RaveAsymptote JournalFrances Riddle’s rendering of Cabezón Cámara’s exuberant range of styles truly shines. Covering everything from lyrics to a funeral elegy and navigating unexpected hybrids with ease—one brief passage, for instance, calls for “a mix of lower-class River Plate dialect and proper Cervantes Spanish”—she deftly captures the rhythms of an often effervescent style ... Slum Virgin is thus never a blind celebration of a space of alterity but rather an exploration of the alternatives posed by those who have little regard for facile categorizations or restrictive roles ... Slum Virgin reminds us that one can never define one’s position in isolation.
Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, tr. Iona MacIntyre and Fiona Macintosh
RaveMusic and LiteratureQueering the past in order to question the many missed opportunities to live in other ways is one focus, but the novel also suggests alternative futures that might yet be possible to construct. And even though Cabezón Cámara has turned to a well-worn tale not widely known outside Argentina, her inspiring iconoclasm resonates far beyond that country’s borders—most visible, perhaps, in The Adventures of China Iron ... The Adventures of China Iron brings to light some of the many possible (and far more positive) outcomes that national poems and narratives had obscured or even occluded outright. And so, even as the novel seems to avoid all contact with the current moment, it actually speaks to us and to the constantly shifting world in which we live, shaking loose new possibilities for how we might reshape the present precisely by unsettling something seemingly so settled as the past.
Julio Ramon Ribeyro, Trans. by Katherine Silver
PositiveAsymptoteAs the title of this volume indicates, there is in fact a politics at play here even if it is one that consists of expanding perspectives rather than articulating clear positions ... Although that effort to incorporate new voices is not always obvious throughout this career-spanning anthology (which also uses the letter excerpt as a sort of epigraph), there is unfailingly a space for studying the sentiments he identified ... Ribeyro powerfully captures this mixture of shame and a strange sense of diminished yet still definable power, which is to say a feeling of holding onto one thing in order to avoid acknowledging how another slowly slips away ... a stirring reflection on the relationship between distress and dignity ... Katherine Silver...not only irons out the occasionally inelegant syntax in previous versions of Ribeyro’s sometimes sinuous prose but also consistently locates a rich sonority within it ... Ribeyro...changes...our gaze. Reality continues to be the same, but we view it through his work, which is to say through a different lens.
Amparo Dávila Trans. by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson
PositiveFull Stop\"Dávila’s output, while not prolific, is certainly profound. Unequivocally adept at ambiguity, she brings a poetic sensibility to each sentence by locating the minimum amount of detail that will produce a maximal effect. But if there is a poetic touch, it is accompanied by the sure hand of an expert narrator.\
