One of my favorite writers that I’ve started to read during these past couple of years living in Buenos Aires is not an Argentine but an Englishman who spent some time here: Graham Greene.

He’s a huge name and I should have read him years ago but somehow never got around to it.

“In a way what one forgets becomes the unrecognised memory of the future.” That’s Graham Greene talking to Alex Hamilton during a 1971 interview recently reprinted in the Guardian.

The novel that Greene was composing at that time was The Honorary Consul, which is set not in Buenos Aires as one might expect but along the frontier with Paraguay. In the Guardian interview, Greene talks a little about the origin of the book in a chance encounter: “Recently I was in a town in North Argentina where I didn’t know a soul. I came down from my hotel room for a quiet dinner by myself and a mysterious figure came and said he had an invitation for me to camp outside the city.”

And for those interested, here are my impressions of The Honorary Consul.