She is a writer, translator and the co-founder of Granta en Español. Read more about her book reviews in The New York Times article, December 9, 2016.
THE REVOLUTIONARIES TRY AGAIN By Mauro Javier Cardenas
This debut novel, 12 years in the writing, is a welcome example of how fiction can have urgency, how it’s still one of the greatest forms for tackling the incommensurable. “What is literature,” the narrator asks, quoting Czeslaw Milosz, “which does not save nations or people?” and answers: “Songs of drunkards.” Filled with gutsy, syntactic panache, Cardenas’s story charts the lives of a group of boys who graduate from a Jesuit high school in Guayaquil, Ecuador — Antonio, Leopoldo and the lusty Facundo Cedeño. After studying in the United States, Antonio leaves the sundress-speckled parks of San Francisco to return to the political morass that is Ecuador after a phone call from Leopoldo; they finally have a shot at running for political office.
COLONEL LÁGRIMAS By Carlos Fonseca
Beware, reader, in these pages you will experience vertigo, anxiety and joy. You will become a ghostly presence in a Borgesian world, a camera obscura, where mathematics is a secret weapon, and memory the object of an archaeological pursuit. Loosely inspired by the eventful life of the French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, Fonseca has created a gorgeous opera prima. Its narrator is obsessed with the colonel, an elderly man who one white winter afternoon in the Pyrenees chooses to sit down to write the story of his life. The narrator as stalker and spy addresses the reader in the first person plural, implicating us as part of the collective of snoops. The colonel is a little lazy and suspiciously aristocratic, he squanders time over insignificant things, likes sweets a little too much and takes naps a little too often. He conjures alchemical divas in his dreams, and is busy writing a collective autobiography of iconoclasts, “a megalomaniacal catalog of other people’s lives.”
BLOOD OF THE DAWN By Claudia Salazar Jiménez
A bold, breviloquent debut novel whose polyhedral story line plunges sans parachute into the bloody chamber of political violence unleashed during the massacre-ridden years in Peru. Opening with Marx: “Great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment,” the narrative hits the ground running in pithy, breathless paragraphs. They hover, incorporeal words and phrases, poised and charged like roiling storm clouds that counterpoint the grounding metaphor of how women’s bodies inevitably become the battle grounds of patriarchal violence. Salazar takes us into the murky domain of Peru’s untold stories, the voices of women and their ability to cope when faced with hardship. Thee novel’s central concern is to bear witness, using imagination as a treadle for coaxing out the deeper truths. Three women’s stories intertwine: Melanie, a white journalist living between Lima and Paris, who decides to step out of her bubble of privilege to photograph and record what’s happening in the mountains; Modesta, an illiterate peasant whose story of terror is nigh unbearable yet she remains unbreakable; and Marcela, an ideologue of the People’s War, the shining beacon of world revolution. “Violence is the midwife of history,” she drones.
DIVORCE IS IN THE AIR By Gonzalo Torné
On a sentence level, the gifted Spanish writer Torné is one of the most accomplished stylists of his generation. In this, his third novel, he resuscitates a character from the second, bestowing first-person status. The character’s name is Joan-Marc Miró-Puig, he of the cranky, parochial prejudices du jour, a bigoted, male chauvinist, homophobic rat. A classic. The novel takes the form of a digressive monologue cum missive — without a single chapter break — in which Joan-Marc narrates his wildly passionate years with his Montana-born, blond bombshell of a first wife. Yet the intended recipient of the narrative is his beloved second wife, who has, unsurprisingly, left him. For some bizarre reason, Joan-Marc thinks this a nifty strategy for winning back her affection. The novel is fun and engaging, with an early sidesplitting section of wisecracks on the rivalry between the cities of Madrid and Barcelona.
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