Positive4ColumnsSince Bonsai, each of Zambra’s subsequent novellas...has been more confident than the last, its voice further refined (his regular translator Megan McDowell has mastered the predominant tone of droll melancholy right along with him) ... Chilean Poet returns to Bonsai’s theme of a young writer’s awakening, but attains its depth by doubling the portrait and tracing both characters through time ... There’s slack in this section of the novel, with the affection it indulges on its motley versifiers. But it also invokes a national theme, justifying the title ... For Zambra’s characters, a literary lineage is easier to cling to than a real one. All too often, their parents are tainted by the not-so-good things about Chile, particularly their roles as victims or beneficiaries or bystanders during Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Fernanda Melchor, Trans. by Sophie Hughes
RaveThe BafflerFernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, first published in 2017 and now appearing in a blistering English translation by Sophie Hughes, surveys a provincial world battered by...storms ... Unlike the titans of the midcentury provincial novel, who conjured their settings through a dreamlike fog, Melchor narrates from up close, pricking at her characters’ nerve endings. Her prose unfolds in long, untamed sentences that barrel down the page like a truck on a dirt road, its engine sputtering with obscenities. (All but one of the book’s eight chapters takes the form of a single torrential paragraph.) Melchor’s feverish voice burns away any semblance of journalistic objectivity, but her methods nevertheless arise from her nonfiction crónicas, vivid accounts of the effects of drug-war violence on the everyday lives of Jarochos, as Veracruz’s inhabitants are known ... Rather than belabor the point, Melchor takes a certain glee in the horror-movie liberties that the theme of witchcraft affords her ... Melchor latches onto each of these witnesses for a single chapter, holding tight as they crash through their ordeals, then abandoning them at the height of their agony. Her close-third-person voice is intimate and coarse, sensitive to pleasure as well as pain ... Few writers since the revolutionary days of the Mexican novel have so vividly rendered the lives of Los de abajo—\'those down below\' ...
Jorge Barón Biza, Trans. by Camilo Ramirez
Rave4Columns\"Barón Biza’s lone novel, first published in 1998 and now appearing in English translation after building a cult reputation in Argentina and beyond. Whatever else The Desert and Its Seed is, it’s hard not to read it as a roman à clef, or even a kind of suicide note. To leave it at that, however, would be to miss the drama that shapes the novel, recounted with cool distance in Barón Biza’s analytical prose: a cycle of immense cruelty and miraculous, but perhaps futile, regeneration ... Barón Biza unfolds this story not as a steady march of dramatic incident but as a volley of thematic counterpoints ... Though at times this seesawing can feel schematic and individual scenes are often thinly drawn, Barón Biza layers so many axes of comparison on top of each other that the various strands of his narration form a teeming network of contrasts.\
