Lost Books – Leaving Tabasco

Set in Agustini, a rural village in Mexico, Leaving Tabasco is a coming-of-age story which ends in violence and exile. We are aware of the exile from the opening chapter, set in 1997 (the novel was published in 1999) in Germany as our narrator, Delmira, looks back to her childhood beginning in 1961 when she is eight years old. She lives with her unaffectionate mother and fearsome grandmother who, despite the heat, wears a shawl as “the visible sign of her widow’s dignity.” “At home only my hair got brushed,” Delmira tells us:

“Otherwise I was like a child who had wandered into the house by mistake…”

Delmira’s father remains a mystery – she only hears mention of him at the market when a vendor gives her a scarf and tells her it comes from her father, before slipping a piece of paper into her hand:

“When you plan on leaving those two witches, call this number, Delmira. We’ll get you out of Agustini.”

Her mother, meanwhile, does not live a life of abstinence – Delmira reports her fear that someone else is in her mother’s room to her grandmother who reacts by beating her daughter with a pole. However, when the ‘intruder’ cannot be found it is Delmira who is in disgrace, an early realisation that she “stood outside the circle of their love.” Later, her mother accompanies the local priest on his weekly journey to deliver mass to the surrounding villages, taking Delmira as cover for their affair. While Delmira sleeps in the car they make love in a hammock, as she realises one day when she first hears and then observes them:

“He was behind her, clutching at her bum, battering his body against hers, with an expression of pain on his face…”

Looking back, Delmira admits, “I too would have loved the priest” but at the time the scene seems unreal to her. Later, when she is twelve, and the town is flooding, she is dragged into the bakery and molested. The local teacher rescues her and admonishes the man “she’s just a kid” to which he replies, “I thought it was her mother,” suggesting her mother’s lasciviousness is well known. Men are a threat, but also represent potential escape, as we have already seen with Delmira’s father. It is teacher who encourages Delmira to go to high school, enlisting the help of her uncle Gustavo, whom Delmira also looks to for help:

“I’ve a dream that my uncle Gustavo would take me away with him to the city as soon as I finish my primary schooling and I’d get my high school education there.”

Although the novel is Delmira’s story, it is also the story of Agustini, and of Mexcio. Boullasa injects elements of what might fairly be termed magical realism into the narrative in order to convey the dangers of the setting. The town suffers a series of ‘plagues’, for example when all the birds tumble from the sky. This is followed by dense smoke from a supposedly dormant volcano, unripe coffee beans falling from the plants and a storm in which a cow is struck by lightning. Among these strange events, which happen on consecutive Sundays, is the arrival of the army, the first suggestion that unexpected, violent acts are not necessarily acts of God. Even a trip to the beach ends with the car crushing migrating crabs:

“This is the time crabs get massacred, daughter, on their way back down to the sea.”

This undertone of violence comes to the fore in the novel’s final chapters when a man is shot by soldiers:

“The car he’d been driving had been forced off the road. Then they put two bullets into him, so that nobody would mistake the death for an accident.”

Delmira becomes involved in protests and so puts her own life in danger. As she is led away by soldiers, the novel comes full circle as we are reminded of her grandmother’s story explaining why the family moved to town “after the rebels came to the farm for the third time and cleared out all our provisions, and raped the woman servants, and killed one or two of the men servants…”

Leaving Tabasco channels the need of many young people to leave the town they were born in for a better future but ultimately Delmira’s escape is a matter of survival. A coming-of-age novel flavoured with magic realism, Boullosa uses genres with which the reader likely feels comfortable to build towards unsettling picture of the precarious nature of life in Mexico.

The Road to the City

The Road to the City was Natalia Ginzburg’s first novel, published under a pseudonym in 1942 in response to the anti-Semitism prevalent in Italy at the time. Its central character, Delia, is a girl of seventeen, who (unlike Ginzburg) lives in poverty in the countryside with her parents and her three brothers – her older sister, Azalea is married and has moved to the city, “and my one ambition was to do likewise.” Azalea spends her days “in bed, smoking or reading a novel or having a jealous quarrel with her lover over the telephone.” Delia is similarly lethargic despite her desire to escape, and her laziness is often commented on, particularly by Nini, a distant relative who has lived with them since he was a child having nowhere else to go.  It is Nini who is astonished at Delia’s boredom:

“I like the looks of everything. A while ago I enjoyed walking in the city, and now that we’re walking in the country I enjoy that just as well.”

It is also Nini who moves to the city first, moving in with a young widow called Antonietta and working in a factory. Delia, meanwhile, has caught the eye of the local doctor’s son, Giulio:

“The neighbour’s told my mother that Giulio, the doctor’s son, was in love with me and that his parents were very upset about it.”

Delia’s mother is delighted, but Giulio’s mother shuts the window “as if she had seen a snake” when she spots Delia walking with her son. Delia’s focus is on marrying Giulio which she sees as an escape route from her poverty, but the reader senses that her feelings for Nini are more affectionate than she realises:

“Somehow I missed having Nini around the house, with his torn raincoat and his books and the lock of hair hanging over his forehead, telling me the way he always did that I ought to help my mother.”

It seems clear to everyone, bar Delia, that Giulio has no intention of marrying her but the situation changes when she falls pregnant and her parents kick up a fuss, threatening to go to the courts and refusing offers of ‘compensation’. Eventually they agree to the marriage to avoid a scandal, and Delia is sent to live with her aunt until the baby is born.

Delia is not an especially likeable character. While her desire for escape is understandable, her reluctance to make any effort is less so. When Nini finds her a job as an old lady’s companion, she complains “that the old lady bored me to death.” She can be superficial (perhaps learned from her sister who refuses to talk to her in the city if she isn’t wearing a hat), meeting Nini at the factory but “ashamed to be seen with him” because of what he is wearing. Even her pregnancy is more of an innocent accident than a plan to snare a husband. In fact, innocence is one of her more endearing qualities – as Giulio says to her when warning her she shouldn’t visit Nini alone:

“There are things you are too much of a child to understand.”

For the reader, there are numerous moments of irony as Nini reveals his affection for Delia but she does not realise the depth of his love. Often these are brief comments that pass by Delia unnoticed, as when her brother tells her:

“He waited three hours for you at the factory. He’s been waiting there for days, so he told me.”

There is also an irony in Delai’s inability to recognise her own feelings, as when she tells Nini, “And I like being with you too. Better than with anyone else.” It is as if her hope of escape from poverty blinds her to the possibility of happiness. Her proposed marriage becomes a negotiation, not only between the parents, but between Delia and Giulio as she places certain material demands on him.

As an aside, at the same time I was reading The Road to the City, I read Marguerite Duras’ early novel The Sea Wall (Duras and Ginzburg are near contemporaries). In it a young girl, Suzanne, seeks to escape poverty in the countryside via a wealthy man. Neither Suzanne nor Delia is particularly cruel, but both are powerless – their treatment of others predicated on what little capital they have through their youthful prettiness. In both novels the writers present their female characters unapologetically but with some sympathy and understanding, and though The Road to the City may feel like Nini’s tragedy, it is also Delia’s.

Cousins

Cousins, translated by Kit Maude, is the English language debut of Argentinian writer Aurora Venturini. It won her a ‘New Novel’ award in 2007 at the age of eighty-five, sixty-five years after the publication of her first book. She spent twenty-five of those years in Paris, a friend of Violette Leduc and well known among writers such as Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus. In her introduction, Mariana Enriquez sums her up as follows:

“Aurora Venturini loved black humour, cruelty and monstrosity: she considered herself to be an anomaly and believed in a twisted but playful approach to literature.”

Black humour, cruelty and monstrosity are certainly evident in Cousins. The novel is narrated by Yuna, disabled in an unspecified way, though not as seriously as her younger sister, Betina:

“She was a mistake of nature. Poor me, another mistake, and poor mother who was burdened with both abandonment and freaks.”

Betina and Yuna go to schools for the handicapped, but “Betina’s school dealt with serious cases” – while there Yuna sees “a cannelloni sitting on top of a silk cushion”:

“It wasn’t a cannelloni but something that had come out of a human womb, otherwise the priest wouldn’t have baptised it.”

Yuna brings innocence into this grotesque world (she is twelve when the novel opens), but it is not accompanied by kindness. Feeding her sister, she misses her mouth on purpose and shoves the spoon “into her eye, her ear, up her nose before it got to her gaping maw.” She looks on the world with a disgust (“anything goes in this filthy world of ours”) shared by the society in which she lives. When she tells her teacher that Betina has ‘developed’ despite being a year younger, she is told off: “we weren’t to discuss immoral things in the classroom.” Her innocence is demonstrated in her relationship with the professor who encourages her in her art. Excited by his praise, she often jumps on him:

“But when my little breasts grew he told me not to jump on him because men were fire and women straw. I didn’t understand. I stopped jumping.”

Should we suspect the professor’s kindness is motivated by his attraction to Yuna? She remains convinced in her ability as an artist, a talent that frees her from the fate of the other women characters – even her misshapen sister is not safe from the attentions of men. Her cousin, Carina, falls pregnant at fifteen and is pressured into a back street abortion. (Yuna, whom she asks to stay with her, remains unsympathetic: “I confess that her stupidity and six toes disgusted me.”) Petra, described by Yuna as ‘Lilliputian’, takes revenge on the neighbouring farmer who impregnated her sister. She later becomes a prostitute and, as both she and Yuna have a regular income (Yuna from her paintings) they buy an apartment together.

The style of the narrative develops as Yuna grows older. As a child she speaks “without periods or commas”, explaining “my sight is as profound as my speech is superficial” and “I could never be lucid because my speech turned imbecilic the moment it left my mouth.” As the novel progresses, she develops her vocabulary using a dictionary and will frequently highlight that a particular word has been taken from there:

“I think the dictionary is good for me, I think that I will overcome difficulties that I previously found impossible…”

By the novel’s conclusion the narrative is unquestionably more fluent and sophisticated. Yet in many ways Yuna’s character remains unchanged. Having escaped her family home, she has little time (or need) for others, and when she has a visitor in the final chapter, she reflects:

“I felt that if he disturbed my newfound peace I’d smash a chair over his blue-black dyed hair.”

The novel is a portrait of an artist, but an artist who can only see ugliness in life and must isolate herself to be free. The novel itself is filled with that ugliness (even as Yuna takes hold of Carina’s hand she describes it as “ugly”) and cruelties both accidental and intentional. Its voice is vivid and compelling, and marks out Venturini as a writer who is unafraid to discomfort, and well worth her belated appearance in English.

Kidnapped

When asked what compelled her to write during the years when her writing was not getting published, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya replied, “I wrote in the name of those who suffered. I was a witness for the prosecution.” This conception of fiction as a holding to account seems particularly appropriate given the subtitle of her latest novel (translated by Marion Schwartz), Kidnapped – ‘a story in crimes’. Set during the 1980s and 90s, it is a novel of duplicity and double-cross, bribery and corruption, dishonesty and deception. It begins with two children – Sergei Sertsov – who share the same identity (and identical passports) as their father’s chauffeur discovers when he arrives to pick the boys up at the airport. (Their father, also Sergei, hasn’t seen his son for a number of years). By and large, the novel is the story of how this happened.

Petrushevskaya, however, also has a number of other stories to tell, beginning with that of the chauffeur himself, Kolya. Two themes quickly emerge: relationships between the sexes, as much about who can be used as love, and (as is usual in Petrushevskaya’s fiction) the scarcity of living spaces. Koyla is currently living in the fictional European country of Montegasco, with his wife, Galina, and daughter, Angelka, as chauffeur for a Russian oligarch in exile. Their marriage is based on Galina’s claim that Kolya made her pregnant with Angelka at sixteen, though, as she later admits:

“I lied, I told you I was sixteen, and when you fell asleep I wrote down your passport info. And took your phone number, so when I found out I was pregnant I decided to fight for you.”

More mysteriously, Angelka is dark haired though both parents are fair. Galina has the survival instinct women need in Petrushevskaya’s world, a struggle that began when she was sexually abused by her drunken father:

“Galina was a plump little girl and pretty. It took him hours to come, the pig.”

Galina also suffers at the hands of Kolya’s boss – but only once. In Montegasco “the police come right away. Not like at home, there’s no point waiting there, they only come for murder.” She tells the police she was attacked but not by whom, until Sertsov agrees to give Kolya an apartment. Kolya accepted the job in Montegasco after he and his wife were thrown out of his mother’s apartment in Moscow, just as when Sergei’s wife first meets him, her grandmother asks her:

“So where are you going to live? Not with me… And remember your parents aren’t going to let you into their apartment.”

Yet, marry they do – Masha loves him, and he needs a residency permit. Meanwhile Alina, the mother of the other ‘Sergei’, is also marrying (having fallen pregnant) only to be left standing at the airport when the groom’s parents arrive and fly him away. Masha and Alina find themselves together at the maternity hospital but with very different views on becoming a mother:

“The more invigorated Masha felt and called on her neighbour to prepare joyously for the birth… the worse Alina’s attitude towards the whole thing got.”

In fact, Alina plans to give her baby up for adoption. As this goes ahead, however, Masha dies in childbirth, and Sergei finds himself unable to take up a lucrative position in Handia (another fictional country) without a wife. “Don’t tell anyone your wife died,” a friend advises him:

“She, that woman, if she gave birth and gave up her baby… couldn’t she nurse your son?”

And so Alina goes with Sergei to Handia as his ‘wife’, with little love lost between them. (This is not the only complication as the adopting mother pays to have the babies swapped, and Masha’s mother, Tamara, plots to take her grandson from Sergei). While the story of the babies may be straight out of classical drama, the tone is one of dark farce. As with Galina, Alina has to fight hard to retain any kind of independence as Petrushevskaya demonstrates the determination and cunning needed to survive as a woman. She suffers frequent abuse and mistreatment at the hands of Sergei:

“You’re trash pit, a garbage pail. For getting dumped on!… You’re a milk cow, nothing more.”

Yet, as the arrival of the two ‘Sergei’s demonstrates, she is able to outwit him. The novel also satirises (if satire is possible) the corruption that swept the former USSR during Glasnost, the use of children and marriage as a kind of currency only one example of the rampant commodification. Though often bleak, there is a kind of manic energy to the narrative, and, by the end, we might feel that, to some extent, justice has been done.

Women in Translation in Penguin Classics

Women in Translation Month, which takes place each August, is an annual celebration of women writers from around the world, writing in languages other than English, started by Meytal Radzinski in 2014. It will not surprise you to learn that independent presses have been at the forefront of bringing these women to an English-reading public, but this year I turn my attention to one of the UK’s most prestigious imprints, Penguin Modern Classics. As the name suggests, there is an element of ‘the canon’ when to comes to the Penguin Classics line (though it is worth reminding ourselves that its purpose was to make classics both affordable and accessible) and ‘the canon’ has been for many years predominantly male. More recently, however, PMC has diversified – in its geographical reach (with more titles from Asia, Africa and, perhaps surprisingly, Latin America, which was quite poorly represented), in including genre fiction (see, for example, Len Deighton) and in publishing more women writers in translation. Here are half a dozen well worth exploring.

The Faces by Tove Ditlevsen

Tove Ditlevesen joined her countrywoman, Karen Blixen, on the PMC list in 2019 when Penguin published Childhood and Youth in a previous translation by Tiina Nunnally alongside a new translation of the third volume of her Copenhagen trilogy, Dependency, by Michael Favala. This was followed by her novel The Faces in 2021, translated by Nunnally. The novel is a classic of mental breakdown, written in the third person but from the point of view of a writer, Lise, who has come to distrust everyone around her. Rather than demonstrate her deteriorating condition through textual breakdown, Lise’s distress always feel logical from within, and the reader is never entirely certain how seriously to take her doubts about her husband, her assistant and even her doctor. Dysfunctional relationships and unhappiness also populate the stories in The Trouble with Happiness. For readers who want an unsentimental view of life’s struggles, Ditlevsen is highly recommended.

Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart by Irmgard Keun

Irmgard Keun first came to PMC in 2009 with Michael Hofmann’s translation of Child of All Nations, the novel which chronicles her nomadic lifestyle in exile with Joseph Roth but from a child’s point of view. Her most famous novels are those she wrote in the 1930s- Gilgi, The Artificial Silk Girl and After Midnight – detailing the lives of young women as the Nazis came to power. Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart, however, comes from 1950 and was translated by Hofmann in 2021. It portrays post-war Germany from the point of view of a man who seems ill-equipped for such harsh times. Surrounded by characters who are happy to use and exploit others, Ferdinand cannot even end his relationship with his fiancée without finding her an alternative husband. Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart displays all the social observation of the earlier novels but with a kinder, gentler centre.

Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

Over the last few years PMC have published nine of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s novels, her Collected Stories, and her complete ‘chronicles’ (Too Much of Life), leaving new readers spoilt for choice. Near to the Wild Heart is her first novel, originally published in 1943 and translated by Alison Entrekin. The novel alternates scenes from the central character, Joana’s, childhood and her present life as a young woman in a stream-of-consciousness style that gained comparisons with Joyce despite the fact Lispector had not read him at the time (though this did not stop her borrowing the title from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). There is little in the way of story; instead, we are immersed in Joana’s interior life, her confusion and dissatisfaction. The novel marks the appearance of an innovative and original writer, perhaps the most important woman writer of Latin America.

There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Russian writer Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has three collections of her stories published by PMC, all with equally grotesque titles. There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In (translated by Anna Summers) has the advantage of containing probably her most famous work, the novella ‘The Time is Night’ (also available separately in a different translation).  A monologue of misfortune, narrated by poet and grandmother Anna, it is fuelled by anger, desperation and dark humour. Her attitude towards men (as is generally the case with Petrushevskaya) is damning.  The novella is accompanied by two stories of failed relationships and, overall, this is not a cheery read, but it is full of fiery life and energy. Petrushevskaya’s memoir, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, is also published by Penguin.

Death in Spring by Merce Rodoreda

Including Merce Rodoreda’s posthumous novel Death in Spring (translated by Martha Tennent) means bending the rules a little as, rather than appearing as Penguin Classic, it was published instead in the short-lived Penguin European Writers series. It is by far the strangest of Rodoreda’s novels, set in an anonymous village, its apparently idyllic appearance a screen for a series of violent rituals. The novel is set in the borderland between a very physical realism and nightmarish fable and even the tender relationship that develops between the narrator and his stepmother cannot mitigate the sense that life is cruel and irrational. For those who want something closer to the traditional novel, Rodoreda’s In Diamond Square (also published as The Time of the Doves) is a masterpiece, but braver readers should seek out Death in Spring.

Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima

Yuko Tsushima had already been published in the UK in translations by Geraldine Harcourt by the Women’s Press in the 1980s, but in 2018 PMC published Harcourt’s translation of Tsushima’s second novel, Territory of Light. The novel recounts a year in the life of a young woman and her two-year-old daughter. Separated from her husband, she struggles to cope at times, particularly with the loneliness she feels (‘territory of light’ conveys a certain beauty but also emptiness). At one point she leaves her child and goes to a bar where she gets drunk, but the tone of the novel is forgiving rather than judgemental. From the start we know she will leave the apartment at the end of the year, and the time there feels transitional as she moves from married life to that of a single mother. A quiet, subtle novel, its success led to the rerelease of Child of Fortune and a second new translations (Wildcat Dome) scheduled for 2025.

The Performance

Claudia Petrucci’s debut novel The Performance, translated by Anne Milano Appel, begins with her protagonist (though not narrator), Giorgia, working in a supermarket. We quickly realise that Giorgia, even in such a relatively straight forward job, has her difficulties to navigate when she becomes absorbed in the distress of a young girl who tells her mother she doesn’t want to go to dancing lessons:

“Giorgia is unable to hold back her thoughts, it’s always been like that. She knows that normal people don’t function the same way.”

Even later, as she chats with the other workers in the locker room, “in some deeper part of herself she is the unknown child and she feels sad.” Her story is narrated by her boyfriend, Filippo, who works in a coffee shop – their existence is so ordinary it feels deliberate, and, indeed, it seems that Giorgia is in a sense hiding, but from what lies within her rather than from any external threat. She recites a nursery rhyme to herself to keep it at bay.

We discover that Giorgia was once an actor when she bumps into an old friend, theatre director Mauro, who tells her that three years ago she asked to take a break but now “the break is over.” He can see that she is changed:

“I remember it well your face, it’s not this one. You look like you’re holding your breath.”

Who the ‘real’ Giorgia is, and who gets to decide, is at the heart of the novel.  Mauro tells her that he has a part “only you can do” and soon she is back rehearsing. The world of the theatre is new to Filippo, who met Giorgia after she had left – he knows only that she became “too stressed” and “had a breakdown.” Rehearsals go well and it is only a moment before the first performance that Filippo suspects something may be wrong:

“Suddenly, I perceive a jarring edge. An anomaly that diverges from Giorgia’s words and flares in her eyes.”

If this sounds enough for a novel on its own, it is simply the prelude to Performance. As the novel proper begins, we find Giorgia in a clinic having suffered another breakdown:

“On her best days she stares at the sky the whole time.”

She has been there a number of weeks with only Filippo visiting her, but now Mauro begins to join him and they become friends. To pass the time, Mauro reads to Giorgia from Twelfth Night, and, over time, begins to suspect that she is adopting the habits of Olivia:

“It’s the first major production we staged together… She’s performing her role.”

Filippo also notices “she treats me, too, as if I were part of the script, a walk-on,” and we discover how her performance of Peter Pan ended: “Just long enough for her to go off-stage and attempt to fly out the window.” From this point on the two men decide that the best way to help Giorgia is to write a script where she is ‘herself’ – Filippo will provide the memories and Mauro will dramatize them:

“We’ll proceed in reverse, from the particulars to the whole, and from there work on constructing the character.”

While the premise may be far-fetched, it makes for gripping reading, as well as allowing Petrucci to examine the way in which men attempt to control women. This applies in the world of theatre – where Mauro is well known for sleeping with his students – and can be seen in the way Filippo – initially reluctant – moves from attempting to reconstruct Giorgia’s character to ‘improving’ it. Petrucci cleverly uses Filippo to narrate the story – Giorgia with her fluctuating character clearly could not – as another way of demonstrating his attempt to control his girlfriend. It also leaves the reader uncertain over Mauro’s motives – is he simply helping Filippo recover Giorgia or does he have his own agenda?

The Performance is a compelling psychological thriller which demonstrates the lengths men will go to in order to control women while, at the same time, questioning the very nature of character. Petrucci keeps the reader guessing until the final pages using Giorgia’s condition to raise a number of ethical questions which apply to relationships of all kinds.

This World Does Not Belong to Us

This World Does Not Belong to Us is the debut novel of Ecuadorian writer Natalia Garcia Freire, originally published in 2019 and now translated by Victor Meadowcroft. The story begins like an eerie western with the arrival of two strangers, Eloy and Felisberto, whom the narrator, Lucas’, father greets like old friends:

“You didn’t seem frightened by those tangled beards, long and filthy, the heavy black clothing, nor by the men’s resemblance to a pair of bison with hollows in place of eyes.”

Lucas is immediately unsettled by the men, as are his mother and the four servants, Esther, Noah, Mara and Sarai – “a wave of fear was passing over all of us” – but the father becomes a “submissive, docile and credulous host” slowly withdrawing from his wife and son. The men repel Lucas, their “great dirty boots splattered mud as they went” and Eloy’s foot “covered in scabs, some of which clung to his sock.” They bring violence with them returning with a dead deer on the first morning, and letting the cows loose on Lucas’ mother’s garden, an incident that affects her fragile mental health. Lucas is increasingly ignored:

“I felt like a stranger, wandering through the house but visible to no-one, Father.”

What the strangers want, or what their relationship is with the father is never clear, an ambiguity which only adds to the sense of menace. Nor is the story told in linear fashion: the arrival of the two men may be the catalyst, but the novel begins with Lucas’ return after his father’s death:

“I’ve come home, but have not yet dared go in. They’re still there.”

While revenge would seem to be the most obvious motive for his return, Freire introduces a further twist by having him declare, when he finds himself in front of Felisberto:

“I wanted to humiliate myself, wanted to kiss his hand, gigantic and hairy, to be his servant, the most loyal in the world, the kind who, upon realising that the one they see is despicable, force themselves to love him even more.”

From the very first page, where he describes his father surrounded by “slugs, camel spiders, earthworms, ants, beetles and woodlice,” we understand that Lucas has an unusual relationship with insects (in fact, with the UK edition, this is made clear from the cover). When his mother is taken away to an asylum, Lucas retreats to a cave where “if you kept very still and quiet, you could see how spiders and scorpions filed out of the cracks.” He soon grows to worshipping the insects, “aware that they were more powerful than I was.” One day Esther finds him and tells him:

“God will lay your lifeless body before the lifeless bodies of your idols.”

The insects do, indeed, represent death (the novel’s original title was Our Dead Skin). When Lucas returns, he is even further removed from the human world, from which he feels he has been expelled as Satan was expelled from Heaven; in the same way, he will create his own kingdom:

“I will have an altar crowned with butterflies and larvae; I’ll forever kiss the beetles, pray before all spiders and march with scorpions, for this house belongs to them.”

In saying this he is saying the house belongs to death, but if we think therefore that he has come to kill Eloy and Felisberto we will be mistaken. Despite the sense of inevitability, Freire succeeds in developing an ending that is not what might suspect.

This World Does Not Belong to Us is a terrifying, nightmarish novel – at one point Lucas wonders if his father has simply trapped them in his own nightmare. It is infused with a sense of dread which embodies itself in the physical present pf the men and then in Lucas himself. As its English title suggests, it reveals to the reader how little we matter, and that life is simply death in waiting.

The Bitch

Colombian author Pilar Quintana’s first novel to be translated into English (by Lisa Dillman), The Bitch, opens with a dead dog. Damaris takes one of the orphaned puppies – the only bitch in the litter – from this scene of death, our first indication of the merciless world into which the animal has been born. If we were still uncertain, Damaris worries, as she takes the pup home, how her husband Rogelio will react – “He didn’t like dogs and only kept them so they’d bark and protect the property.” She remembers him slicing off the tail of one of their dogs with a machete when a wound became infected. In contrast, Damaris nurtures the puppy, which she calls Chirli, feeding her bread soaked in milk and carrying her around in her bra.

These small details, as with much in the novel, are more significant than they first appear. Damaris, now is her late thirties, has been married since eighteen but unable to have a child. In that time, she and Rogelio have tried various different Indigenous remedies, but nothing has worked. The failure of the most recent attempt has driven a wedge between them:

“One night, on the pretext he was snoring and keeping her awake, Damaris moved to the other room and never came back.”

‘Chirli’, we discover, was the name Damaris had planned to give to her daughter.

If her childless state continues to be a regret for Damaris, it is not her only one. In a matter-of-fact style Quintana reveals the difficulties of Damaris’ childhood, which begin with her conception, her mother falling pregnant to a soldier who quickly abandons her. She, in turn, abandons the child, as she has to work as a live-in maid to earn money, and Damaris is left with a relative, Tio Eliecer. There she befriends the son of a family who have a holiday home nearby, Nicolasito, but he is killed when he is washed out to sea:

“Damaris tried to stop him, explained that it was dangerous, told him that the rocks were slippery and the sea treacherous.”

Still, she blames herself for his death – and is blamed by Tio Eliecer who lashes her every day until the body is found. We also see here the class distinctions which Quintana subtly illustrates, yet leaves unremarked, throughout the novel. Even Nicolasito’s refusal to head Damaris’ warnings hints at a sense of class superiority. After Nicolasito is washed away, Damaris must make her way through the jungle alone to raise the alarm:

“…a jungle that seemed denser and darker than ever. The treetops above her formed a solid canopy, and the roots below snarled together. Her feet sank into the dead leaves carpeting the ground and got buried in the mud…”

This is the first of a number of terrifying jungle journeys which Quintana will describe, the next being when Chirli goes missing and Damaris goes into the jungle to search for her. If anything, the description is even more disturbing – “Things brushed against her, things that were rough, prickly, hairy…” Living on the edge of jungle insinuates a constant threat into Damaris’ life. Not only that, but years later Damaris now finds herself and Rogelio living as caretakers to the house where Nicolasito lived, and where his room has been preserved:

“Senora Elvira had special-ordered his bed and wardrobe from the best carpenter in town and painted it bright colours herself. The curtains and bedding she’d brought from Bogota: a matching set with Jungle Book motifs. They were a little faded now and had a few holes…”

The Jungle Book reference is ironic as no child can survive in the jungle which is a place of death. One reason Damaris and Rogelio become caretakers is that their predecessor is found shot dead in the jungle (suicide? a hunting accident?), his resting place identified by the vultures gathering above.

Damaris’ relationship with Chirli is at the centre of the novel. Like her relationship with Rogelio, it fluctuates, perhaps even more violently. The dog takes to leaving for days at a time (as does Rogelio who works on a boat) and then returning, filthy and often injured. It has pups of its own, but is not a good mother. The story is told on the surface, but the dog reveals the depths of Damaris’ character. Its complexity is such that the ending is both unexpected and inevitable. In the end it is human nature which The Bitch strips naked and displays.

The Twilight Zone

Like her earlier novel, Space Invaders, Nona Fernandez’s The Twilight Zone (also translated by Natasha Wimmer) borrows its title from popular culture and uses it as a starting point to examine the years of dictatorship her home country, Chile, suffered between 1973 and 1990. Its starting point is not the television series of the early sixties, but an article in a magazine in the mid-eighties in which a member of the armed forces confesses to his part in the torture and murder of opponents of the regime:

“His face was on the cover… and over the picture was a headline in white letters: I TORTURED PEOPLE… The man gave a full account of his time as an intelligence agent, from his service as a young conscript in the air force to the moment he went to the magazine to tell his story.”

The narrator – we assume Fernandez herself (she was born in 1971) – reads the story as a teenager; she even comments on the man’s likeness to her science teacher. It is she who is transported “into some parallel reality:”

“A disturbing universe that we sensed lay hidden somewhere out there, beyond the bounds of school and home, where everything obeyed a logic governed by captivity and rats.”

Two further encounters follow: firstly, when she is writing a television show which features a character based on the man; and secondly when she is working on a script for a documentary in which he is interviewed. We begin to understand what she means when she says that, in a dream, she “inherited the man I am imagining,” presumably the same dream about which she asks him in a letter that is entirely made up of questions:

“Will we ever escape this dream? Will we ever emerge and give the world the bad news about what we were capable of doing?”

What is impressive is how Fernandez turns this admittedly dramatic confession and the chance encounters which follow into a novel. She does this using the tools of the novelist, taking the incidents described in the confession and reimagining them, while continuing to tell her own story. For example, she links the morning routine in the household of the first victims she describes to that in her own:

“On the 29 March 1976, at 7.30 am, the same time my son and his father leave the house each day, Jose and Maria Teresa left to take their children to school.”

This domestic scene is transformed when Jose is captured on the bus under the pretence he is being arrested for robbery. His family cannot say what happens next, but “the man who tortured people”, as he is frequently referred to even though his name is known, can, that he was likely “handcuffed, blindfolded, and then shot and killed…”

“…they then cut off his fingers at the first joint to make identification more difficult, and they tied stones to his feet with wire and threw him in the river.”

One of the most affecting stories Fernandez tells is of the Flores brothers – all three are arrested, and all three are eventually released. Unbeknownst to the rest of the family, one of the brothers, Carol, has agreed to work for the intelligence service as long as his brothers are left alone: “The Flores were freed from danger in return for Carol’s soul.” In this way, Fernandez demonstrates the choices which ordinary people faced, and, once again, humanises the individuals who, as she shows at one point, are often little more than a photograph of remembrance.  Yet, despite this, Fernandez avoids the novel becoming simply a collection of painful and upsetting stories. Those stories are there, but surrounded by other elements – not only Fernandez’s own life, but the life of the man who tortured people, who exists in a twilight zone of culpability and redemption, both haunted by his past and a ghost himself:

“That’s how I imagine the man who tortured people: as one of the characters in those books I read as a girl. A man beset by ghosts, by the smell of death.”

The Twilight Zone is not the only touchstone for understanding – in this section (The Ghost Zone) Fernandez also calls on A Christmas Carol. These references work because they also relate to Fernandez’s life as a child and adolescent growing up during the dictatorship. Rather than being simply accusatory, the novel feels like an attempt to understand the experience of those who were tortured and killed, of their loved ones, of the man who tortured people, and of Chile itself. Something of the teenage girl reading the magazine remains in the narrative.

The novel ends with a timeline of the dictatorship written out as free verse with the repeated refrain, “Family members of the disappeared light candles at the cathedral.” But a coda reminds us that at the centre of this is the relationship between the novelist and her informer, and it is this relationship which raises it above its worthiness as a witness to suffering to something very special indeed.

Never Did the Fire

That Chilean writer Diamela Eltit is highly regarded was demonstrated in 2007 when writers and critics were asked to choose the 100 best novels in Spanish in the last 25 years, and three of her books were included. At the same time, only three of her novels had ever been translated into English: two of those selected above (The Fourth World and Custody of the Eyes) and Sacred Cow. Now we can add a fourth with Daniel Hahn’s translation of Jamás el fuego nunca, Never Did the Fire. (If you want to read more about the process of the translation you can do so in Hahn’s Catching Fire). Eltit was part of a group of artists which opposed Pinochet’s dictatorship – Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA) – and the repercussions of that time continue to feature in her work. The political, however, is deeply interwoven with the personal. As Olivia Casa points, out Eltit’s work often makes “visible the relationship between the personal and the political.”

“In Maipú, from 1980, Eltit carried out a series of actions to this end. She cut and burned her arms and legs in a brothel, read excerpts from her then-unfinished novel Lumpérica (E. Luminata) that narrated her actions, and washed the building’s front steps.”

The narrator of Never Did the Fire is an old woman suffering the repercussions of a life of political opposition under dictatorship. In a setting which could have been lifted from Beckett, her existence now is largely proscribed to the bed she shares with the man who also shares her past – her political activism, a child. They are both entangled with and irritated by each other. He insists on wearing his trousers in bed (a throwback to when a sudden escape might be needed?) which scratch her. He weighs on her like the past:

“At one specific point in the night I felt contaminated by our weight. That moment of the night weighed on me and I knew it was you, I knew it was your weight collapsing on top of the night.”

He is sick and frail: “He’s dying, dying, I thought. We thought it together, said it together, he is dying.” But, as this demonstrates, they are also intrinsically part of each other – “I think or we think,” she tells us, “I don’t know anymore.” Eltit does not leave the horror of ageing in the abstract. The woman works as a carer, cleaning the old and infirm, and this job is described in meticulous detail:

“I squeeze and squeeze the sponge I’ve used to clean her crotch, until I’ve made sure that, down the drain, amid a circle of water, the last remains of the shit that were still left around her genitals is slipping away.”

It feels a long way from the life they were fighting for, and perhaps also represents the kind of unpleasantness that we put out of our minds, as Chile, and other countries who have suffered repression, often do with the past.

If the man and the woman remain together it is because they are united not only by habit but by two betrayals, one political, one personal. In the first, she betrays him, siding with other members of the cell (a word which will be used ambiguously throughout) against him: “I was in agreement with the dominant group… that was the day, the hour, the moment when your defeat was written.” However, there is also personal anguish in their past, a dead child: the question “why didn’t we take him to hospital?” is repeated throughout. Given the way Eltit mixes the personal and political, the physical and the abstract, it not implausible to suggest that the child also represents their political aims, the future they hoped for. This is suggested in the way the word ‘cell’ is used throughout – a body is made up of cells and a cell is made up of bodies:

“…that agility you demanded of the cell which, if it was not up to your expectations, we would have to re-make with other bodies that were hungry and energetic.”

Whatever the exact circumstances (and they become less clear towards the end of the novel as we are offered alternative versions of the child’s death), we know that the woman blames an inability to seek medical help due to the secrecy of the cell. Eltit shows us the political and the personal intersecting to tragic effect here but, rather than suggesting one should trump the other, emphasises that they cannot be separated.

Never Did the Fire is not an easy novel – nor is it meant to be. It challenges the reader – and it sometimes feels like part of that challenge is not looking away. It’s ending may even suggest some hope, but, above all else, what it tells us is that we simply carry on. While the experience of reading it may be far from enjoyable, it is also unforgettable; it burns with life and will burn its way into your memory.