Austral

Product Information

The words, coming from the kitchen, crossed the living room on that December morning to reach Julio, who had sat in one of the armchairs farthest from the door to try and escape the freezing breeze that periodically slipped in. Recognizing the expression, he stopped rolling the cigarette he had in his hands and looked up. He saw no one. Olivia had excused herself to make more coffee, and the only thing that moved in the room was the Italian greyhound that had jumped up into the chair she’d just vacated. He had the impression that they were acting out a previously rehearsed scene. Just last night, in fact, they’d been right here, sitting in these old leather chairs with three small lamps lighting the scene, telling the story that today she was recounting with variations. It was as if she were afraid he’d already forgotten it, or maybe she thought repeating it was a way of understanding it. Two strangers who were seeing each other’s faces for the first time, united by the trust placed in them by the fragile ghost of the mutual friend under whose roof they were speaking. Just like this, they’d settled in with a couple of beers from seven in the evening until well past ten, though now the morning exposed what yesterday had been only shadow. There are some great nuggets of wisdom and food for thought in here. I found the last section, Theatre of Memory, particularly affecting and the strongest of the many interrelated stories.

Bill Swainson, consultant editor, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, to Retrospective by Vásquez from María Lynch at Casanovas & Lynch. He acquired the same rights to Fonseca’s Austral, originally published by Anagrama in 2022, from Sandra Pareja at Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents. Colonel Lágrimas - The White Review». The White Review (en inglés) . Consultado el 30 de agosto de 2017. Rising star Fonseca’s new novel [is] a literary tour de force, impressively translated by Megan McDowell. Fonseca’s challenging and transcendent novel offers a prescient message about media fabrications and the unreliability of history.”Jessica Sequeira is a writer and literary translator of Latin American literature. Recently she completed a PhD at the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge. She lives in Santiago, Chile. Her novella Jazz of the Affections is forthcoming from Subliminary Editions.

A beautifully knotted novel which unfolds with every traced layer of its deeply affecting narrative" GUY GUNARATNE A few lines down, we read: “Now he [Gamboa] is there, in the desert, but he keeps on staring at the same postcard … he turns the card over. The name on the piece and its photographer — Elevage de poussiére, Man Ray, 1920 — are crossed out with a fine red line. In their place she has written: Humahuaca, Argentina. A simple gesture that transforms the work.” Transformation, both personal and artistic, is an important theme in Fonseca’s novel. The five essays emphasize the point that escape and separation from humanity are fraudulent concepts, no matter how far away you think you’ve gotten from it all. People — especially women — are forever enmeshed in a host of complications related to environment, capitalism, and power.” Carlos Fonseca consolidates with Austral a profoundly literary project: a search for the traces left by that journey without return towards those we once were. He hands us, in turn, a beautiful account, free and joyful, of his unexpected findings.” I have tried in this review to convey the sense of a reading experience. I’m also thinking about the Metropolitan Museum of Art in my hometown, which is currently renovating its galleries for “the art of indigenous peoples”. The new galleries will be white, gleaming and flooded with light. The better to enhance the viewing experience of the lost civilizations of the Aztecs, the Mayans, and the Incas, the conquered peoples of the South Sea Islands and Africa. Cultures that had been, and are presently, fighting off the enforced silences that sometimes have been imposed on them by countries that speak European languages. Those histories are also relevant to the stories and concerns of Austral.In the process of this game of coding and decoding, Fonseca deploys a torrent of vital and poetic ideas within a singular yet fascinating literary artifact . . . [ Colonel Lágrimas makes me think of] Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, W.G. Sebald, Borges, Juan Rulfo.”

A novel with many ideas that lead in several directions, but I’m not sure they coalesced for me in any satisfactory way. Natural History, ably translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, appropriates from the great metaphysicians of postmodern fiction. Its plotting and Delphic aura suggest the paranoiac glitter of Don DeLillo, the cosmopolitan dread of Roberto Bolaño and the imaginative elasticity of Ricardo Piglia.” Una deslumbrante novela sobre las huellas que dejamos, las huellas que borramos y las huellas que buscamos reconstruir. My years of allowing my drinking to increase, of guzzling margaritas, had changed something fundamental. Like my grandfather, I wasn’t capable of cutting down anymore. I either drank or I didn’t.” In Austral, Fonseca has created a profoundly literary project: to search for the traces of that journey of no return to who we used to be, and to leave a free and joyful record of his unexpected findings discoveries.”In this pretty puzzle, Fonseca tests the limits of fiction . . . Fonseca’s narration mimics the meandering matrix of memory or an esoteric police procedural by Jorge Luis Borges . . . For lovers of literary and Latin American postmodern fiction.” His academic monograph The Literature of Catastrophe: Nature, Disaster and Revolution in Latin America, published from Bloomsbury, tells the ecohistory of how discourses on nature and discourses on history intertwined during the violent aftermath of the Latin American Wars of Independence. Synthesizing intellectual history and readings of textual production, and focusing on how natural catastrophes became tropes for thinking through historical eventuality during the 19th and 20th century in Latin America. Additionally, the start of many of our main character’s philosophical musings on the themes or revelatory insights into his dead friend seemed to me forced and far fetched. I didn’t necessarily buy into the way these connections were being made. Julio is from a hard-scrabble family in Costa Rica. His older brother, the family’s first hope, ends up a street tough and criminal. Julio, made of less stern stuff, is however, bookish. It turns out being bibliophilic is his secret power. Fast forward to an adult Julio, professor of literature at a snowy midwestern campus.