The author's writing flows between erudition and farce, between the essay and adventure, to construct a contemporary allegory about how Argentina —and perhaps any nation— invents itself. More than a historical novel, 'El contrabando ejemplar' exemplifies a narrative theory about identity. A story where smuggling ceases to be a crime and becomes a metaphor: the art of surviving through appropriations, disguises, and shared stories. With humor, erudition, and melancholy, the novel proposes a hypothesis as absurd as it is plausible: that Argentina was born of smuggling, and that this clandestine impulse continues to mark its destiny. For this novel, the author won the Herralde Prize 2025. The story begins in Madrid, when Pablo —an aspiring writer without too many scruples— decides to recover the unfinished manuscript that his friend and mentor, Eduardo, left behind after dying. In 'El contrabando ejemplar', Pablo Maurette turns the history of the Río de la Plata into a sprawling fiction where the past and present mirror each other, and the Argentine identity is revealed as a plot of plagiarisms, smugglings, and nostalgias. That lost book was meant to explain 'the sad epic of Argentina,' and its reconstruction becomes the center of a novel that mixes homage, expiation, and looting. In that sense, 'El contrabando ejemplar' does not seek to restore a lost memory but to analyze the forms of deception, the persistence of collective fictions, and the way in which literature can also be an act of smuggling. A philosopher by training, an essayist, and a professor of comparative literature, Maurette combines intellectual rigor with a sense of humor that dismantles solemnities. Parade characters as unusual as endearing —Aunt Chiquita, the mysterious Teruca, the Jewish doctor Zebulão Mendes, or the grotesque Querandí monster— that compose a mosaic where official history is confused with invention. The result is a choral novel, dense in ideas but light in tone, that reads as a funhouse mirror of the country. Maurette reactivates the old 'found manuscript' device to interrogate the way national narratives are constructed: how versions of the past are falsified, trafficked, and reinvented to sustain an identity. In the attempt to appropriate another's work, the protagonist ends up writing his own: a story about friendship, betrayal, and the desire to understand a country condemned to repeat its own mistakes. From that starting point, Maurette unfolds a multi-layered narrative: a travel chronicle, an intellectual comedy, a political elegy, and a historical fable.
