute and an expiation, a plunder and an elegy), Pablo will embark on a process that will lead him to reconstruct his own biography, and also Eduardo's: a Peronist, excessive and sentimental, an overflowing figure, marked by contradictions and melancholy. Within its pages burst characters that pulsate with intensity: Aunt Chiquita and the enigmatic Teruca, Pietro Malaspina, the first Italian to set foot on the Río de la Plata, Zebulão Mendes, a Jewish convert doctor, or the Querandí monster, a grotesque folkloric figure whose curse seems to weigh on Argentina… Neurotic, tender, violent, humorous, all intertwine in a mosaic where history, imagination and the sentimental chronicle of Argentine identity become indistinguishable.