MARIA DUARTE is swept along by the cocky self-belief of a ping-pong hustler in a surprisingly violent drama
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Revelatory depiction of life in Buenos Aires slum is a tragi-comic triumph
A South American shanty town
[Leon Petrosyan/Creative Commons]
STEVE ANDREW recommends a lively and often moving guide to once vibrant spaces that have been abandoned or swept away
GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
Slum Virgin
by Gabriela Cabezon Camara
(Charco Press, £9.99)
IN THE El Poso slum of Buenos Aires things are starting to change for the better. Its inhabitants organise in special committees, they create a system of canals filled with large and glistening carp to eat, they grow their own vegetables and they are learning to be self-sufficient.
El Poso (“The Sediment”) is turning into a tiny utopia and all of this is apparently thanks to a strange cement Virgin Mary statuette — the Slum Virgin — that sends divine messages to the people through a “medium,” the transvestite prostitute Cleo, who renounces life on the game to try to save his shanty-town community from impending destruction.
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