Atlas del eclipse

Atlas of the eclipse is a hypnotic narrative essay or travel book or non-fiction novel that takes place during one hundred days of the year 2020. From mid-February, when Reinaldo Laddaga contracted the coronavirus, to the demonstrations that caused the murder of George Floyd. During those strange months, the author dedicated himself to systematically walking through the ghostly metropolis, touring the most unknown dimension of New York City. Its old parks, jails, asylums, cemeteries and sanatoriums. And the new refrigerated trucks that housed the corpses of the pandemic. With the lucidity provided by the light of the cataclysm, the Argentine writer rereads in these pages the work of Edgar Allan Poe, the topography of Central Park or Coney Island, the figure of Donald Trump or the literary tradition of limbo, that floating zone between heavens and hells. The result of all these physical and mental excursions, through the present and the past, is a fascinating book, reminiscent at times of those by Ryszard Kapus'cin'ski or Joan Didion, and which is inscribed on its own merits in the wake Delirium of New York, by Rem Koolhas, and Underworld, by Luc Sante. Ambitious and vagabond literature to delve into the subconscious of a city and a time.