Bruno Folner’s Last Tango

At the heart of Bruno Folner’s Last Tango is the moral issue concerning the matter of death with dignity, and whether the act of euthanasia is a crime or a final expression of love. The reader learns in the initial pages of the novel why the protagonist fled to Brazil and decided to stay by pure chance in the coastal town of Praia Macacos, where he checked into the Pousada da Baleia with a laptop, false passport, Victor Hugo’s Les miserables, and $34,000, for an indefinite stay with no departure date. We learn that the character’s real name is not Bruno Folner, an alias that pays homage to his favorite writer William Faulkner, and that he is 64 years old and has just made the second most important decision of his life, to fulfill an old fantasy of reinventing himself and starting over.