In a provincial Argentine river town, a kidnapping meant for the American ambassador snags the wrong man — a boozy, aging honorary consul — and drags a local doctor into a doomed hostage standoff run by his own boyhood friend, now a defrocked priest turned guerrilla.
Books mentioned in The Honorary Consul (3)
Das Kapital by Karl Marx: “The Bible is as unreadable to me as Das Kapital.”
Martin Fierro by José Hernández: “The subject was the bad effect of the epic poem, 'Martin Fierro', on the Argentine novel.”
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens: “"...like a Russian who believes that the bailiff and the coffin-maker still follow their unchanged vocations in a world where Oliver Twist is somewhere imprisoned in a London cellar asking for more." — following "When Doctor Plarr as a boy read a novel of Dickens..."”