Margins
The President's Room book cover
The President's Room
2015
First Published
3.57
Average Rating
94
Number of Pages

In a nameless, homogenised suburb, every house has a room reserved for the president. No one knows when or why this came to be. It is simply how things are, and no one appears to question or contradict this spatial disposition. The room is kept ordered and clean, and nobody is allowed to use it. It is solely for him, the president. But what if he never comes? Everything is kept vague, so vague that we begin to wonder if even the narrator can be trusted... Compared to Kafka and Calvino, Ricardo Romero brings us a novel that narrates eeriness, perhaps a metaphor, from the point of view of a shy boy who seems to be very good at lying about the truth. Following in the steps of Julio Cortázar and of a certain literary tradition of sinister rooms –where Dr Jekyll became Mr Hyde, for instance–, The President’s Room is a mysterious tale based on the metaphysical hypothesis that each house is never just one single home.

Avg Rating
3.57
Number of Ratings
527
5 STARS
14%
4 STARS
41%
3 STARS
34%
2 STARS
10%
1 STARS
1%
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Author

Ricardo Romero
Author · 3 books
Ricardo Romero was born in the province of Entre Ríos, in northern Argentina, in 1976. He studied Literature at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and has been living in Buenos Aires since 2002. Between 2003 and 2006 he directed the literary journal Oliverio and between 2006 and 2010 he was one of the members of the ‘El Quinteto de la Muerte’ (The Lethal Quintet) with which he published two books: 5 and La fiesta de la narrativa (Fiction’s Party). He has also published a book of short stories, Tantas noches como sean necesarias (As Many Nights as may be Necessary, 2006) and the novels Ninguna parte (Nowhere, 2003), El síndrome de Rasputín (Rasputin’s Syndrome, 2008), Los bailarines del fin del mundo (The Dancers of the End of the World, 2009), Perros de la lluvia (Rain Dogs, 2011), El spleen de los muertos (The Spleen of the Dead, 2013) and Historia de Roque Rey (The Tale of Roque Rey, 2014). The President’s Room (2015) is his latest novel.
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