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

Jorge Eduardo Benavides’s first three published novels—Los años inútiles (2002), El año que rompí contigo (2003) y Un millón de soles (2008)—seemed to brand him a political writer, or so we might conclude from the questions journalists asked him whenever he returned to his native Peru from Spain. Perhaps he was sick of being pigeonholed, or maybe he lost interest in portraying the social turmoil of 1970s and 80s Peru in his narrative. Or maybe because he was restless and driven by his double condition as a citizen of Latin America and Europe, Benavides moved away from those themes and turned his talent to projects that creatively combined the personal diary, historical novel, crime fiction, and even the inner workings of literary production, as we see in La paz de los vencidos (2009), Un asunto sentimental (2012), El enigma del convento (2014), El asesinato de Laura Olivo (2018), and El collar de los Balbases (2018). Nonetheless, with his most recent novel, Benavides seems to stick his tongue out at us and show us yet again that his writing is hard to label. For the first time in his literary trajectory, Benavides narrates from the perspective of a convincing female voice. 

In the novel’s first lines, the feminine narrative voice draws us into a first-person oral account—a lengthy confession to a loved one—to which the reader becomes a witness. Mariana, the narrator, connects the distinct stages and memories of her life through the narrative device of a box of photos that she describes over time. These photos are the pretext for Mariana’s adolescent daughter to discover, along with readers, the private life of a Latin American woman born in the twentieth century who moved to Spain in the twenty-first century. We also learn about her difficult relationship with a restrictive mother, the absence of a father who left and started a new family, and her search for paternal and maternal figures that complement those who are lacking. We also become privy to the mechanisms forcing women to postpone their dreams so their male partners can realize theirs first; the painful transition of immigration and alienation; and, above all, an unconscious passing of the baton in which some mothers transfer an involuntary burden to their daughters. Despite all these layers, several mysteries invite us to read on: why does Mariana relay all these things to her daughter? What has happened and, mainly, what justifies such a visceral monologue to a listener who never replies?

Beyond being an author, Benavides is also a literary advisor. In his pedagogical work, he identifies narrative strategies writers use when crafting their texts. His technique in this recent novel speaks to his talent as a narrator, but one aspect in particular stands out: his approach to readers as friendly competitors who feel like they’re on a level playing field with the author. It’s not by chance that the ideas of “competitor” and “competent” are related in the above notion. Benavides hands readers a puzzle with the idea that reading will transform them into accomplices competing at the same level as the narrator.

It’s almost cliché to restate that with high-quality literature readers end up co-creating the text through their interpretations. I would only add, perhaps perilously, that while teachers say emotion is involved in all learning, in the case of challenging fiction, the intimate joy of deciphering is involved: if we give a child the answer to his homework problem, he will get a passing grade. But if we encourage him to be the kind of person who deduces the answer for himself, that discovery will remain in his memory his whole life.

If savvy information management is an important aspect of Volver a Shangri-La, no less important is Benavides’s intensely intimate portrayal of a feminine character. In interviews with the author after the novel’s publication, Benavides explains that the idea for it came about more than two decades earlier, after having conversed with women friends who told him about their lives. The author, therefore, appears to have engaged in literature’s foundational practice of putting oneself in the shoes of others and trying to understand their lives through this perspective. To construct realistic literary beings, narrators make use of characters’ actions, their manner of conversing, and how they reflect. With no active dialogue in this novel, the insight with which Mariana observes her memories throughout the text creates the illusion of embodiment. For example, I cite the protagonist’s memory of her mother helping her father write up business reports at night: “I think the imposed silence they shared at the dining room table brought them together with the artificially supportive trust of an old couple, when in truth, it was exactly the opposite. They didn’t notice they began growing apart, submerged in their own thoughts, equidistant with respect to that arithmetic and rigorous pact requiring silence, to which my mother devoted herself. She never guessed dad would end up chiding her, as men tend to, for a lack of ambition they demand in exchange for living together and as proof of their love.”

Notably, when removed from the print structure, this paragraph sounds well-written and “literary.” However, when read as part of the novel’s monologic context, it creates the illusion of perfect and spontaneous orality concordant with time spent between mother and daughter, and the reader, of course. Such ambiguity demonstrates the author’s technical skill in inviting us into the story and its reflective tone. In the novel, Shangri-La is, textually speaking, a place the mother and daughter visited in Spain and, apart from that, it is an idealized Arcadia to which they want to return. Benavides has linked these two notions in his latest novel, and he takes his readers to the margins of the hyper-fashionable literature of self-reflection, where writers can fully invent and thrill us with literary characters.  

Translated by Amy Olen
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

There are books that are mere time fillers. That we consume and forget like a snack to satiate our midday hunger. There are also books that require us to approach them with care, because they will leave traces and will not leave our mind when we have finished reading them. Los regalos y las despedidas by Ricardo Montiel (a poet, prosist, musician, and architect born in Maracaibo, Venezuela in 1982)  is one of those books.

In the prologue that introduces the work, Norberto José Olivar emphasizes identity as a principal motif, as an issue that always returns for the most bizarre of reasons, redefining and renaming us, grounding us in what we believe or want to be. Thus, it highlights that in order to find yourself you must look within what scares you.

That is exactly what Ricardo Montiel does in the five stories that make up this volume. The author takes us to the past, to that moment when we begin to leave childhood and must face a world we no longer comprehend. In these stories, family has stopped being a refuge and is presented as a fragile and scattered structure, almost like the first obstacle in overcoming one’s personal fight against the world. It is in this home that is no longer home (or perhaps it is, but not in the way we used to believe) where the author makes us relive the eternal intergenerational clash, that collision between the preadolescent and adult worlds which does nothing but remind us that, in reality, they are not as different as we might have thought. That they share dreams and disappointments and often run into the same walls. 

Perhaps it follows that, as these texts suggest, we have never stopped being children. Perhaps we have never stopped being afraid, and the step into adolescence is the first discovery that we will never be better than those who came before us.

Thus, either as a rejection of ourselves, an expression of rage, or simply a possible reaction facing the elliptical deception to which we seem to be condemned, we return to the desire to break the rules, to oppose the established order, to rebel while we tirelessly seek to find a place to be understood, to feel a sense of safety and belonging.

However, we should not fall into the trap of thinking this is a sad or sentimental book. Ricardo Montiel weaves together the disappointments of Los regalos y las despedidas with an intimate and poetic voice, symbolic without being so, capable of taking us to that time when we, the readers, were lost as well. But it is also a comprehensive voice that carefully recalls the child we once were and reprieves the adult ego who betrayed their dreams.

Perhaps this is a book that helps us to see within ourselves, that helps us to understand those parts of ourselves that, like the remnants of our dreams upon waking up, escape us, or that confine us to smile with sorrow or nostalgia. Without a doubt, this is a work to keep in mind, one of those jewels to which, in one way or another, we always return.

Translated by Jared Peterson

If we could put together a collection of all the pains suffered during Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, no collecting tool would be up to the job: a time capsule would be useless; personalizing and thereby embalming the pain would be useless; even writing a novel that endorses one’s personal pain would be useless if we meant to pass a collection of pains down to future generations. However, Antes que llegue la luz is no triumph in capturing pain; it is, rather, a triumph in documenting fragments of spaces, people, and events lived through during and after the hurricane, in order to create among readers, Puerto Ricans, and the community at large a conjugation of humanity. 

So what was Hurricane Maria for Puerto Ricans? Each one has their story: some would write of how their homes were left under the rushing waters while they were trapped between a wood plank and a piece of furniture as the hurricane passed by overhead; they would tell of how they saw the roof of their house take flight and disappear into the over 160-mile-per-hour winds; others would tell, in tears, of how they saw relatives drown while trying to save a grandparent or a child. All Puerto Ricans would tell you how the lights were out for months, how food could not reach their homes. I could tell you how the door to the house burst out of its frame, how the neighbor’s roof collapsed into his home; how, months later, politicians took advantage of the supplies and community aid for their campaigns. In this regard, Santos-Febres succeeds in capturing a fleeting image of what happened in Puerto Rico: long lines, disaster, corruption, anxiety, losses, destruction, uncertainty, an apocalyptic scene the like of which nobody imagined because, as Mayra explains in “De otros vientos huracanados,” the chronicle that makes up the first part of Antes que llegue la luz, Puerto Ricans paid no heed to the news or the forecasts because, for decades, hurricanes had seemed to skirt around Puerto Rico just before touching the archipelago. Puerto Ricans sang their country’s praises as the island blessed by God, and therefore Hurricane Maria (like all past hurricanes) would eventually swerve to the north or the south. Many repeated these words, even when, a week before Maria, Hurricane Irma lashed northeastern Puerto Rico and left much of Borinquén in the dark.

In turns, the chapters tell the writer’s personal story from hours before Maria hit the Puerto Rican archipelago until the lights finally came back on in her house months later. Every other chapter consists of a brief chronicle from friends, colleagues, workers with the now privatized Electrical Energy Authority (AEE), and everyday Puerto Ricans who experienced the hurricane in various ways. In the style of little flashbacks from some apocalyptic movie telling the characters’ stories before the day of reckoning, Mayra narrates the tales of her children, Aidara and Lucían, based on the relationships she had with their respective (and, seemingly, failed) fathers; of the literary colleagues who worked together to create cultural projects to cultivate literature in the archipelago; of her relationship with Gabriel García Márquez, el Gabo, that starts with a jangueo (Puerto Rican for “hanging out”) and ends in silence; of her friendship with Alexa, whose penthouse has been destroyed and who likewise loses contact with her son; and, perpetually and in almost all these stories, of her role as a funded, well-educated, award-winning writer and speaker who is constantly traveling to el norte. These memories, which interrupt the disaster and take place in one of the colony’s most privileged neighborhoods, enter into the narrative to bear witness to human circumstances that might not normally include a person with all this author’s recognition, and to breathe life into what Puerto Ricans faced before, during, and after the disaster—because, indeed, in Puerto Rico we mingle at the party, capitalism drowns all dreamers, and your friends are left imprinted on your skin.

Once the hurricane had passed, the only thing left to do was go back outside and work side-by-side with your neighbor. Divides of political party, religion, and social class ceased to matter. Just as the hurricane ended, Puerto Ricans were in the streets, reopening highways, feeding their neighbors, getting water from strangers’ houses, sweeping the debris to one side, finding ways to help among the horror. Mayra Santos-Febres dedicates the second part of the book, titled “Las muchas voces,” along with the fourth part of the book, to lending a voice to Puerto Ricans and telling their stories of survival through the hurricane, precisely because throughout the chronicles of her own personal experience she speaks about how and when she visited different communities to give away books and educational materials at schools throughout the archipelago. She found people who recognized her; they would say to her, “You must be the writer. Please, writer, write, tell my story; writer, write…”

Finally, Mayra Santos-Febres tells of how she did what over a hundred thousand Puerto Ricans did after Hurricane Maria: how she got a plane ticket and went looking for light in el norte. Mayra and her children reached Connecticut, and, after a few days spent celebrating light, peace, and harmony, Mayra buckled down to her role as a writer, bringing together the Puerto Rican diaspora for a series of events that would benefit the country. “Do not send any more supplies, Mariposa. They are not letting them through,” Mayra warns one of her collaborators in el norte, since many supply drops were held up at ports and military bases. Nonetheless, Mariposa explains, Puerto Ricans and nuyores (Puerto Rican New Yorkers) kept on sending supplies just to feel that they were helping. Mayra’s argument is valid: we needed more hardworking hands, we needed Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico.

Then Mayra finds out, thanks to the father of one of her children, that the lights have finally come back on in her neighborhood. I remember when the light came back to my street a month after the hurricane. In San Sebastián, the mayor had created his own brigade to bring light back to communities, but in other areas it took months, even a year for the lights to come back on. In my home, we celebrated as if we had won the lottery. Along with the light came smiles and harmony, but also, and above all, hope.

Antes que llegue la luz is one of many works of art to have emerged since Hurricane Maria. The disaster has been used in many disciplines to reveal the pain of four thousand deaths ignored by the corrupt government (then led by Governor Ricardo Roselló), the roofs that have still not been repaired today, the hunger suffered by thousands of Puerto Ricans in the highlands. This pain has been communicated through music, art, and the written word. Antes que llegue la luz succeeds in representing the experience of thousands of Puerto Ricans: it joins the conversation about the island’s lasting vulnerability, it exposes the colonial system’s corruption, and, along with so much else, it sets the scene for the horrors we lived through during that terrible, unpredictable, and imminent phenomenon.

Carlos A. Colón Ruiz

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Seix Barral has begun recovering the work of one of the late twentieth century’s most original authors. Manuel Puig (General Villegas, 1932–Cuernavaca, 1990), is the creator of a body of work in which film, his own experience, and a taste for popular language combine into a singular case of the Spanish-language novel in Latin America. Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Heartbreak Tango, and Kiss of the Spider Woman are good examples of the narrative form so characteristic of this Argentine author. 

With The Buenos Aires Affair, Puig abandoned the vital space of Coronel Vallejos—a clear substitute for General Villegas—where he had set his previous novels. This time, Buenos Aires serves as an urban space in which to weave a detective story that unfolds between the 1930s and the end of the 60s. As Colombian writer Mario Mendoza points out in his insightful prologue, the novel narrates “the last two days in the life of Leo Druscovich and the enigma of a series of disappearances, false trails, and sexual obsessions.”

The novel is a well-aimed critique of those totalitarian regimes in which “violence upon individual bodies and the social body, official lies, and family secrets intertwine in a plot of seduction, psychoanalysis, and fascism,” according to the words on the book’s back cover, drawn from that “letter to a stranger” Roberto Calasso mentioned in his essay Cento Lettere a uno Sconosciuto, which Manguel Puig used to create a plot that will make us participants in solving a crime.

In 1971 Manuel Puig signed a contract to publish the novel with Seix Barral under the title Noche en el Ritz. In the end, due to problems related to censorship, the text never saw the light of day. Nevertheless, two years later Editorial Sudamericana published the novel, changing the title to The Buenos Aires Affair. The book was not exempt from difficulties: it was confiscated and censured, a fundamental cause of the Argentine writer’s exile to Mexico.

From a young age, Puig tried to escape the oppressive reality of his birthplace, which led him to create his own reality where musical comedies, the sophisticated comedies of the metropole, “were reality for me. The town was a western that I had entered into, a movie I had gone to see by mistake but could not escape from.” A cinematic quality is present in all his novels; it could be said that his narrative technique cannot be explained without film. This longing for the seventh art took him to Italy, where he worked as an assistant to Vittorio de Sica and Stanley Donen, but this experience disappointed him: “I had lost what had sustained me until then: a calling for cinema. This turned out to be a misunderstanding. Because, deep inside, what I was really trying to do was prolong my ‘role’ as spectator.”

He began to write film scripts, but they had little impact. And so, he turned to the novel. That’s when he realized literature was closer to what he sought. In that vocation he found a path to explaining his own lived experience. His friend Néstor Almendros introduced him to Juan Goytisolo, who encouraged him to compete for the Premio Biblioteca Breve, which saw him place as a finalist with his first novel. 

The Buenos Aires Affair, like Manuel Puig’s other novels, converges on an obsessive and constant set of themes, in which the films of Hollywood’s golden age play a starring role. At the start of the work, we witness the following dialog, taken from the George Cukor film Camille: 

The handsome young man: You’re killing yourself.

Greta Garbo: (feverish, trying to hide her fatigue) If that were true, you’d be the only one against it. Why are you such a child? You should go back to the living room and dance with some of those pretty young girls. Come on, I’ll go with you. (She holds out her hand.)

The handsome young man: Your hand is burning up.

Greta Garbo: (ironically) Why don’t you let a tear drop onto it to cool it down?

The Argentine writer had a sincere interest in certain disparaged forms, certain popular genres. Puig himself recalls:

I think these minor genres can be treated with a certain artistic rigor and appreciated. The fact that they are popular doesn’t bother me, quite the contrary. There are certain ingredients, for example, the serial story, a care for intrigue, that seem valid to me. I’ve always attempted a kind of popular novel.

Eduardo Suárez Fernández-Miranda

Translated by Alex Halatsis

In his Anotaciones a la poesía de Garcilaso (1580), the Golden Age poet of Seville, Fernando de Herrera (1534-1597) dedicates the following words to the problem of representation and beauty in art: “born of the election of good colors is that pleasant and lovely beauty that dazzles and does sweetly gorge the eye  […] gives forth that smooth loveliness that does suspend and stall our senses with marvelous violence, and not only is the choosing needed, but much more the composition.” Before the resplendent landscape evoked by Herrera’s poetry, the brilliance of the sun that reflects and extends sparkling across the fields and the waters of a crystalline river, this voice recognizes the deceit that makes up this image, the illusory specter that both consists of and is given off by that luminosity, its golden ruse: “That gold that has me fresh deceived,” “But from my true deceit I cannot / free myself; for the fire yawns flaming, and while this ill keeps me alive, in good I die,” says the Spanish author.

The poetics I quote here serve to summarize, one way or another, the foundation upon which the lyrical writing of Chilean poet Ismael Gavilán (Valparaíso, 1973) has been erected and manifested over the course of its first twenty-five years of development, from his debut work Eurídice duerme en nuestro sueño (1996) to Claro azar (2017), passing through Fabulaciones del aire de otros reynos (2002), Raíz del aire (2008), and Vendramin (2014), as well as the final two as-yet unpublished books that complete the present volume, Voz de ceniza and Rompiente. Along this line, and in light of Herrera’s proposition—made explicit in turn by Gavilán in one of the very significant epigraphs that open some of his poems—the keys to the poetics of an essentially metatextual pursuit converge: a pursuit of the revelation and reach of the poetic, of that which is perceived, observed, or thought to be glimpsed nearby and in the distance, but that nonetheless is lost in the interstices of language “like water that slips,” like a “sleepwalking star / that falls fleeting,” “the instant / sated on its intangible purple.” Nonetheless, beyond this desperation, said pursuit is incessant, constant, and palpable in the journey and edification of these verses, and it reveals to us, truly, in the paradoxical (un)fulfillment of its purpose—which it likely neither wants nor accepts—the following truth: the visible world as the hinge of that which is hidden and unfathomable, as the image of another time we try to reach through figures that summon up a natural landscape of classical splendor and celestial arcades—Euridice, Dido, and Apollo stroll through these gardens—gleaming in its modernist air, along—in apparent opposition—with the clean, frank, and austere gestures of the everyday. Likewise, the revealed truth of this visible world brings with it other truths that the verses of the present offering admirably uncover, gradually but also pristinely and pointedly, to the reader’s happy eyes: the correspondence between the visible and the invisible, behind the translucent veil that falls off the former, implies perfection: the exact correlation of one dimension to another. Perfection that, in turn, necessarily and univocally comprises pleasure and pain, existences absolutely indefectible from the precision that contains them. It is “the suffering perfection of the beautiful,” “the Garden’s perfect Rose,” that through its image, the domain of the visible, opens—or seems to open—the doorways that give access to that other reality, invariably longed for and evoked by the lyrical subject, his liminal footstep that leads to the brownfield of this simulacrum. This border-crossing movement—as border-crossing as its pursuit, its straying, and its nearing—and the continuous progression of these verses make up in Gavilán’s writing an eminently dolorous process, a wound that bleeds irremediably into time, perennial, inasmuch as “pain is proportionate to the perfection of the being,” the acute affliction that pierces the subject and places him before the irrevocable impossibility of any and all revelation: “Sores grow on the center / of his inexplicable calm,” “he bleeds at the mere presence of longing,” “every flight will be ruined blood, / bruised bodies / charred loveliness,” “like ice in the wound / that opens my skin again and again.”

Crossing the threshold emerges, thus, into this poetry as a failure foretold, a boundary projecting only the image of that invisible world, a mirror or a mirage, the sign that points us toward the nothingness on the other side of the doorway. The indolence of the image and, in this case, of the word as sign and transparent, divisory veil become the speaker’s flesh as he hears the crash of his fall, the overturning of a desire that leaves him stranded, having lost sight of the ship that was meant to carry him across the vast waters, the boundary between one stretch and another:  “when he defines its indolence, intense as seaglass,” “after language come catastrophes: / ghosts of a shipwreck that rejoice in not being executed.” The wind takes its place, likewise, as an intermediary between realms; in its fleetingness it allows for uncertain movement down the line, the tenuous breeze and incorporeal gale, the presence of a colorless absence, “visible and invisible, / subject to touch as smoke and fleeting / in the permanence that augers progression.” The wind accompanies the subject in this journeying, and in his unbreakable attempt to annul the fine line that divides one world from another. The senses also collaborate in this mission, lending shape to the translucent frame that foretells the illusion the image projects: an inaudible constellation that borders absence/presence, ineffable melodies, blue perfumes, “the sun’s warmth,” “insatiable thirst,” “violet clarity.” All of these, nonetheless, are merely tracks of an “inexistent kingdom,” of a “perfect writing” that reveals its impassable distance through the visible sign, the only path by which to access beauty, the definitive evocation and sighting of illusion and (poetic) deceit, as Fernando de Herrera foretold, edified through the image and the exact word as instruments of representation. In Ismael Gavilán’s Poesía reunida this word is constant, everlasting, found insistently in every bend in these verses and their reading: happy encounters with signs from that—or this—“visible world” that holds up the lyrical subject and the reader: “There is no other way: / symbols, inscriptions, or representation of Lethe.” The “perfect figure that encloses recognizable signs,” within which, the poet pronounces and reveals, is found the deepest and most genuine part of the self, its fathomless face, the irrenunciable effort to unveil the poetic that, in the end, goes no further than ourselves.

Ana María Riveros Soto

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

The cover of this book—sporting an image of an open door amongst ruins, and a play on words—has a certain look to it which attracts us immediately. Two words, which appear to belong together as they are joined through the proposition “de” [usually translated as “of” or “from,” depending on the context], differentiate and connect that space which they frame. The house, a symbol of isolation (which we can live inside of), as the most private and isolated space, is united with the city, the zone of the public, where every space is shared and visible. This title is the starting point of this short story collection by Gisela Kozak Rivero—what, then, does it mean? Casa de ciudad (2021) is, unquestionably, a space where the hybridity of existence, in two places, is transferred from one ground to another, departing, in addition, from the material to the corporeal, to become the context of those who live two realities in one and the same body, materialized and urban. 

Here, the house in ruins becomes a symbol of identities that have been destroyed by injustice, inequality, incomprehension, and dislocation. In each of these stories, the main characters detail with subtlety everything that causes their most profound and silenced pains. Before each experience detailed in their stories, we’re given an epigraph to read, which establishes the first connection between the reader and the suffering character. A quotation from Rafael Arráiz Lucca—“Al fin termino por entender que yo amo esta ciudad hasta la rabia” [“I finally understand that I love this city to the point of rage”]—opens up onto this place where “habitar” [to inhabit] means to connect the most profound of feelings, like the love of music, or sadness. This permits a closed-off place, like the house, to create a bridge by means of a concert, as a symbol of union with public space, back to the city. In this way, a shared space, like a stage, closes the gap by means of the connection between melodies and memory. All of this happens while the adagio agonizes in the beauty of spread-out notes, and here Caracas individuates itself in the memories of one who combines reality with the sounds of an instrument. 

In other stories, like “Vuelta a la Patria,” the imaginary of Caracas moves from the interior of the corporeal to the exterior of the parks. In the city, avenues, gardens, silence, and laughter form part of this other form of collective existence that succeeds in connecting the sensation of being there with a yearning for home. Walks through the park, these motions replete with memory, are also united with the migratory movements of those who moved to the capital city, drawn by the deepest of feelings. The symbol of belonging to a city in decay is reflected throughout its streets, in its expressways, at the Bello Monte morgue. Many of the protagonists of Kozak’s stories also relive, or outlive, the anguish of the Caracan life, in a space that’s transferred from memories and yearnings to everyday experiences, and that ends up being part of a shared memory. 

One also encounters a profound sentiment of farewell within these stories, which act like small tunnels that allow us, upon finishing one, to enter directly into another. Each movement implies leaving something behind forever, like in the last lines of “Zanahoria rallada,” in which the narrator—who considers himself a great guy—concludes with “me despido” [“I say goodbye”], which immediately brings this feeling of lack to the reader. This feeling is later extended into another story that follows shortly thereafter, “Ya que para despedirme,” where a quotation from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (“Hablar me impiden mis ojos; / y es que se anticipan ellos, / viendo lo que he de decirte, /a decírtelo primero” [“My eyes prevent my speech; / for they, knowing already, / what I might say to you, / tell it to you first]”) situates the remoteness of words, as part of what is not said, because one’s gaze forebodes everything that is later omitted. 

Part of this omission appears in the contrast of other very short stories, like “Palabras escritas en la arena por un inocente,” and the story following it, “Yo,” where upon citing Idea Vilariño (“Mi nombre no me dice nada” [“My name says nothing to me”]) we begin to think again about what words are for. How, in these two urban accounts, could a word game from the innocent viewpoint of childhood be contrasted with the profound exhaustion of maturity? In the former story, words are just this: little, free sounds that come together in the park, together with the nonsense of the absence of grammatical rules: “¿Mamá, papá, caballo, parque?” [Mom, Dad, horse, park?]. Even so, the profound logic of innocence recreates the instantaneous perfection of life, which is noticed even by a destitute youth who dreams of returning to infancy and reclaiming his dreams. On the other hand, in this space that’s public, hot, Caracan—a little bus—the idea of the Self is far away from the innocence of the parks, and reflects the curious similarity between Caracan public transit and certain prison cells. There, an old woman thinks, at seventy years old, the opposite ideas from those of that boy: she uses, this time, a perfect wordplay; she is astonished by the decline of those who, by age, could be her grandchildren. In this small, enclosed space, “una buseta sucia y destartalada equipada con un reproductor de primera calidad de cuyas cornetas salen palabras nada fáciles de transcribir” [a dirty and beat-up short bus, equipped with a stereo of the highest quality from whose horns come words hardly possible to transcribe], the meaning of the political and historical changes of the last few decades in Venezuela is revealed.

Another open door, between the private and the public, between the house and the city, of music (like jazz) or shared space (like the University), dynamic and sonorous places, could be the completely opposite gesture, which allows us to inhabit the strange world of silence. “El noctámbulo” begins with a quote from Vicente Gerbasi, “La noche impulsa rumores, estrellas, para el noctámbulo, y a su lado corre un caballo con crines de luciérnagas” [The night drives rumors, stars, for the nightwalker, and at his side runs a horse with braids of fireflies], and in this isolated and dark space the mind of an HIV-positive person runs in silence. Here, urban spaces hide in the place of memory, even further within, in that metaphorical form of the unconscious which is like a closed room in a dark part of the house, where memories lie. “Recuerdos de noctámbulo. Recortes, chispazos, imágenes de tragos, cuerpos en movimiento, risas escandalosas” [Memories of a nightwalker. Clippings, sparks, images of drinks, bodies in motion, scandalous laughs] appear to enter and exit a body, from the first to the third person, like a movie in which one is, at the same time, the viewer and the main character. 

In this work by Gisela Kozak, random movement continues in various ways through each of the stories: in the urban spaces of Caracas; in comparisons with other places like Mexico City and Paris; between the politics of the Communist Party and those who have taken power today in the military and political dictatorship; from the rebellion of the domestic tribe, the love of a mother, photographs, film, always coming back to a lengthened time, to an inconclusive autobiography, to a short story that is inherited, that is transformed and that only sometimes needs be forgotten, and so which almost always demands to be mentioned and rewritten, as happens in every one of the stories of Casa de ciudad. 

Claudia Cavallin

Translated by Jack Rockwell

What’s in the gaze? An attempt to place what is rooted, among the mist, in a state of language that allows, in some way, to tell. What you look at is an instant, the composition of an endless chain of moments that, going forward, constitute a singular version of the story. The past is also looked at in this manner: its narration implies a form of interference with the future because the act of remembering activates, at the same time, the act of creating. A movement in two directions whose border is flexible, open to exchange, to the displacement of signs through which one tries to tell the experience in a different time. This pendular movement makes up the gravitational center of this book, recalled and written by Peruvian poet Roger Santiváñez.

Around this center we can see the passage of a generation of writers marked by violence, political rot, and social hopelessness, who chose to respond from the core of these conditions by becoming radical militants in a state of anarchy. The Movimiento Kloaka (Sewer Movement, MK)—active between 1982 and 1984 in several regions of Peru—was the space in which this response materialized.  Santiváñez puts together a polyphonic archive that amplifies the landscape around MK and shows a process that, with neither belonging nor property, happens organically and intersects with the most vital postulates of the Western poetic tradition.  Between these pages, dozens of testimonies look at the MK as a place of questioning, experimentation, and incorporation of heterogeneities, at the precise moment when the neoliberal machine built bridges with literary production and, irrevocably, combined the act of language with the reproduction of capital. 

The Lima narrated in these lines sounds like underground rock, like high speed on the asphalt, like multiple languages boiling their delirium on the edge of reality. Only in this way could such a voice prevail in the midst of war’s rumble. Divided into several sections (Pre-face; Kloaka, Los Subtes, Los Ochenta: fragmentos de un espejo roto; Subte: el sonido de la utopía; Around; and Anexos Kloakensis), this book allows us to move through different temporal spaces and artistic initiatives that set the temperature of the time. Thus, it hurls out a notion: that the language of resistance—as a peripheral place for its voice is built—is emerging from the interaction between literary genres, from their relationship with music, their erosion of visual support, their absorption into other languages, their incorporation of difference into a place which must be continuously dynamited so that the unforeseen (that which is necessary in the creative universe) can happen. 

Roger Santiváñez thus opens a route for looking at that moment of crisis and change in forms of writing in different sectors of Peru. He does so through an exercise of recognition of the collective efforts around art, in order to ratify that in times of crisis every line of individuality is torn, as in the case of MK, in favor of unveiling a path unknown up until that moment. There is also in this work an attempt at comparative dialogue, by tossing these materials as an invisible question into other geographical and social spaces, plagued by the violence and radicality of the globalizing machine in different areas of the continent. This is an example of the possibility of dialogue that takes place among artistic, poetic, and musical activity, and the most recent changes in the social structure of our countries. This is where history has passed, certifying the victory of one against another, the silence of one before another, where the possibility of a nonconformist reading is born, built on the rails of those who have burned their bodies in favor of the voice.   

 Víctor Vimos

In Un objeto afilado, a collection of poems by Brazilian writer Alexandra Maia, there is a spark of dissatisfaction that creates a tension between what one is and what one yearns for. To read these poems is to observe the movement of the tectonic plates of desire. These poems of desire don’t exert control over what they describe and evoke; they’re not an organized representation of wanting something more. A poem is not the submission of language to an expressive desire. It’s an exploration of word and silence as ventilation shafts of something pulsating that resides within. Angolan writer Ondjaki summarizes it well in the poem-epilogue that closes the book: this book opens and defends a poetic space for “non-domesticated materials.”

These poems are like bonfires with free will, yearning for combustion behind each spark. Nevertheless, they are ambiguous resistors to darkness. There is a tension with this darkness, but they continue needing it in order to create an image, a feeling. The relationship between words and silences is not exclusionary. Silence is the moment prior to the beginning of the poem, it is its prelude; it contains the seedling of what will begin to happen. Although meaning is not clear and remains hidden, writing still pursues it; in “De las mil palabras” [“Of the thousand words”] we read: “De las mil palabras / que me piden que diga / vive en el silencio la más pura de ellas” [“Of the thousand words / that I am asked to say / the purest one lives in silence”].

In this journey to find the meaning of words, the poem becomes a vision that allows one to get a closer look into the world. It’s not about clearly translating or representing experiences or feelings; it recognizes the difference between living and naming. Although the poem is not a stable receptacle for life, the voice trusts it, indicating in “Biopsia”: “en la cavidad del verso esculpo esta ausencia por no saber vivirla” [“in the hollowness of the verse, I sculpt this absence for not knowing how to experience it”]. She even goes on to say, later, in an untitled poem: “Deseo un poema / como quien nace” [“I desire a poem / as one who is born”]; the poem becomes a way of being, a method of existence in the world. Nevertheless, it’s an ambiguous exercise. We don’t know if the poem allows for exploring dark and uncharted areas in search of something new, or only for looking at inner territories to rediscover things that had been hidden within itself. To read Maia is to remember that poetry always implies a certain unraveling. In these verses, the voice returns to her and her past as if they were distant and rediscovers them, giving them a new life. 

Although in this book it seems like the verse reaches a transcendental potential, some poems turn towards the reader and, in a few lines, generate the effect of an audiovisual production that breaks the fourth wall that separates the viewed from the viewer. It constructs a world full of life only to show us who or what winds the toy’s mechanism, making it imitate life without living it. There is a tension between construction and destruction: the messages self-destruct, they fail to reach us in the reading, and already they begin to disappear. These poems give life to things just to leave them to die, or even kill them. 

Josué Cabrera Serrano

Translated by Simran Kaur

There is nothing dizzying about what happens in Estrella madre, the second novel from Colombian writer Giuseppe Caputo. There is no chain of events that carries readers breathless along the path the hero takes to transform himself. What’s more, it could be said that, in the strictest sense of the term—the one we have internalized as the universal form of stories—there is neither hero nor transformation, only the character’s acceptance of the real conditions in which he finds himself. It’s as if the whole story had been written to watch how he very slowly emerges from the fantasy that has allowed him to overcome his abandonment, but at the same time kept him stagnant. This absence constitutes the scaffolding that supports the story, and is the reason for its power and beauty.

Narrated in fragments, it goes through the main character’s past and present, his relationship with his mother, with two neighbors and his landlord, and daily life in the community. But in reality, there are only two major events that unfold. In the first, the main character—a son stuck in a half-built, suffocating, color-rich, poor, and dusty world—clings to his wait so as not to assume his mother has abandoned him, in the company of others who do the same: they pin their hopes, their desires, and all their imaginative force on a lie, because it’s easier to live that way than to accept reality. The second moment is when air is breathed again, the end of waiting, which is, at the same time, the loss of hope. Or, more accurately, the loss of a specific kind of hope, of romantic love—that self-induced blindness in which the characters live: “Seré de nuevo el hijo de mi madre” [I will be my mother’s son again], the main character seems to say, when, despite having all the evidence that she will not return, he continues to wait for her, clinging to the signs he has invented himself, to the magnified and embellished memory of what little love she gave him. Madrecita seems to say that she will be the mother of all things that need a mother as she fills her barren belly with rag children and adopts pillows and vacuum cleaners. All the inhabitants of the building where the novel takes place want to believe that the unfinished building in front of us—the same one that is torn down over and over again on the whim of the construction company of the moment—one day will be the most beautiful of all.

They say the deepest truths are born of the imagination. One could say of this novel that it is the story of a Rapunzel who waits, unshakeable, determined, for a love that does not exist. A Rapunzel locked in a tower inside an invented city, half Caribbean, half Andean, full of Rapunzels, where everything is poor and happy, unjust and sympathetic, cruel and tender, violent and playful, pragmatic and excessive all at once: out of something so ugly, something so pretty; out of something so poor, something so luxurious. One could say that this is the story of an invented city with some invented characters, who, like the protagonist, say: “Casi siempre confundo el amor y la tristeza” [I almost always confuse love and sadness]. But that would be saying nothing about the truth the author is putting in front of us: the truth of a country called Colombia that prefers to continue filling its belly with rag children before admitting that life will not provide any real ones; that chooses to believe that one day it will live with dignity, even though right under its nose, government after government, everything that rises is made to fall in order to start again in an endless cycle. Nor would it be telling us anything about the way out of the quagmire that the novel proposes: we must stop waiting, get out of the tower. Estrella madre is the story of a son with no future who learns to breathe in reality and takes the first step out of the tower of illusions made to alleviate the pain of his abandonment. The redefinition of hope. That’s what it’s about.

Andrea Salgado

Translated by Marit Eiler