Coming Soon...

Chilean Poet
by Alejandro Zambra

Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

Coming Soon...

Mouthful of Birds
by Samanta Schweblin

Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

Coming Soon...

The Passion According to Carmela
by Marcos Aguinis

Translated from the Spanish by Carolina De Robertis 

Coming Soon...

Bruna and Her Sisters in the Sleeping City
by Alicia Yánez Cossío

Translated from the Spanish by Kenneth J. A. Wishnia

Coming Soon...

Fog
A Novel
by Miguel de Unamuno

Translated from the Spanish by Elena Barcia

Coming Soon...

ODETTA IN BABYLON AND THE CANADA EXPRESS
by Gregorio Kohon

Translated from the Spanish by Gregorio Kohon with Toni Griffiths

Coming Soon...

Abyss
by Pilar Quintana

Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman

Coming Soon...

This World Does Not Belong to Us
by Natalia García Freire

Translated from the Spanish by Victor Meadowcroft

Coming Soon...

Chilean Poet
by Alejandro Zambra

Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

Coming Soon...

Chaos, A Fable
by Rodrigo Rey Rosa 

Translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Gray 

Story Overlooking a Sea

The story begins when Damaris picks up a pup from a litter whose mother is found dead by the beach. She decides to raise it and takes it to her shack, located on a bluff overlooking a sea and which has a jungle nearby. Her fisherman husband and Damaris had moved to the place on account of taking care of the estate which belonged to a couple who lived faraway. It turns out that Damaris had lived there during her childhood and has a tragic memory associated with the place, all the same she still loves the place. 

Damaris, who couldn’t have any children despite trying many methods of healing along with her husband, doesn’t like the way her husband treats the dogs they already have at their home. So, in the early days of her adoption of a girl dog, she pampers¹ it like a mother does to her child, is possessive about it and wants to raise it without causing it any suffering. In fact, she names her with what she thought for her unborn child. The trouble starts when one day the pup following other dogs run away to the jungle and doesn’t return for more than a month only to suddenly appear. She tries to restrain it from escaping but nothing helps and it keeps escaping from the home for hours or days until the day when the dog comes home pregnant. Already irked by the dog by now, who she thinks disregards her attention and care after all the trouble she took for it, she wants to get rid of it. However, things escalate to a dreadful episode when one day dog appears again and destroys something that is sacred to her memory.

1.       During the daytime, Damaris carried the little dog around inside her brassiere, between her big soft breasts, to keep her nice and warm. At night she put her in the cardboard box Don Jaime had given her, with a hot-water bottle and the T-shirt she’d worn that day, so the dog wouldn’t miss her smell.

Set in the Colombia’s Pacific coast, The Bitch is a novel that holds the controlled and natural perfection in the narration until the very end. The atmosphere and setting with coves, tides, sea, rain and storm and the dense jungle is pitch-perfect that captures the mood and tension of the story. The story is about motherhood and love but also about guilt and shame. The characters are so raw and genuine, without any embellishment, though the story revolves around Damaris and her dog, they add to the internal trouble and change in Damaris’s emotional realm, and everything that characterizes her motherly nature, her bitter-sweet memories and the guilt of not having any children.

The story built around a canine character is so intense, we identify with the psychological tension building up in Damaris. And, every sentence hits the bull’s-eye; not an extra word is written. The forte of description is equally brilliant like the plots that make The Bitch a powerful story that takes not so many pages. Here, the coastal life comes alive and also the symbols of decay that overshadow the harshness. This work makes us realize how strong and feeble at the same time are human thoughts, emotions, relations, expectations and persona.

Author: Pilar Quintana

Translator: Lisa Dillman

Publisher: WorldEditions

Author's Photo Credit: https://www.worldeditions.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/AP_Quintana_c_DaniloCosta.jpg

Review Copy Courtesy: World Editions

Coming Soon...

Dressed for a Dance in the Snow: Women's Voices from the Gulag
by Monika Zgustova
Translated from the Spanish by Julie Jones

Coming Soon...

Among the Lost
by Emiliano Monge
Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne

Weather Among Men

Tomás González's novel The Storm set off at early 4:00 am when the twin sons Mario and Javier and their father ('the old bastard', as called by his sons) start making preparation for their journey far off into the sea for catching fish for their tourists. From the very beginning we feel the resentment the sons, especially Mario holds for his father. They have a 'nut case' mother Nora, probably a schizophrenic, who talks to her imaginary followers, and mostly stays all day indoors, driven to conclusions, sensing a scheme of her murder or else making incoherent comments about her sons or her husband, whom she has grown to resent.

Novel progresses, treating each passing hour like a chapter, and unfurls the psychological relation between the father and sons, meanwhile making them lively with intense descriptions largely about their inner world. While at the sea, we could feel how each of them consider themselves superior to the other, and the narrative voices—which  are experimental, shifting, inclusive—perfectly tailored to characterize them doesn't let the tension wane. We sense the storm gathering strength and momentum at the far sky and the tension dramatized in the boat, or developing in their fishing line will at some time all conflate to extreme limits and story engrosses us completely what happens in this account.

Where a captain rules, a sailor has no sway, she thought. Hopefully the

 twin would stab the sailor’s captain. And hopefully not. He could

 also drown him – they say it’s a sweet death. A sweet death

 in saltwater, what do you say to that.

The author has spared no character to go away without saying something, and which serves as portrayals done by others of the father, the twins and their delusional mother. Kids speak, adult tourists speak, neighbors speak, even Nora's 'throng' speak, and we gather all these elements to create the atmosphere surrounding the life of the family. The father considers his sons losers, and himself a king. And, Mario wants him dead for good, or to get rid of his taunting remarks forever any way. The translation is almost poetic, and mostly thoughts of the characters have spoken for themselves. What we find is a finely braided storytelling, where not a sentence can be overlooked—nothing overly done, hanging resentment keeping things apart and together at a time.

Despite Nora’s madness and his complicated relationship with his sons, the

 father thinks, when looked at the right way, and especially given the prosperity the

 hotel has brought them, things have turned out pretty well.

Everybody’s got problems.

He knows that no individual, not even him, understands everything

 about the world, and so he recognizes that human beings

will be forever doomed to humility

Despite the growing loathing and want to inflict pain, something holds the family together, and whatever we see happening, there is a glow that everything will in fact come back to normal, or it has always been like this, even before the story started. Their personal moods and vanity, their delusion and bare truths, their reclusive sense of life has given each of the characters their height in the story.

So that we're not confused with the voices, characters introduce themselves, and the accounts are funny, sad in the part of Nora, and all shed light to the Bungalow holder family, and also the coastal life. We're reminded of The Old Man and the Sea, and Moby Dick, but here the force that drives the story is human flaws and complex. And like a magician, González has turned an ordinary family chemistry to something extraordinary. We are driven to understand the sons and the father, weigh their values, realize their personal truth and observation, judge their little actions, and hear their thoughts. The Storm approaching them soon adds up and down emotional graph to their fishing expedition, and to their lives, and we are astonished how everything concludes.

Author: Tomás González

Translator: Andrea Rosenberg

Publisher: Archipelago

Page Count: 120

Price: $11 (Paperback)