"Pot Pourri: Whistlings of an Idler" by Eugenio Cambaceres **

• #3 in Summer Sub Club with Beth
• Argentinian author
• Originally published in 1882, first published anonymously
• Author info:  
  Son of a French chemist father who immigrated to Argentina in 1833 and a mother native to Buenos Aires. Cambaceres went to secondary school at the Colegio Nacional Central and then went on to receive a law degree from the Universidad de Buenos Aires.^[1]
  Quickly launching into politics, he was elected to the Argentine Chamber of Deputies and was named secretary of the Club del Progreso in 1870, and in 1873 became Vice President of said organization. However, his denunciations of fraud within his own party led to his downfall, and although he was re-elected to the legislature in 1876 he soon resigned his post and left public life to devote himself to literature. From his career as a liberal politician, perhaps his most important contribution was a controversial tract in a local magazine advocating the separation of Church and State that was quite polemic at the time.
  As a writer, he combined the naturalism of Émile Zola and the Goncourt brothers and a localized realist character with four novels of a pessimistic nature. His first two novels were Pot-pourri (1881) and Música sentimental: Silbidos de un vago [Sentimental Music: Whistles of a Lazy Man] (1884). Both lack a precise plot and leave many threads hanging, containing stories of adultery within a pessimistic and weary atmosphere. The novelty of dealing with such a lurid topic and in such a crude manner provoked a scandalous repercussion and critics did not hesitate in directly attacking Cambaceres. This changed the composition and style of his later works, which were much better received.
  In 1885 he released his most significant novel, Sin Rumbo [Without Direction], where he offered good descriptions of the landscape of sexual pathology, including interesting anecdotes. The year before he died 1887, he published En la sangre (In the Blood), a story about the son of Italian immigrants of humble origin that advances his social standing by marrying the daughter of a wealthy estate, only to squander his fortune and end up with a miserable life. Through his writing, Cambaceres dealt with the problems associated with the arrival of Immigrants to Argentina and the social changes of his time, but ended up taking the perspective of the high bourgeoisie that critiqued the lower classes and European immigration.
  Eugenio Cambaceres travelled to Europe and was in Paris when he died at 45 years of age, in 1888. His daughter, Rufina Cambaceres, was only four years old.
• Author's Foreword: 
• p.2..."...I think the mere display of those blemishes now corrupting the social organism is the most potent antidote which can be used against them
•  p.3..."As I was saying, I had the material before me, but it being carnival time, when everything is transfigured and becomes distorted, my lenses were probably also distorted, leading to slightly altered negatives with a dash too much shade."...Yep
•  p.4..."After each sentence, each word, each comma, and even in the blank margins, instead of the carefree whistlings of a flaneur, they have heard, .....the whizzing of poisoned darts that I, perverse bastard son, have plunged with parricidal hands into the bowels of our common mother." 
• p.14..."Turn the page and lend your ears to a collection of melodies, proof and testament to my thesis, that have been arranged as a concerto for whistles, a pot pourri of whistlings and catcalls composed by ear and on impulse - sans embellishment or variation--from the monumental music of the world."
• Review:   I was very disappointed in this novel.  The author paints a sarcastic, caustic picture of society in Buenos Aires in the 1880s.  The intensity of his invectives crossed some sort of line for me, moving from literature to nasty caricature.  The intense negativity caused me to tune out any sociopolitical substance.