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 "If you haven't fallen in love by the end of the dance you haven't danced the tango."
Lloyd Jones' HERE AT THE END OF THE WORLD WE LEARN TO DANCE follows a love affair that spans continents and decades that began during World War I in a cave in New Zealand when a young girl named Louise and a German piano tuner named Schmidt, whom she had hidden to save his life, dance a tango that lasts three minutes and fall immediately and forever in love. "She feels the piano tuner's hand arrive at the small of her back. The hand gives a little shove and resettles." Years later Schmidt's grandaughter, the sensuous Rosa, tells of Louise and Schmidt's great love affair to a much younger dishwasher-- he is 19; she is 36 and married-- Lionel who is besotted by her and who works in her restaurant where she teaches him the tango after hours.
Jones' novel teems with love, passion and ultimately great sorrow as, according to Ernest Hemingway, every love affair is tragic because it eventually ends in death. Louise and Schmidt's love story conjures up Hemingway's A FAREWELL TO ARMS, McEwan's ATONEMENT, Joyce's beautiful short novel THE DEAD, Marquez' tale of love in old age LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, even some of Robert Browning's poetry: "grow old along with me," for example.
Jones' haunting story of missed connections and love in old age really has no bad characters. Billy, for instance, the husband Louise leaves for Schmidt, is as decent a character as you are apt to find in any novel. In Louise's obsession, she goes to Buenos Aires where she never learns the language, hates Christmas because she always has to spend it alone and likes to meet Schmidt in later years on Sundays by the waterfront because she can see the horizon that reminds her of rural New Zealand. She has forsaken much, but she is saved from what Jones describes as a "wallpaper life." His description of her-- and much of his writing-- read like a prose poem: "Louise was usually the first one there [the waterfront]. There she is, sitting on a bench waiting for Schmidt to extricate himself from his comfortable apartment. . . He always hoped to see her first. Sometimes he did, and these days hobbling on bad knees he stops to squint into the untrustful distance, admiring the view. The way the river air pushes her skirt against her legs. To his eyes Louise is still young, forever young; the sight of her still excites."
Throughout these two love stories that have many parallels there is always of course the throbbing tango.
Highly recommended.
 Look! Bad Writing Meets Mr. Obvious!
This is a perfect book for any reader who ever finished The Notebook and said, "You know, I liked it, but I wish it was written by a less talented writer*. And I wish the story revolved not around an elderly man trying to recapture the spark of love in his ailing and mentally frail wife, but around a middle aged Argentine restaurateur trying to recreate her grandfather's life-long affair with his store clerk mistress by seducing the first year University student she employees as a dish washer." Then, write the story in prose that tries to be minimalistic and terse but falls into flat-out bad, with a romance as bland, predictable, and lifeless as Wonder Bread and you have Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance.
* - When I say "less talented writer" you should be aware that I really don't like Nicholas Sparks' writing. At all.
Loved It
I loved this book. I've read a number of books about tango, and enjoyed them all, but this is my favorite. (Second favorite: Long After Midnight at Niño Bien.)
Good story, engaging characters, and a wonderful take on how Argentine tango can affect you in ways you hadn't imagined before you took your first lessons.
Peter Silverman, Ashland, Oregon
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