PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksGala’s characters are always impressive creations—he gets inside their heads and bodies and libidos—but Gringo is exceptionally magnetic ... Refracting off Gringo’s larger-than-life story are quieter voices, alluring in their different ways ... The social reality depicted in this book is considerably harsher than the versions of Cuba in Gala’s other novels ... The language of Black Cathedral is also more colloquial than in Gala’s other books—in keeping with its oral history form—with only the slightest Caribbean lilt, providing sly, rhythmic embellishments ... Apart from occasional instances that stiffen the prose...the translation by Anna Kushner is flowingly faithful to the original ... The Black Cathedral is a book about survival—every character is in danger of imminent harm—but there’s a melancholy playfulness that enlivens the tragedy.
Maria Gainza, trans. by Thomas Bunstead
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...startlingly original ... By writing openly about her upper-class Argentine family, Gainza is treading on potentially treacherous ground ... And while she does label herself a black sheep...she never denies her excess of privileges. instead, in Optic Nerve, [Gainza] takes her family as one of her objects of study, an operation surely eased by the fact that the relatives she is examining belong, by now, to a family in ruins. The book is filled with images of something once magnificent failing...Gainza’s strategy in confronting the taboo of upper-class birth is to be self-deprecating — she makes fun of herself before you can — yet her gaze on her family is strikingly impersonal, as if she were surveying a curious tribe, or a work of art ... Gainza has always been a comparativist, and this practice of double vision — placing life story and art story side by side — allows the author to tease out unexpected reverberations, and occasionally a common essence, beyond the contingencies of time and place. By way of the comparison, the narrator’s life story is elevated from the chaotic realm of personal anecdote into an aesthetic object.
Samanta Schweblin, Trans. by Megan McDowell
Positive4Columns\"Part of the reader’s pleasure is waiting for the surprise, the off detail that converts the banal moment into the anomaly. We are often not sure where the fantasy is located, inside or outside the characters’ minds. The stories thrive on this ambiguity ... the energy of Schweblin’s prose, carefully replicated in McDowell’s translation, comes precisely from its pared-down quality ... As her work matures, Schweblin is revealing herself to be most masterful, and her material most charged, when she is groping along the murky line between reality and fantasy, rather than out in the daylight performing the fantastic flash.\
