The book Feroces brings together stories that aim to destabilize what is considered feminine, tales that show a wound, reactive stories that pose questions. Compiled by Jacobo Villalobos, designed by Juan Mecerón, and edited by Luza Medina, Tibisay Guerra, and María Esther Almao, the collection brings together work by Venezuelan authors Andrea Leal, Verónica Flórez, Sofía Pereda, Gabriela Vignati, Verónica Albornoz, Clara De Lima, Yoselin Goncalves, Natasha Rangel, and Ana Cristina Frías. Themes like the legacy of matrilineal tradition in interesting dialogue and contrast with the subversive and challenges to the status quo; sexual awakening and the discovery of pleasure; different forms of peripheries and minorities; and issues of identity, gender roles, and gender violence all undulate, permeate the pages, and bring the authors together. Each one is autonomous in her voice and accompanies the others.

According to Simone de Beauvoir, a specifically feminine discourse does not exist. For her, the authentic author is someone who universalizes the individual, who opposes the notion that women write about different things to men, or the very idea of women’s writing. Nonetheless, she notes that we women do tell particular stories, and we do so in response to the weight of historical oppression that we still carry. It is our way of saying, “I exist.” And of rebelling. Stories like those in Feroces think through what is silenced, create spaces for discussion, companionship, and taking a stand. Whatever form it takes, literature does not owe anything to anyone, you write what you must write; the what and the how is something the author comes to through searching for her own voice, starting with the spice rack, the toolbox, the baggage of materials that infiltrate the page or the screen and go beyond gender.

Every time a female author puts a foot outside of what “the feminine” supposedly is or should be, she challenges the established order. Citing a poem by Patmore, in a speech to The Workers Society, Virginia Woolf referred to the day when she realized that, unless she killed the angel in the house, that vision of the feminine as angelic, sweet, complacent, and self-sacrificing, she would never write literary criticism, or anything really. Killing the angel in the house requires observing with distance, standing firm, declaring a position, and, yes, being ferocious.

Writing independently, not owing anyone anything, about or out of dissatisfaction, rage, sadness, desire, and against control, prejudice, and expectations, is only possible if we stay alert: the angel of the house is a spirit, it does not die, it lives evasively, lying in wait. Given that the feminine has been supposed to oblige the masculine, a female author who freely exercises her literary labor ends up being ferocious.

“If every compilation is a floor and a ceiling, support and shelter, this book is a protected place for free movement”

“Smart,” by Ana Cristina Frías, is a story about migration, keeping one another company online, the diasporic experience, an ethnography from Miami in which a woman tired of obliging, agreeing, and keeping quiet puts an end to her exploitation. In the story “Las piedras,” by Sofia Pereda, magic, eroticism, imagination, and different planes of reality hold hands with brilliant impudence, and desire is a central element. Andrea Leal, in “La Ninfa de Villa Ruselli,” joins the fantastic with the dark, the forbidden; a woman with a supernatural vagina who drives mad the uninitiated young man who, from repeatedly asking, obtains what he desires, finding himself faced with a forest. In “Maizales,” Verónica Flórez recounts a furtive encounter at nightfall which, in that liminal moment, leaves behind an enigma to solve. Magic—the hinge between night and day—breathes in every paragraph of the story. Gabriela Vignati also crosses through the mirror in “Casa de muñecas”: in her new job as a companion and domestic helper in a house with interchangeable doors, the protagonist loses her autonomy, becoming another doll in her employer’s collection. In “Cambio de fase o cómo corromper a tu prima,” Verónica Albornoz imagines a community with no men, controlled by the older women, in which pleasure is taboo and there is minimal freedom of choice; only those who have decided to procreate have the right to visit the city. Eroticism, masturbation and sexual awakening are the other conveyor belt. In 

 “No es un caracol gigante africano,” Clara de Lima approaches posthumanism and the supernatural, building a bridge between species. In the story, a body assumed to be defective risks physical or symbolic elimination. For her part, Yoselin Goncalves writes in “La bruja nos trae de vuelta” about sickness as both possibility and passage to the other side, to the invisible. She shifts from the everyday to the magical; the ungraspable and inexplicable is just around the corner. Finally, in “Jaula para zorros,” Natasha Rangel writes about twins who identify with each other in their desire, blood as an inheritance and fervor, in a story in which the uncanny—what is familiar and at the same time terrifyingly unknown—questions the border between genders. 

The anthology Feroces connects with the idea of a global Venezuelan literature, with a diaspora aesthetics, in the words of Alirio Fernández Rodríguez, and with a certain way of producing, reading, and circulating texts that cannot be separated from the national crisis. A phenomenon that Gustavo Guerrero has called Venezuelan diasporic literature, which offers an opportunity for exchange and cultural projection. If every compilation is a floor and a ceiling, support and shelter, this book is a protected place for free movement. It is a house to which you return no matter where your body resides, because you write with what you carry on your back, with your language and the cultural weight of that language, tradition, and a way of being and doing things, references, smells, tragedies, and the party that marks the point of departure that will always be an anchor. 

Writing goes beyond your current circumstances; it does not require one circumstance or another to appear. People write because they have no choice, because writing is their voice, their lungs and their heartbeat, the way to find themselves, to discover who they are and to prick readers with their words and wake them up. As Gloria Anzaldúa says in Borderlands: 

Why am I compelled to write?… Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger… To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispel the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit… Finally I write because I’m scared of writing, but I’m more scared of not writing. 

The authors of Feroces seek to create with this anthology their own cartography, to disorder what needs to be questioned so they can try to reorder it, to find autonomy, their own voice and a shared and free space. They accompany each other and accompany us. 

Translated by Katie Brown

El amor que nos queda, Fernanda Reyes Retana’s third novel, is the story of love and rivalry between the members of a family in the present time. This novel traces events that span four generations and connect a grandmother, two parents, five siblings, a housekeeper, and a painting. The story begins with the image of dried leaves accumulated over time and ends with a pile of dry leaves before the bristles of a brush. This is how El amor que nos queda begins: “No one could have predicted the set of circumstances that, like heavy drops of rain, took place that afternoon. There was no way to calculate such a buildup and its subsequent overflow, brought about by those dry leaves that, unseen, are forgotten yet still hinder.”

It is not possible to foresee the set of events that shape—strengthen, weaken, or obliterate—affection between human beings. In any case, what transpires when in contact with the world changes us. But, what is a family? Is it the case that when parents die—the tradition, the history, that bond—the descendants always irremediably break away? Is it maternal or paternal will, custom, or inheritance that holds together the love of five siblings?

The story is told in a narrative voice that flits from character to character, between the siblings and the housekeeper, revealing an author who, through actions and appearances, displays tendencies, concerns, and the trace of grudges, preconceived notions, and misunderstandings. It touches on themes such as survival, attachment, love, loyalty, fear, distrust, and greed. The action and reaction of each character to the unfolding of this “set of circumstances that no one could have predicted” (let’s call it life) is distinctive, shaping each sibling and showcasing their individual humanity.

The rotation of this voice begins with Hermelinda, the housekeeper in charge of the paternal house where one of the daughters (Aurora) lives with her elderly father now that her siblings have embarked on their own family life. Aurora is a successful doctor. Lucía is the crude representation, the public face of the Martínez Alcázar family. She is married to Juan Carlos, with whom she has a son. Camilo has a son with Clara (Bruno) and, while he “loves” her, he does not wish to commit. He does not believe in love or women. They share parenting responsibilities. On a fine day, Clara announces her move to New York with a new boyfriend. Blanca is a mother of two and is married to Antoine, a Swiss circus performer who will teach the siblings a lesson in devotion, compassion, and forgiveness. David, the eldest, has historically been in charge of solving problems, protecting, and caring; he piles up frustration due to the lack of attention he receives from others. He is married to Livia, a seemingly materialistic woman. However, in this story, everything remains to be seen. 

“THIS IS ONE OF REYES RETANA’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS, THE ABILITY TO APPROACH THE MOST BASIC HUMAN TENDENCIES WITHOUT JUDGMENT”

Hermelinda’s voice opens the novel as she oversees preparations for what will be the last birthday party of the paterfamilias, Don David. Thus, with these two symbols of tradition, the caregiver and the predecessor, the story begins.  Soon the source of discord is revealed: Aurora announces her desire to sell a portrait of grandmother Lucía, painted under unclear circumstances (by Dr. Atl, no less), to the Regional Museum of Jalisco. Revelations about the work of art ensue, and Don David leaves a gift that no one will open: “Do not get confused… the objects we treasure in life are merely palliative, fantasies for the ego: to possess the grandest library does not make one intelligent; a luxurious house does not guarantee a home; nor does the most precious jewel ensure beauty… of course, a perfect portrait does not a story make.”

Minutes later, and without being able to calm the waters, the painting falls to the ground. The following chapters, from each character’s perspective on the events, present a fragment of the painting that is the novel. They offer a peripheral and insufficient perspective, revealing (like the nuances of a painting) the family history as the figures of fraternal union slip away. This is one of Reyes Retana’s accomplishments, the ability to approach the most basic human tendencies without judgment. The third-person voice dissolves into the characters, expressing their thoughts without dictating or qualifying them. 

The death of and the dispute over the portrait of grandmother Lucía unveils old quarrels. Greed, resentment, and selfishness come to the surface. But discord gives way to perplexity when the eldest brother is kidnapped and the other four, not entirely convinced, end up selling the painting to pay the ransom. 

This event adds to the existing tension, another achievement of this book: the story of five siblings, three predecessors, a housemaid, and a painting results in a tale of adventure. The dispute that uncovers resentments dissipates into fear of potentially losing one of the siblings, leading to the question: what remains when stripped of everything? Love. The memory of the love shared by their deceased parents might lead them (as Lucía always remembers) to find “the path back, the path to the other, to forgiveness, to happiness.” This is also the path that the younger generation offers to their parents, the siblings in conflict. 

This realization will lead each one of them to make the pending decisions. But if, after everything, what remains is love, what to do with “el amor que nos queda,” the love that remains? In the end, Aurora wonders if “el amor que nos queda” is enough. Everything remains to be seen. The final word belongs to the reader of this thrilling story.

Translated by Laura Yedra

Campus, written by the Chilean author Antonio Díaz Oliva, can be situated in the traditional genre of the academic novel. It’s centered on the figure of the university professor and the contradictions and inconsistencies that the university administration imposes on him as challenges (yet not to be overcome—such hope does not exist—only survived). The book opens with an epigraph by Virginia Woolf: “For do they not prove that education, the finest education in the world, does not teach people to hate force, but to use it?” From this question emerges a vector in which the genres of satire and political thriller join with science fiction throughout its five chapters, using memories, present-tense narrative, academic directories, web pages, and emails to craft a story of biting irony. How much is real and how much is imagined, how much is denunciation and how much is a mere game, will depend on each reader’s interpretation. Whatever it may be, this novel details the dark and uncomfortable side of university life in the Hispanic Studies and Spanish doctoral programs of the United States. It exposes and ridicules its characters without proposing a solution, as that is not the novel’s objective. A tacit voice whispers in the reader’s ear that nothing can change or be repaired, and for this reason, Campus is, above all else, cathartic.

The narrative is primarily conveyed in either a second- or a third-person voice, focusing on two main characters: Salvador Allende and Wanda Rodríguez. Allende, a scholar specializing in “pornostalgia” (a term that refers to endlessly harping on the past) in Chilean literature, and who soon, in the wake of an unfortunate event (though unfortunate for someone else, it is a misfortune that will soon spread to Allende himself), will begin a job as a professor at Pepsodent University. Rodríguez, on the other hand, is an academic affairs private investigator, a stoner, and a psychic medium who, after abandoning her own career as a PhD candidate, ends up investigating Salvador. It will be up to the readers of the novel to find out what ensues from her inquiry. 

Campus begins from the perspective of Allende, a Chilean academic prone to apathy, depression, and insomnia, who has been left broken-hearted after Anselmo, his partner (who is also an academic), abandons him for a new life by switching careers to work as a sports coach for guerrillas in Chiapas. To make matters worse, he has left the country with a new lover. Of Anselmo’s story, readers will learn little; it is only relevant in that it creates an anxious and unwilling atmosphere within Salvador, who, in his insomnia and alienation, without higher hopes and, furthermore, under investigation for the death of his former professor Javier La Rabia, decides to attend an event at Pepsodent University, where he eventually accepts a position as a professor. 

Salvador and Wanda are linked by their insomnia, by their feelings of unreality, by their excessive consumption of alcohol and weed, and by a past that binds them to Professor La Rabia, who has been both Salvador’s professor (at Maindell) and Wanda’s (at Princeton). If, as the narrator says, “Sometimes, someone’s death is nothing more than an excuse to remember the people we once were,” then perhaps this “campus” novel is nothing more than an excuse to cynically display the threads of our contemporary despondency. From the academic novel and noir, from the mystery and questions that surround Professor Javier La Rabia’s death, this satire transcends the walls of the university and refers to life itself.

This is a novel that uses universities like a playground, and one that, if it so chooses, could use another human landscape to gaze into the absurdity that surrounds the existence (or survival? or decadence?) of contemporary life. Soon Salvador Allende will become part of the institution. He will be hired not so much for his academic brilliance as for the name that connects him to the political development of his home country and to the history of an imprisoned, revolutionary father (a made-up “story,” or course), which will turn him into a “superstar,” or perhaps more accurately, a useful idiot. Through the capricious origin of his name and the lucky materialization of an academic job, the cracks in the university system become apparent. 

As the story’s events transpire, everything that at first seemed doubtful, incredible, or bizarre is shown at last to be lurid. From the moment of Allende’s job offer, things begin to get out of hand, starting with the memories of his experience as a student of the now-deceased La Rabia (his former professor of literary theory and now a ghostly presence in the novel) and the absurd vicissitudes of the present that they carry, including being used sexually by the dean of the university and her husband. If the name Salvador Allende or La Rabia seem to wink at the reader, the feeling is justified. Any suspicious name in this novel carries additional weight. They are all intentional and informative. Indeed, Campus not only values names such as these, with their resonances and their unique histories, but also references real students in one or another well-known Spanish master’s degree or other academic program in the United States. Those who read it with an awareness of certain real-life intricacies can’t help but feel as if they were at a party—a party in which amicable bullying (reminiscent of institutional bullying) is the norm. If these names are only halfway made up, does that make the story half true? In a twist, irony and senselessness happen as much within the pages of the book as they do outside of them. The veiled criticism, the despair, and the certainty that one is never safe remain: each and every person has the potential to be a character, and for some, this potential is realized, driven on by the sharp threads of a good sense of humor.      

Translated by David Brunson

The Lisbon Syndrome, by Venezuelan author Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles and translated by Paul Filev, is a novel about cataclysms. Lisbon has been hit by a meteorite and has disappeared. Rumors say this might generate a major disaster and possibly obliterate the entire planet. At the same time, on the other side of the ocean, Venezuela’s sociopolitical stability has imploded under an authoritarian regime. At a more intimate scale, in Caracas, a high school professor goes through a romantic breakup, a Portuguese migrant remembers his past and his love in his vanished country, and a group of young students is fiercely determined to fight against the dictatorship in place, some of them facing death. Everything seems to be lost, the apocalypse seems to be present in each of these stories. It is not by accident that the sun can barely be seen in the sky, completely gray due to ash rain.

The novel is divided into chapters, following the parts of a musical symphony: Overture, Allegro, Scherzo, Adagio, Requiem, and Offertory. In each movement or segment, the reader goes back and forth between the ripple effect of what happened in Lisbon, the turmoiled present in Venezuela, and the story of Fernando, the teacher; Moreira, the immigrant; and the students at risk. Fernando is a schoolteacher who works in different schools in Caracas, and also at a cultural center called La Sibila, where he imparts drama classes, becoming a guide and role model for his students, who, in distress due to the political and social debacle, take part in the city’s riots, risking their freedom and possibly their life. They see themselves as a generation suffering from “The Lisbon Syndrome”: they feel that the things they love are finite, that there is no tomorrow, that they will disappear and their disappearance will be irrelevant to the rest of the world. On the other hand, Fernando feels also that his life has lost meaning. His wife has recently left him for another man, and his mind wanders in a suspended past, obsessed with what happened, trying to understand when and how his wife stopped loving him. 

In the meantime, as one might expect, censorship pervades at all levels, and no one knows with certainty what the consequences of the damage in Portugal will be. Will Europe disappear? Is this in fact the apocalypse? The story of Moreira, the Portuguese immigrant living in Caracas who turns out to be a storyteller himself and recounts his past and experiences as a foreigner while lamenting the loss of his birthplace to the meteor strike, becomes the moving belt on which the tragedy evolves. The distant reference point of an obliterated Lisbon goes hand in hand with Venezuela’s civil unrest, censorship, conspiracy theories, food shortages, and political repression.

Dedicated to the fallen, to the young Venezuelans who died defending their country from the dictatorship still in power, The Lisbon Syndrome uses the notion of the apocalypse as a very explicit symbol. Because if each human being is a universe, the world has ended once and again with each death. Planet Earth continues existing, and as we discover in the novel, the apocalypse never happens. But the universes obliterated by the Venezuelan dictatorship cannot come back to life. The Lisbon Syndrome describes a cataclysm as a metaphor for a sociopolitical debacle which is still in place. Nevertheless, Fernando’s commitment to his students, his devotion to his work, and the way he makes every effort to protect them transform the bleak perspective: they shift the story’s meaning. An apparently pessimistic view, turns into a narration about the love for freedom and the ability to walk over ruins in order to protect it, to regain it, to own it. As Moreira tells Fernando: “despite the deception and the disappointment, the essence of the things we love still remains intact. You have a firm basis for hope, even if it seems that everything is lost.” 

Keila Vall de la Ville

New York

Preamble to a moment that develops outside this novel, and afterward? Preamble toward another narrative dimension? The foreshadowing of a biographical and historic moment that is still inaccessible, and that can be glimpsed at the end of the work?

The novel begins with a point in motion that traces the perspective, and the reader is invited to be transported along its course. We are going from La Guaira to Caracas on the old highway, aboard a Packard driven by the mother of the narrator, who is sitting in the backseat next to his dead grandfather, his traveling companion, now from the beyond. The rough highway, the petite mother driving that heavy and enormous vehicle, the jolts and wobbles of the other occupants, and the vision of a perfect sky from a low-angle shot. This trip, and others, will trace the geographic and sentimental itinerary of a migratory novel set in the Venezuela of the first half of the twentieth century through the transformation of a family that abandons its rural origin in search of the urban paradigm: from Zaraza to Caracas, from there to Lagunillas, from Zulia to Paraguaná. The history of a family, but also of a country.

Soon the narrative time mutates, and the one narrating does so from the present, from far away, the car, himself, the grandfather, dead and shuffling, with a still-living flower as a decoration in his lapel, punctum magnetized between the static present and the past that is set in motion to tell the story. Like a good autobiographical and memory-rich tale, something spectral beats inside it. It is not coincidental that, to the child who observes the characters’ acts in the nocturnal hours of rest, his family members resemble ghosts. People, upon dying, enter into a dream, enter into the past, like switching off. There is something in this transition, toward a dream/toward a temporary death that alludes to a country that wanted to be modern with one foot in tradition, and found itself suspended and devolving a few decades later.

The plasticity in the handling of narrative time slides the voice of the first person singular to a plural that invites us to see the character and also ends up displacing him. If it were cinema, this would be a dolly transitioning from the external world to the subjective, smooth and imperceptible:

Let us describe the slow push of the squeegee, the moment when the black rubber blade meets the translucent film of water, which is the focal image upon which she concentrates. Violet grasps the wooden handle, and the effort seems to be that of two hands never calloused, but dark-skinned; never withered, but corroded. (“Violet’s hands,” someone whispers into your ear, “are a simulacrum.”)

In this way, the first person plural is transferred to the woman, to the focus of attention of the one squeegeeing. The one reading is guided skillfully along by prose with an undoubtedly poetic tone. The precise handling of the tools and materials, however, does not seek to dominate the story, much less to take charge of its outcome. Memory is imprecise and misleading. It is, ultimately, a construct; Lopez Ortega knows this and handles it with beauty: “I suspect that Mother was married in 1928. It is a hazy and circumstantial piece of information, but it is the one we have.” The fictional substrate in this story is undeniable if it is understood that any autobiography, any reconstruction of the past, more so if it is aesthetic in nature, is distilled through fiction.

The family’s transition from the village to the city is initiated by Rachel, the narrator’s mother. Into the simple plains, the landscape progressively disappears in pursuit of industrial promise. As a salesman husband journeys far and wide in a country undergoing vertiginous development, his partner opens a small chocolate factory (the iconic La India) with help from her brothers; and the narrator, at the same time, is coming of age. Concurrently, the grandparents, the eight surviving children out of a total of twenty-three, the three airy and spectral aunts, the roguish, delinquent cousins, the successful son who is a doctor: an extensive gallery of characters brings this story close to the ensemble novel. They are all portrayed with a great love and compassion for their destinies, which are often truncated or diverted, without avoiding the shadows, the reproaches, or  the guilt. This is a tale of familial closeness, of minor stories told with nostalgia and honesty.

The numerous actors in this novel move through memory looking for an anchor that soon breaks away, projecting the story into the present (remember that is the preamble), explaining through this transition much of what we have been and are, employing an exact and crisp prose of balanced and elegant phrasing. Here, the poetic emerges from a great knowledge of and respect for language. This distinctive trait is not new in the writing of López Ortega, and it can be observed in his extensive narrative work.

The Flores family’s transition from Zaraza to Caracas portrays the passage from the rural and atavistic to the urban and their dreams of modernity. “The first house in Caracas, the one in Panteón, couldn’t be anything other than a typical Caracas-style house, with its courtyard of hanging ferns, its long entryway, the parlor on one side and a dining room that seated twelve.” This is the house the narrator remembers, the house of his early childhood. The place that interlaces the memory-rich chronicle with his personal biography.

Preámbulo is a story woven from nostalgias and melancholies. Consequently, it has aromas of caramel, of tobacco leaf, of chocolate. But also of losses, of broken dreams, of disillusionment. The story depicts the naïveté of a community and its desire to rise above, its struggle to leave the village behind and reach its ambitions. Aromas that hang in the air in the numerous scenes that populate this telluric story in which destiny remains tied to the earth that saw the births of the characters; and the narrator, now a youth in search of his own destiny, recounts his adolescent experience at a school in Caracas, his studies in the United States, and his problematic relationship with his rural past, materialized in his first work experience in an oil field in Cardón.

Thus, the novel brings forth an entire generation that lived and grew around these multinational camps established in Venezuela during the first half of the twentieth century. Is this story the preamble for using fiction to address the Venezuela of the oil camps, which has only begun to be glimpsed?

The local reader will recognize in this book the tale of the configuration of an identity and an idiosyncrasy, at least the one that corresponds to the twentieth century in this country. And the international reader will find symmetries with their own collective experience, because Preámbulo appears to respond to the famous quote by Tolstoy: “Paint your village and you will paint the whole world.” The Zaraza of the novel—entrenched, tragic, and picturesque—functions as a specific place on a map, but also as a metaphor for a Latin America in search of its evasive identity, dragging its dramatic social transformations along with it.

Keila Vall de la Ville & Gustavo Valle

Translated by Whitni Battle

La librería del mal salvaje. Hernán Vera Álvarez. Miami: SED Ediciones, 2018. 212 pages.

Estar completamente solo rodeado de libros
es regalarse un ticket al mejor lugar.

[To be completely alone and surrounded by books
is to give yourself a ticket to the best of places.]

Hernán Vera Álvarez

Prepare yourself, whoever holds a copy of La librería del mal salvaje [The bookstore of the ignoble savage] (recipient of the Florida Book Award), to follow the footsteps of a reader, an author, and a meticulous and stubborn bookseller. The book is comprised of titled but unnumbered chapters, ranging in length from two lines to two pages, crónicas, personal reflections on reading and writing, and intersecting perspectives on the biographies of authors, alongside bibliographical citations, all of which are fragmentarily linked from start to finish without the need of a narrative order.

Like the body of a dolphin that momentarily breaks the surface only to disappear again, there is a spinal column that gives continuity to the work. It’s a list (this one is, in fact, numbered) of tidbits, a smattering of obliquely related fun facts that connect disparate ideas about writing and the creative process, such as biographical episodes and other various and sundry curiosities. Within these lists, birthplaces, suicide rates, disappearances, infatuations, and divorces are favorite brands of cigarettes, names of editors, of cities, and titles of works by a diverse range of authors (the majority of which are male, it must be said) such as Cortázar, Casares, Ocampo, Lugones, Borges, and Pizarnik. In addition to a bibliographical and emotional relationship, real or imaginary, between these authors and their evolutions, the subversive inserts that appear and disappear throughout the book remarkably offer a sense of cohesion. It lifts the reader onto the back of the dolphin, allowing them to be swept away by its whimsical curves.

The first chapter, “El orden de las cosas” [The order of things], claims that a library is an autobiography and, in doing so, suggests an evolution: the gaze of a Hispanic author based in the United States is linked to the voice of a bookseller in charge of a Spanish bookstore in Miami, which is connected to the history of its customers and, of equal importance, to that of the authors and their works on sale. This autobiographical framework is constructed through the lens provided by the books chosen by the customers themselves or for them by the one who filters their voices that meticulously observes from an ironic and critical yet simultaneously sensitive and wonderful subjectivity in the presence of the literary.

From the perspective of the possibilities that the autobiographical notion offers, the first chapter ends with a quote by Thomas Mann, “Una ciudad es una obra colectiva” [A city is a collective work]. In response, the narrator says: if that’s the case, then this bookstore is as well. It’s even possible to take another step further: if a city and a bookstore are both collective works, then the book that is held in the hands of the reader must also be considered. The numerous gazes of the narrator, cronista, and stubborn reader of authorial voices, at the wanderings of the customers and the transformation of the volumes that, once paid for, will leave from there swinging in a plastic bag, ready to become a part of another autobiography, that of the library that will receive them, offer a choral work and, why not say it, in a certain way, collective.

Anchored to a momentous point in contemporary American history, La librería del mal salvaje establishes a critique of consumerism and the dominating superfluousness of the culture according to market changes or, better yet, the market according to culture changes. “Este país es un negocio. Y esta ciudad es un atraco” [This country is a business. And this city is the attraction]. Not without pessimism or desperation, the bookstore is the imagined realization of an alternative and subversive landscape illustrated by the simplest experience: “En estos tiempos oscuros trabajar en una librería que tiene especialmente obras en español es un acto estético y no menos político” [In these dark times, working in a bookstore that specializes in Spanish works is an aesthetic act and no less political] says the clerk, who knows that even his job guiding the customers through the corridors and placing them before the bookshelf or the book that best suits them is a powerful act. On the other hand, when he manages to sell a book by association that a client was not looking for, he feels bad, “un impostor, es decir un vendedor, un maldito cretino” [an imposter, that’s to say, a salesman, a damned fool.]

Now, if living surrounded by books is the clerk’s ideal, the social aspect associated with literary promotion is far from being his favorite iteration. In that way, it associates the presentation of a book with a Tupperware party. “Terminados los discursos, el público —y los oradores— se abalanzaron sobre la mesa con comida. A pocos metros yacían apiladas las obras completas que como el gran poeta regresaban al lugar de siempre: el implacable olvido” [The speeches ended, the public—and the speakers—pounced on the food table. A few meters away lie a stack of completed works that, like the great poets, returned to the usual place: implacably forgotten]. It’s an ironic desperation in the face of the evolution of the author and their work, the bookstore itself, and his own job. But La librería del mal salvaje opposes pessimism, it endures apathy: “Hola, sí, estoy buscando el Principito, de Maquiavelo” [Hello, yes, I’m looking for The Little Prince by Machiavelli].

It goes without saying that the autobiographical viewpoint is enchanting: “Me gusta ser librero. Recomendar lo que leí y los bellos libros de mis buenos amigos. Y con el mismo placer denostar a algunos escritores” [I like being a bookseller. Recommending what I read and the beautiful books of my good friends. And, with the same pleasure, insult some authors]. A light turns on: from a corner, perhaps at the end of the last launch circus for those complete works that no one will buy, the bookseller comes to the rescue. He will order chairs, place new volumes on the novelty table, and endure the client who, after asking about all sorts of books, all of which being available at the store, will give their thanks, turn tail, and never return. He’ll return to his place.

New clients bring their atmosphere and take it back with them, they enter and leave in a dance, they cry when they find the sought-after title or, once settled in, never want to leave. As is the case of “Mamushka,” who reads Proust in a corner for hours “con la distancia agradecida de quien sabe que nada en el mundo importa demasiado” [with the appreciated distance of someone who knows that nothing in this world is that important]. Only the bookseller, and whoever reads La librería del mal salvaje, is familiar with this idea of sitting beyond the clutches of time, being in one’s own place, sister to the cronista bookseller and the Russian doll absorbed in Proust. Because it is from the outside that the system that orders everything is established, that one can see better, and that one can any tale can be told.

And speaking of order, returning to the notion of the autobiography and keeping the idea of the peripheral close at hand, the reader participates in a series of extremely personal restitutions in a way that no one asked for, but that prove to be necessary. Guided by a peculiar perception of beauty or justice, it settles scores and attends to the unprotected. Two authors who became enemies in life, two longtime lovers, two lifelong friends, are suddenly reconnected by their overseer, “a los suicidas —siempre los poetas ganan en la lista— los dejo en la sección infantil” [the suicides—the poets are always at the top of the list—I leave in the children’s section]. In this reordering of the shelves, in the connection between events and authors and dates and titles of books or their translations: “Al lado del libro de Kerouac llamado En el camino, coloco otro libro de Kerouac titulado En la carretera” [Alongside Kerouac’s book titled On the Road, I have placed another book by Kerouac titled On the highway] and from a compilation of brilliantly selected, sophisticated but not scholarly vignettes, a new universe is created: that which could have been but never was.

La librería del mal salvaje is able to briefly delve into each wave or chapter, bringing the undulating back of the dolphin to the surface, or letting it be swept away by the current. It offers as many beginnings as readers, just as a bookstore with as many books as interests. If the bookseller defines literary happiness as, “Ver la alegría en el rostro de un cliente que regresa y te da las gracias por el libro que le recomendaste” [Seeing the joy on a client’s face that comes back and thanks you for the book you recommended], and if all this is nothing more than a collective autobiography, if this book is also a bookstore, then whoever picks it up should be making its author “literarily happy.”

Keila Vall de la Ville

Translated by Eric Holman

Keila Vall de la Ville is a New York based Venezuelan author. Author of the novel Los días animales (OT, 2016) shortlisted as Best Novel by International Latino Book Award 2018. Author of the short stories books Ana no duerme (Monte Avila Editores, 2007), Ana no duerme y otros cuentos (Sudaquia, 2016); and the poetry book Viaje legado (Bid&Co, 2016). Editor of the American bilingual anthology Entre el aliento y el precipicio. Poéticas sobre la belleza / Between the Breath and the Abyss. Poetics on Beauty (Amargord, in press), and co-editor of 102 Poetas en Jamming (OT, 2014). Co-founder of the movement “Jamming Poético” (2011 to present, Caracas; 2017 to present, NYC). Columnist of “Nota al Margen” for Papel literario, literature section of the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional; and “The Flash”, for the New York Magazine Viceversa. Included in several continental and european anthologies. BA in Anthropology (Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas), MA in Political Science (Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas), MFA in Creative Writing (NYU, New York), and MA in Hispanic Cultural Studies (Columbia University, New York).

Eric Holman is a graduate student at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey studying Translation and Interpretation. He holds bachelor’s degrees in Spanish and International Area Studies from Saint Mary’s College of California.