Tango (French Edition)

Tango dancing is enjoying a rediscovery with concert performances such as Forever Tango and Tango Argentino, but this book by French author Evelyne Pieiller and Spanish photographer Isabel Muñoz makes no attempt to tell the Argentinian dance's history. Rather, it approaches its subject obliquely, with a long piece of fiction and a series of tango song lyrics, translated into English, and accompanying the book's centerpiece, a series of remarkable, glowing, mildly erotic photographs. All freeze the tango dancers in action: tangles of entwined limb tightly clad in stretched satin and fishnet, sweating, and not always just with exertion. The lyrics, presented here as poems of passion and betrayal, capture both the essence of the dance, and the sharp tang of the lifestyle that produced it. Rarely does a book capture pure mood so well--to exclusion of virtually everything else.