Below Federico Andahazi's third-floor flat, two of Buenos Aires's traffic-filled avenues intersect and shops occupy the ground floor of the turn-of-the-century building. But in the high-ceilinged, parquet-floored, elegant flat itself all is spare and ordered: it is somewhat clinical, which fits with the fact that Andahazi practised as a psychoanalyst before the success of his novel The Anatomist about the doctor who discovered the clitoris.
With his lustrous ponytail, earring, tanned complexion and lithe movements, Andahazi resembles the Chilean tennis star Marcelo Rios but is as responsive as Rios is surly, eager to laugh and pounce on paradoxes. Andahazi's success has been even more meteoric than Rios's, but he benefitted from a publicity campaign by Argentina's richest woman, the cement millionaire Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat, known as Amalita.
Through her Fortabat Foundation she funds the richest Argentinian literary award. However, when it went to The Anatomist for the best first novel, she took full-page advertisements in national dailies to denounce it as "blasphemous and heretical". The award ceremony was cancelled - but the scandal helped boost sales to over 100,000 in Argentina, and did not prevent Andahazi receiving the $15,000 prize money. Doubleday paid $200,000 for English-language rights, Hollywood has taken an option and there are to be 22 other foreign editions which will enable him to indulge more than his taste for old motorbikes (at the moment he is refurbishing an Indian 47).
He receives rock star treatment in the Buenos Aires press, which quizzes him on how he likes women ("al dente") or what is the greatest quality of an ideal lover: "The words: I'm entranced if I'm told what I want to hear even if I know they're lies" or whether he is a winner with women: "There are no winners with women - you're always in danger of losing." Towards the end of the interview, his fresh-faced, fair fiancee arrived but there was no opportunity to hear her view of the issue.
Although Andahazi has not visited Italy, he set The Anatomist there during the 16th century. It concerns a doctor who gives the first scientific description of the clitoris, explores pleasure with prostitutes, dissects corpses and is tried by the Inquisition. His name, Mateo Colon, which in English becomes "Columbus", enables Andahazi to draw parallels between the doctor's exploration and that of America by Christopher Columbus.
Has it a historical basis? "There was a real Mateo Colon," says Andahazi, waving one of the 20 cigarettes he smokes daily - he has bought a bicycle, apparently, which for some reason he thinks will help him buck the habit. "Born in Cremona, he taught in Padua - which gave him ready access to Venice, where much of the novel takes place. He discovered the blood circulatory system before William Harvey, as well as the clitoris."
Surely the clitoris had been discovered previously, rather as Australia had been discovered long before Captain Cook . . . people were just discreet about such things. "I suspect he was censored rather than discreet because, despite his importance, he does not receive much attention in medical history - I came across a brief reference to him in a United States history of the human body."
Who would be today's Mateo Colon? "One of those geneticists who believe our genes explain everything. As I was not writing an academic history but a novel, I arranged it all as if it was happening on a stage. I suspect that he ran into trouble with the Inquisition - as did Galileo, who also taught in Padua. It's only a hypothesis but certainly pleasure, and the female capacity for sexual enjoyment, is a threat to power. The female body has always been a battlefield. Discovery of its mysteries is a step towards control of it - as was the case with Christopher Columbus's discovery of America. In the novel, I had in mind John Donne's use of the exploration of a woman's body as a metaphor for the exploration of America."
In the period in which your novel is set, didn't America mean not only the pleasures of discovery but also the perils, because syphilis was taking a toll in Europe? "Yes; the female protagonist of The Anatomist dies of it. Power uses sexually transmitted diseases to impose its moralism. The morality recommended to avoid AIDS is close to that imposed by the Catholic Church."
Amelita Farabita found Andahazi heretical, but here he is talking orthodox Freudianism. Of Hungarian descent, he is the only son of his mother, with whom he shares the city-centre flat. His father, who has other children, is also a Freudian psychoanalyst.
Federico, born in 1963, was an adolescent in the 1970s when having a psychoanalyst was a status symbol. There were so many psychoanalysts and patients in Buenos Aires's better suburbs that a sector is still called "Villa Freud". (The complete works of Sigmund Freud sit on his desk and bookshelves, cheek by jowl with Spanish classics and a collected Edgar Allen Poe). At 14 he began writing poetry, then moved on to short stories. In 1985 he placed one with the literary review Crisis, the week it folded. Nevertheless its editor Oswaldo Soriano, a fine writer, invited Andahazi to a coffee bar and they talked for four hours.
"I can thank Soriano for what I've achieved," said Aldahazi, "but his conversation stopped me writing for four years. Although he aimed to encourage me, he was so severe, his standards so high, that I was ashamed of what I'd done. But, eight years ago, benefiting from his interest, I started again.
"Argentinian writers tend to be split between those who follow Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1987), internationalist and preoccupied with style, and those who follow Roberto Arlt (1900-1942), a powerful talent who was socially involved but not much concerned with style. Borges was blind not only physically but politically - he didn't know what was going on under the military dictatorship, he never moved beyond his library. I think the opposition between Borges and Arlt is false, that one can use both approaches and try to combine them."
He mentioned two writers who were doing this, Matilda Sanchez and Juan Jose Saer, who lives in Paris, adding that military repression had destroyed the sense of a generation with shared creative interests.
Andahazi has written three other novels and a book of stories which will appear in Spanish in December. Two of the novels are set in contemporary Buenos Aires, a city which he finds less enjoyable than before the dictatorship but that he does not want to leave. One is a detective story which he may publish but he does not want to release the other, the first.
In September Las Piadosas (The Merciful Woman), which begins in the Geneva of Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, will be appearing in Spanish and later in other languages. If it enables Andahazi to avoid being categorised as a clit-lit purveyor and is a success, he could become a banner-bearer for the younger Latin American writers. Its villain is Byron's Italian secretary, John Polidori who, in fact, wrote the first ever history of Dracula and vampires.
Andahazi describes him as "envious and resentful - literature had produced several monsters, but this was a monster who produced literature. He did so in exchange for something. "You have to read the novel to find what the something is."
Federico Andahazi's The Anatomist is pub- lished by Doubleday at £12.99 in UK.
