In his long-awaited novel Rosen – una historia judía (“Rosen – A Jewish Story”), Paszkowski tells the story of a colourful character who has perfected the art of manipulating everyone around him. At the age of 16, handsome Max Rosen, born into a Jewish Argentinean family, decides to turn his back on religion and becomes a bon viveur and a successful businessman in the gambling trade. But in spite of all his efforts to ignore his roots, he cannot avoid dealing with God and the history of the Jews. Based on a true story, the novel immerses the reader in a fascinating life, and time.

Tesis sobre un homicidio (“Thesis on a Homicide”) is a thrilling novel about the perfect crime. Having completed his studies in Paris with distinction, the lawyer Paul Besançon returns to Buenos Aires, where he attends a course given by the famous criminologist Bermúdez. The 55-year-old, whose personal life is rather unstable, feels irritated by the cool and arrogant, yet extremely bright young man. When the corpse of a young woman is found near the faculty alongside a subtle sign noticed only by Bermúdez, the criminologist is sure that the culprit is his best student. To prove his guilt and to regain his own superiority, he grows increasingly obsessed with the case.

Two years later Paszkowski published his second novel, El otro Gómez (“The Other Gómez”). One day the bank official William Efraín Puente is abducted and forced to live the life of a certain Gómez. There is little sense in him insisting on his real identity, so he finally succumbs and takes the place of Gómez. Who would not like the chance to lead someone else’s life? The reader follows Gómez in awe into his new life where some indefinable threat seems to lurk. And yet the structure of the story is such that the reader simply cannot put down the book until the altogether compelling end, when real Gómez turns up.

With Alrededor de Lorena (“All About Lorena”) Paszkowski departs from the crime genre and seduces the reader into the realm of poetic prose. The title character is the middle class woman Lorena, who had always dreamt of getting married, while her husband, Ricardo, did not find the trip to the registry office quite so easy. They then embark on normal married life and have two daughters. The unexpected turning point comes when they take the trip to Paris that Lorena had long desired, with Ricardo only braving his fear of flying with difficulty. When he suffers a panic attack during a stop-off in São Paulo, she continues her journey and falls in love – on the steps of Montmartre – with Gerard, a Frenchman. Lorena’s decision to divorce her husband leaves his world in tatters. Ricardo loses the power of speech and spends two years in a psychiatric clinic, where he is cared for an attractive nurse with a blond wig – Lorena? Later, he looks for work and a roof over his head, and finds both as a proofreader in a publishing house, never leaving the building. He has a humiliating relationship with the manager of the publishing company, at the outer limits of human dignity and sexual lust. But, once again, the woman appears to be none other than Lorena…

With elements reminiscent of director David Lynch or writer Herman Melville, this multiple-voiced and experimental novel leads the reader into a labyrinth of passions, driven along by the question of the hidden desires and identities concealed within us – and how far we are prepared to go to fulfil them.