"In a "neofantastical" novel that both follows and leads the grand tradition of Latin American literature, the highly acclaimed best-selling Argentine author Osvaldo Soriano dazzles us, through humor and illusion, with the hilarity of modern angst and the inventiveness of the disenfranchised." "A brilliant but washed-up computer programmer walks off into the endless pampa - the vast expanse of the provincial Argentine countryside - after the train he is on breaks down in the middle of nowhere and is unlikely ever to be repaired. Heading for the next station in hopes of cashing in his ticket, he traipses through a spectacle of forgotten towns, deserted hotels, abandoned highways, and broken dreams, and along the way encounters a menagerie of motley and eccentric characters. Their appearances, disappearances, reappearances, and crossed destinies seem natural and inevitable to the narrator - whose name we never learn - and he is invariably drawn into their circuitous misadventures, as they are drawn into his." "Among the supporting cast we find: Coluccini, a 250-pound former circus owner, acrobat, and expert scammer desperate to get to Bolivia; Lem, a lovelorn banker from Rio de Janeiro who drives a Jaguar, has a weakness for gambling, and is determined to find "a system" at any cost; Nadia, a fortune-teller who demands payment for her services in food items; Barrante, a would-be wheeler-dealer who travels from ranch to ranch attached to his self-made system for washing farmhands; and Barrante's companion, a priest who performs baptisms, marriages, and the last rites for a not-so-small fee." "In prose combining sharp wit, crisp, incisive dialogue, and cinematic description, Osvaldo Soriano takes us on a romp through the countryside (and his literary landscape), where monuments to magical realism, surrealism, hard-boiled detective fiction, and farce will surprise, astonish, and regale at every turn."--BOOK JACKET.