La última actriz
Tamara Tenenbaum

NOVEL | 2024 | 200 pages

Two women, two timelines. A novel that explores feminine identity through time and memory.

Although she dreamed of becoming an actress, Sabrina wound up studying the Arts. Spurred by Gabriel—her thesis advisor and lover—she decides to investigate the traces of Jewish theater in Argentina. To do this she resorts to Jaim, an old professor who suggests she review the remains of the AMIA archives, the mutual organization that suffered a terrorist attack in 1994. “That was the moment I decided that I would dedicate my life to this past. It’s not like I was drawn to that world, at least not more than I was to any other: what compelled me was that it had disappeared.”

The investigation turns out to be complicated and difficult, because most of the documents disappeared with the bomb. That is until an archivist offers her a box where she discovers a diary by Jana, a Yiddish theater actress in Buenos Aires in 1960. Jana acts as a sort of magic mirror for Sabrina. Following her footsteps becomes an obsession, and everything else—her family, her career, her relationship with Gabriel—fades into the background.

In La última actriz, Tamara Tenenbaum demonstrates an exceptional narrative intelligence. With two disturbing female characters and a plot that is as elusive as it is hypnotic, this novel is about what it means to be a woman, desire and realization, the myth of the Dybuk and bodily possession, tradition and modernity, the city of Buenos Aires, and the search for an existential key in a stack of burned papers.

RIGHTS: spanish SEIX BARRAL/PLANETA | italian FANDANGO

BY TAMARA TENENBAUM:

La última actriz
NOVEL, 2024
Todas nuestras maldiciones se cumplieron
NOVEL, 2021
Nadie vive tan cerca de nadie
STORIES, 2020
El fin del amor
NON FICTION, 2019
Reconocimiento de terreno
POETRY, 2017