How to Order the Universe is beautifully, delicately written. Much is left unsaid ... There is a cold sadness to this story of loss—the loss here much more than simply one of childish innocence ... The universe itself here is crushing—all the more effectively conveyed by Ferrada's contrasting and very delicate touch. It makes for a powerful and accomplished book.
M’s systematic attempts to make meaning out of her chaotic life may be futile, but they offer a canny insight into her magical mind ... Ferrada—a prizewinning Chilean children’s book author—cleverly pulls the curtain back at just the right moments to offer a more objective view of M’s young life, to track the story of her disenchantment. In elegant and simple prose, ably translated from the Spanish by Bryer, the author disperses clues to explain what M cannot, like the cause of her mother’s sadness. M’s logical thinking reflects the human instinct to create order out of chaos, but her coming-of-age is realized only once she begins to grasp her messy reality, the tragedies of her childhood, the consequences of her parents’ choices.You’ll find yourself at the end before you know it, still wondering if M finally found the order she craved.
Elizabeth Bryer's whimsical translation from the Spanish feels appropriate to M's exceptional perspective. Ferrada's playful, poignant novel...is fanciful, sweet and moving ... This is a beautifully translated, thought-provoking novel of profound themes and childlike wonder.
Written by María José Ferrada and translated by Elizabeth Bryer, How to Order the Universe fits the vastness of the unknown into a travel salesman’s suitcase ... what initially reads as a story of unconventional father-daughter bonding is actually a coming-of-age tale that tracks M’s disillusionment as she matures into understanding against the backdrop of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. With the strong, stunning honesty of a young mind, M describes the world as she sees it without realizing how much she does not see ... How to Order the Universe is rife with wisdom, lists and wishes, and Ferrada unpacks the strangeness of M’s early years in poetic and simple prose. She juxtaposes the hopefulness of childhood against a dying sales industry and a hostile political regime with an uncommon nostalgia. Using M and her father’s system of typifying phenomena into 'Probable' and 'Improbable,' Ferrada has written a novel that would be classified as 'Truly Improbable' in the very best way.
In How to Order the Universe, readers are thrown into a child’s perspective as she eschews traditional learning in order to make a living with her father on the road. A world of tools and hardware catalogs lends itself to new relationships, unearthed secrets, and a coming-of-age story no one quite expected. This sparse, quiet novel is itself a collection of parts. Not quite a novel, far from a collection of stories, more disparate vignettes than anything else. At times, these feel incomplete. Parts without their fittings ... In short, this is a book of a child learning her own mortality, learning her larger place in the world, creating her own constructs and having them fall apart with experience and tragedy. We see this in a literal sense, as M envisions an omnipotence she calls 'The Great Carpenter,' and soon curses and loses track of this being. In this change we now have the fittings we need to understand this unconventional little story. Here we learn to read between the lines.
Ferrada, an award-winning journalist and author of children’s books, presents an adult debut as haunting as it is charming, a study in contrast between the simplicity of childhood and the heaviness of adulthood. Readers will fly through this slim novel, which is perfect for discussion.
M and D quickly discover that M’s presence positively impacts D’s chances of making a sale, and before long, she’s missing weeks of school at a stretch. Things grow more complicated when E, a photographer, starts traveling with them in search of “ghosts.” These are the Pinochet years, it turns out, and what has seemed at first to have all the charm and magic of a fairy tale carries a much darker underbelly as well. Ferrada, who has published several children’s books, excels in her depictions of M’s 7-year-old state of mind, her attempts to understand the world she’s been born into. The book progresses at a quick clip until it is stalled by a scene of some horror ... This quick and quirky book is as charming as it is unsettling, as appealing as it is wise.
Ferrada debuts with a pithy bildungsroman about a Chilean girl whose parents’ marriage never recovers from the loss her mother experienced under the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship.Ferrada keeps the plot moving along with a winning combination of M’s perceptiveness and innocence. A moving tribute to childhood, Ferrada’s novel is an enthralling tale of resilience, deception, and trauma during a dark time in Chile’s history.
