Tiempo Compartido

Description

“They say that what you learn in childhood is learned forever. And what I learned was taught to me by television.”

One of the central confessions of the narrator of this unforgettable novel, which spans the entire 1990s in Argentina, building his identity and emotional formation through mass consumer products and especially television, which exploded in ratings and established a new horizon of reality for all viewers. Meanwhile, the Argentine state was being privatized, marginality was deepening, and social class divisions were becoming sharper every day. All of that universe of privatization and corruption would eventually lead to the collapse of the Argentine state in 2001. And in the meantime—meanwhile—the middle class aspired to travel to Miami, bring back televisions and video cameras, and live under the 1-to-1 exchange rate, which ultimately became one life that prospered, one life that fell out of the system.

All of this is narrated with masterful insight by Nicolás Diodovich in Shared Time, a novel that tells the story of a family in the 1990s, when life itself became privatized, emotions became privatized, pain became privatized. “A one-on-one with the prosperity meter,” says the narrator, who measured himself day by day against the consumer objects families added to their stock. Whoever reads this book will laugh, will cry, will learn, will be outraged, will reflect. Whoever reads this book will come to understand, with compassion, that what we are as a society is the failure of what we once dreamed of becoming. And this novel, with irony, humor, and pain, reveals that truth.

Cynthia Edul