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Beltrán Mena. Tubab. Santiago, Chile. Alfaguara. 2009. 429 pages. ch$15,700. ISBN 978-956-239-631-8
The novel Tubab begins with a medical student, Beltrán Mena, who spends his free time reading books and studying old maps of Africa. The basic plot of the book revolves around a trip a Chilean man takes to Africa in search of the mythical city of Timbuktu. The main character is a "tubab"-a white man, or foreigner, in some parts of Africa.
"Maps fill our heads with names, names full of connotations and resonances, names that come to us through the air as notes cascading from the orchestra of paradise, they compel us to take a bus, wait for a ferry, fly on a plane," writes Mena. The trip will have no purpose other than to...