At one moment, in La vida papaya en Nueva York, writer Ulises Gonzales recalls the chorus of a jingle: “venga, venga el sabor de Inca Kola, que da la hora en todo el Perú, la hora Inca Kola…” [come, come, the flavor of Insta Kola, which sets the time throughout Peru, Inca Kola time…]. The song, tightly tied to that product, a dubious gum-flavored potion bought by a multinational company, takes him to his native Lima and an early childhood that has disappeared. 

In that nostalgic journey there is a wide repertoire of stories that echo others experienced on US soil. Soon after we start reading this book of personal chronicles and essays, it becomes clear that Lima represents the past as much as so many other streets in the city of New York do: the person remembering is now a mature man—Gonzales arrived in the US in November of 2000—someone who, he confesses, writes to understand, “to see everything clearer.”

What is he able to see clearer? On the one hand, the testimony of a noble sentimental education stimulated by the myth of an ever-transforming city, even though we can deduce that the countercultural splendor faded decades before; on the other hand, the power of a creative life. 

These nonfictional texts read like a novel where the main character, together with a wide group of different characters, traverses different realities. In this case, the representation of his country is associated with a sector of the population that works unabatedly to pay for private schools and health insurance, and that devotes a great part of their time to battling against a system that is meant to expel them: 

Se me ocurre que la clase social peruana no sólo explica montos de dinero en las cuentas, sino más bien las posibilidades de mantenerse a flote: las oportunidades, la educación, las palancas para abrir puertas y conseguir trabajos, cierta facilidad en el plano social para ocupar puestos públicos y para gobernar. […] “Clase media”, en el mundo, puede referirse a tantas cosas. Depende del país, de la ciudad, incluso del barrio. En el Perú, ese término también abarca a sobrevivientes, a quienes, casi sin dinero, se agarran con las uñas a ciertas condiciones de vida. 

[It occurs to me that Peruvian social class does not just explain the amount of money in accounts. Above all, it explains possibilities of staying afloat: opportunities, education, the leverage to open doors and get jobs, relative ease at the social level of attaining public offices and governing. […] “Middle class”, in the world, can refer to so many things. It depends on the country, the city, even the neighborhood. In Peru, that term also includes survivors, who, almost out of money, cling on to certain living conditions for dear life.]

In contrast, the myth of a United States where everything is possible emerges. New York is always a promise that only asks for a different type of sacrifice in return: one carrying a lot of tangible hope. Even though he had some texts published in Lima, Ulises Gonzales became a writer in foreign land. Whether we like it or not, this reality aligns with the narrative of the American dream. 

“Each of these collected texts is a stimulating footprint of the traveler who, in existential wandering, leaves in his trail a portrait of the era befalling him”

However, in the adventure of hurdles and achievements there is no room for vanity. The only possible response to tough years is to pull through: 

Mi primer trabajo consistía en abrir la tranca eléctrica de un estacionamiento, en un edificio de consultorios médicos en White Plains. Después me contrató Andrew, un gordo bueno de apellido italiano, al que se le caían los pantalones cuando corría a estacionar los autos y se le veía el poto. Trabajé para él hasta el 2015, estacionando carros, metido en una pequeña caseta dentro del club de golf más antiguo de los Estados Unidos. Los viernes empezaba a trabajar a las 8 de la mañana. Me levantaba en Brooklyn a las 4 para poder tomar el metro y luego el tren de cercanías que me llevaba a White Plains. Desde White Plains tomaba un autobús hasta Elmsford, a la esquina de White Plains Road con la Interestatal 287. Desde ahí caminaba 15 minutos hasta el club de golf.

[My first job consisted of opening the automatic security gates at a parking lot located in a building housing doctors’ offices in White Plains. After that, I was hired by Andrew, a kind, chubby man with an Italian last name, whose pants would drop showing his butt when he was running to park cars. I worked with him until 2015, parking cars, confined to a small little house inside the oldest gulf club in the United States. On Fridays, I would start working at 8am. I would wake up at 4am in Brooklyn to be able to take the metro and local trains getting me to White Plains. From White Plains, I would take a bus to Elmsford, at the corner of White Plains Road and Interstate 287. From there, I would walk 15 minutes to get to the golf club.] 

La vida papaya en Nueva York has a style that reasserts itself in the retelling of everything, which sets its own rhythm, serene and reflective, probably ideal in a city delineated by intimate experiences: “Fui un tipo muy inseguro hasta que nacieron mis hijos. Ellos me hicieron mejor persona” [I was a very insecure guy until my kids were born. They made me a better person].

Each of these collected texts is a stimulating footprint of the traveler who, in existential wandering, leaves in his trail a portrait of the era befalling him. Spanish writer Sara Cordón reflects: “Para Ulises Gonzales, New York no es la estereotípica gran manzana, sino una fruta desmesurada, carnosa, hispana. Una ciudad compleja y hostil a la que consigue sacar el jugo, haciéndola más leve, más deliciosa y disfrutable: más papaya” [For Ulises Gonzales, New York is not the stereotypical Big Apple. It is an excessive, fleshy, Hispanic fruit. It is a complex and hostile city out of which he manages to get the most, making it lighter, more delicious and enjoyable: more papaya].

Translated by Adriana Vega

Some of the best Argentine literature has been written abroad. Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig, Copi, Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, and Sylvia Molloy, among so many other authors, form a diaspora that flirts with an international gaze crossed with the vernacular, incorporating playful aplomb, experimentation, and a certain creole malice. Far from suffering for their expatriate condition, these Argentine writers have turned this dislocation into a captivating heritage, personal to the extreme. This tradition has lived on throughout the years.

Pablo Brescia has lived in the United States since 1986. He arrived as a teenager, attended university here, and continued on to a career as a professor, critic, and fiction writer. Brescia, consistent with that Argentine tradition, is someone dislocated, out of place, and despite the years of his life spent traveling this foreign land, he is an author who, without rejecting North American culture, roots himself in his home country. Attesting to this is his prose, which, unlike that of other Hispanic authors, is clean and clear, and produces no barriers between the reader and the plot. Many of the stories of his new book take place in the United States, though Brescia doesn’t try to be the writer version of Daddy Yankee. He doesn’t play the role of the latino, nor does he abuse common settings, or twist his tongue between English and Spanish to make a linguistic chewing gum. Though this could surely win him grants and positions at prestigious universities, it would be an artistic affection, an operation that many in this country perform: working as a minority author. Brescia, in any case, is a minority of a minority: Hispanic and Argentine, he comes from a community that, though it has had talented cultural figures in the United States, always seems to have remained on the margins by choice.

The characters of Fuera de lugar suffer this condition unwillingly, being relegated to it by a system without pity. This is shown in the first story, “Realismo sucio,” in which the protagonists are cleaning women. A character named Marina sees life and, in many cases, danger in each of the rooms of the hotel where she works, for the travelers who dump their bones onto those hard mattresses and damp sheets are dangerous guys, marginalized without ethics. They are also displaced, even when they’re Anglo-Saxon and United States citizens. These cleaning women who listen to cumbia and bare sparsely-toothed smiles are immersed in the quotidianity of a country with feet of clay, one that leaves its workers on the edge of a precarious life and where earning a meager paycheck is just one more link in a chain of misfortunes and inequalities. They are working poor: Latin America in the United States.

The hotel, a postcard accompanying roads paved with the dreams and acrimony of the North American imagination, is intertwined with other stories in which the specter of disillusionment passes rapidly into adventure, as though from one room to the next. In these displacements we can discern the theme of exile as thematic axis, key to understanding Brescia’s literature.

The dislocation moves to other settings like Tangiers, Mexico, and Europe, but it’s united by personalities who are already cultural brands: “Che” Guevara, Augusto Monterroso, Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez. Fuera de lugar has two sections: “Lugar” and “Afuera.” The stories in these sections oscillate between realism and the fantastic—the Río de la Plata is fertile with this genre—well demonstrated in “Lapivideo®2,” “Frank Kermode,” and “Para llegar a D.F.W.” In this last one, an irreverent ghost—who bears the mark of Borges, with his games of waking and dreams and the figures of writers—plays pranks with fateful consequences for the living. “Frank Kermode” puts a pair of intellectuals into relief, who change several times while an unpunished secret grows between them like a mortal illness.

In Fuera de lugar, writer Pablo Brescia executes a narrative project that touches the sensibility of a reader attentive to cruel and imaginary worlds, in a handful of stories that are from here, from there, and from everywhere. He understands very well the lesson Borges inculcates in his mythic essay “El escritor argentino y la tradición”: “We must believe that the universe is our birthright and try out every subject; we cannot confine ourselves to what is Argentine in order to be Argentine because either it is our inevitable destiny to be Argentine, in which case we will be Argentine whatever we do, or being Argentine is a mere affectation, a mask.”

Hernán Vera Álvarez

Translated by Jack Rockwell

In moments of revisionism, the Latin American Boom betrays an excess of testosterone and a crude marginalization of women. Think of Clarice Lispector and Silvina Ocampo, who had to wait decades before finding readers beyond the borders of Brazil and Argentina. Unpaid debts hover over Venezuelan literature. This debt, in part, perhaps began to be paid at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The political and social crisis in the country has pushed writers to emigrate to more benign lands (and ones with a market) and led to an interest in understanding when exactly Venezuela screwed itself over. Literature that had been a secret for decades has left ostracism behind. In this prolific library, titles like the best seller It Would Be Night in Caracas (Karina Sainz Borgo) and a lukewarm urban novel like The Night (Rodrigo Blanco Calderón) pile up next to works of artistic quality, whether Blue Label/Etiqueta Azul (Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles), Los días animales [Animal days] (Keila Vall de la Ville), the stories of Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez, or the poetry of Raquel Abend van Dalen.

Now Crema Paraíso [Paradise cream] by Camilo Pino joins this library. Truthfully, the author guaranteed himself a spot with his debut novel, Valle Zamuro, which discusses the 1989 social upheaval known as the Caracazo. Through the young man Alejandro Roca, the writer portrays a sentimental education in the midst of chaos. Venezuelan society did not emerge from this incident unscathed. His new work is also a snapshot of a particular era: it alternates between the beginning of the eighties and the new millennium. The timeframes create a parenthesis where the characters enter and exit the story with their best comedic stylings—it’s worth clarifying: the novel is an infinite South American carnival, so pathos-filled that from its bowels escape ever-bitter but no-less-lucid guffaws.

The plot of Crema Paraíso is simple: one day, Emiliano, who wants to squeeze every last drop out of his youth, receives a strange proposal: twenty thousand euros and a week in Berlin if he appears on a television show alongside his father, the poet Alfonso Dubuc. The mystery is heightened by the presence of some old letters addressed to an individual named Ulrika. Then, in a game of emotional memory, the poet returns to a literary conference in Havana. And he’s not returning to any old place: we’re talking about a time when the city was a diamond whose prestige and shine attracted a slew of intellectuals. They would stay for a few days, engage in cultural (and perhaps sexual) tourism, and then continue on their way talking about the wonders of the Revolution. It’s in this place that the Venezuelan poet, who until recently had been a rising start and is now the kind of guy whose colleagues cross the street when they see him, will end up. But the trip will become a mythical one for Alfonso, a fount of inspiration that will lay the groundwork for what he has privately dreamed of his entire life: becoming the national poet. A marble bust, a legendary tale.

Each conflict allows Pino to disassemble the mechanisms of the Cuban Revolution and emphasize games of literary power. The strategy is an effective one: the pans to Ernesto Cardenal, Mario Benedetti, and even Fidel Castro, along with certain pernicious rumors surrounding Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar, awaken a sarcastic reflection that provides the reader with a complicit gaze. Fiction and nonfiction converge in the narration, an intelligent trick that elegantly heightens the delirium of Crema Paraíso.

The interaction between Dubuc and Fidel lacks an epic exchange of words; there is nothing for posterity nor for a biopic. Simply because he knows that in emotional moments intelligence falters: all creative work is intellectual. And also Alfonso, like any artist, has a thousand different masks:

Fidel me dio un apretón de manos y me agradeció por participar en el congreso. Yo apenas alcancé a verle la barba de pequeños rizos y responderle: ‘De nada’. Eso fue todo lo que dije: ‘De nada’. No le dije: ‘¿Cómo crees, Fidel?, para mí es todo un honor estar en el primer territorio libre de América y poder ayudar, aunque sea con mi humilde poesía a la revolución. Yo, un poeta desconocido, soy quien se debe sentir honrado de tener el privilegio de etcétera, etcétera’. No, lo único que alcancé a decir fue ‘De nada’ cuando el destello de una cámara me encandiló (¡esa maldita foto me ha salido carísima!; los idiotas radicales de la oposición la sacan a cada rato como evidencia de que soy un caballo de Troya chavista). Fidel, con su característica astucia, se dio cuenta de mi insignificancia y siguió su camino tomado de la mano con Benedetti, dejándome como el lastre de un globo que ascendía al cielo de la revolución latinoamericana.

[Fidel shook my hand and thanked me for participating in the conference. I barely managed to get a look at his beard of tiny curls and respond, “You’re welcome.” That was all I said: “You’re welcome.” I didn’t say, “Are you kidding, Fidel? It’s an absolute honor for me to be in the first free country in the Americas and be able to help out, even if just with my humble poetry for the revolution. I, an unknown poet, am the one who should be honored to have the privilege, etcetera, etcetera.” No, the only thing I had managed to say was “You’re welcome” when the flash of a camera blinded me (I’ve paid a high price for that stupid photo! The radical idiots from the opposition constantly pull it out as proof that I’m a Chavist Trojan horse). Fidel, with his characteristic astuteness, realized my insignificance and continued on his way hand in hand with Benedetti, leaving me behind like the ballast on a balloon floating up into the sky of the Latin American revolution.]

This trip to the Havana of the 1980s builds a bridge to the present where father and son, not the closest of enemies, duke it out: resentment builds on European soil and there is a culminating moment in the story where the chance to change fate presents itself. It is sensitive, ironic, and beautiful, like the life of a poet.

Hernán Vera Álvarez

Translated by Fiona Maloney-McCrystle

“Muchos de nosotros veremos cumplirse uno de los mayores miedos que tenemos, que no es el miedo a la muerte, sino a la organización social de la muerte. Muchos de nosotros moriremos en una cama de hospital, después de días, semanas o meses de haber sido privados de los más simples derechos humanos” [Many of us will face one of the greatest fears we have, which is not the fear of death, but of the social organization of death. Many of us will die in a hospital bed, after days, weeks, or months of having been deprived of the most basic human rights], wrote Argentine author C.E. Feiling, who died of leukemia at 36 in a hospital bed in Great Britain. One of the protagonists of Cocodrilos en la noche [Crocodiles in the night], Gisela Heffes’ new novel, suffers this social organization of death. His entire pancreas was removed, and he spends his recovery in a clinic in the center of Buenos Aires. His children have arrived at the South American capital from that mythological, so-called “First World” in which they have lived for years—one in the United States; the other in Europe—alarmed by the sickness that slowly devours, although with sadistic will towards the eldest of their tribe. Despite everything, this man remains unshakably lucid. It is the others, in this case the nurses who care for him—at times with hurtful practice— old and new couples, relatives, and Dr. Casabilla, with his bureaucratic cordialness, who are consumed by an overwhelming dailiness.

To tell this story, Heffes chose to write from a distant third-person perspective, which in some passages becomes first-person. This change in register is another brilliant technique used in this personal and open novel. The author remarks, “We must make sure that the airport the protagonist leaves from is not George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, but the Orlando International Airport. That the airline she travels isn’t United (formerly Continental), but American Airlines. That the protagonist of this novel is not named Gisela, but Vera. That her last name is not Guerenstein, but Heffes. Vera Heffes.” This strategy creates the illusion of an alternate reality that produces a seductive, artistic tension. The distance further deepens the narrative map and the conflict in which the characters are involved.

Another aesthetic characteristic of Cocodrilos en la noche is its plot: separated by brief chapters that relate the daily events of the story—Day 1, Day 2, etc.—each one of these entries includes a “Notebook” with personal notes in which Vera sometimes tires of her character and the alternate reality, and returns to normality. Now Vera is Gisela:

Miré a mi hermano y a mi cuñada, interrogándolos. Sí, está despierto. El enfermero se introdujo en la conversación. Está bajo los efectos sedativos, pero te puede escuchar. Mi padre asiente. Yo le agarro la mano. Se la agarro fuerte. Siento su fuerza en mi mano, como si esa fuerza, ese encuentro de fuerzas nos comunicara. Me acerco y le hablo al oído: le digo que todo salió bien, y que pronto muy pronto va a salir del sanatorio y todo va a regresar a la normalidad. Asiente. Le digo que mis hijos le mandaron unos dibujos y quieren hablar con él. ¿Mis hijos? ¿Cuándo me convertí en madre y mi padre, en abuelo? ¿No soy acaso yo la hija, la niña, la más chica que mi padre cuida y lleva al colegio todas las mañanas? ¿No soy yo la que necesita que la besen y cuiden?

[I looked at my brother and sister-in-law, examining them. Yes, he’s awake. The nurse inserts himself into the conversation. He is sedated, but he can hear you. My father nodded. I grabbed his hand. I held it tightly. I felt the strength of his hand in mine, as if that strength, that conversion of forces was communicating to us. I came closer and spoke to him out loud: I told him that everything was alright, that soon, very soon, he would leave the hospital and everything would go back to normal. He nodded. I told him that my children had sent him some drawings and wanted to talk to him. My children? When had I become a mother; and my father, a grandfather? Aren’t I the daughter, the little girl, the youngest one that my father cares for and takes to school every morning? Aren’t I the one who needs him to kiss me and take care of me?]

What the author tells us in this story narrated from pain, memory, and a certain skepticism, is that illness is another literary form. What’s more, in that yellow notebook, there is a novel about returning. It is the perception of a daughter once again in her hometown, where the streets are now full of dog shit, filth, and violence. Therefore, from this work a social perspective of Argentina emerges, one that disintegrates, chapter by chapter, along with the father’s health and establishes a novel that, as Ana María Shua describes it on the book’s cover, is “brave, attractive, and interesting.”

Hernán Vera Álvarez

Translated by Ardyn Clayton

Hernán Vera Álvarez, sometimes just Vera, was born in Buenos Aires in 1977. He is a writer, poet, visual artist, and editor. His published books include Los románticos eléctricos, La librería del mal salvaje (Florida Book Awards), Grand Nocturno, and ¡La gente no puede vivir sin problemas! He is the editor of Don’t cry for me, América, Escritorxs Salvajes, Miami (Un)plugged, and Viaje One Way. His fiction has appeared in Estados Hispanos de América, Los topos mecánicos, and Pertenencia: Antología de narradores sudamericanos en Estados Unidos, and his work has also been featured in The Kong Kong Review, Hostos Review (CUNY), El Nuevo Herald, Meansheets, Loft Magazine, El Sentinel, La Nación, and Clarín. He lived illegally in the United States for eight years, working in a shipyard, a cabaret kitchen, a few nightclubs, and in construction.

Ardyn Clayton is currently pursuing an MA in English-Spanish Translation and Interpretation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. She previously attended Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, where she obtained a BA in Spanish before deciding to pursue translation and interpretation at Middlebury.