[Verónica Rosenthal 01] • The Fragility of Bodies

Veronica is a beautiful and successful young journalist with a healthy appetite for bourbon and married men. She is a fascinating and complicated heroine, driven by a sense of justice but also by lust and ambition.

Sensual and terse, the novel is also fiercely critical of a system that tolerates the powerful and wealthy of Buenos Aires putting the lives of young boys at risk for their entertainment.

When she hears about the suicide of a local train driver who has left a note confessing to four mortal ‘accidents’ on the train tracks, she decides to investigate. For the police the case is closed (suicide is suicide), for Veronica it is the beginning of a journey that takes her into an unfamiliar world of grinding poverty, junkie infested neighbourhoods, and train drivers haunted by the memory of bodies hit at speed by their locomotives in the middle of the night.

Aided by a train driver with whom she has a tumultuous and reckless love affair, a junkie in rehab and two street kids willing to risk everything for a can of Coke, she uncovers a group of men involved in betting on working-class youngsters convinced to play Russian roulette by standing in front of fast-coming trains to see who endures the longest.