https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/03/fracture-by-andres-neuman-review-the-damage-of-the-past

The Argentinian writer’s best novel yet follows a Japanese man investigating his country’s history of trauma and survival

Novels are experiments: they offer writers an opportunity to play with time, to invent places and to imagine and inhabit lives other than their own. Fracture is by far the Argentinian writer Andrés Neuman’s most successful experiment. Neuman is a poet, short story writer, columnist and firm favourite of the late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, who proclaimed: “The literature of the 21st century will belong to Neuman.” A bold claim, and doubtless as much a curse as a blessing, but Neuman has been doing his best to live up to the hype. The recipient of multiple awards and prizes, and still only in his early 40s, he is now undoubtedly an international figure – with global ambitions.

Mr Watanabe is a figure condemned to live through history, observing and observed