Kirjahaku

From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling novel about legacy, memory, and the desire to know and be known. Julio is a disillusioned professor of literature, a perpetual wanderer who has spent years away from his home, teaching in the United States. He receives a posthumous summons from an old friend, the writer Aliza Abravanel, to uncover the mysteries within her final novel. Aliza had raced to finish her work as her mind deteriorated. In her manuscript is a series of interconnected accounts of loss, tales that set Julio hurtling on a journey to uncover their true meaning. Austral tracks Julio's trip from Aliza's home in an Argentine artists' colony to a forgotten city in Guatemala, to the Peruvian Amazon, and through Nueva Germania, the antisemitic commune in Paraguay founded by Elisabeth F rster-Nietzsche. A story of mourning and return--to one's native country, to one's darkest memories, to oneself--Carlos Fonseca's Austral interrogates the obsessions and upheavals faced by survivors of a rapidly globalizing world. A treasure map of intertwined experiences, each cleaving its own path through time, the novel is a fascinating investigation into the disappearance of culture and memory and a charting of the furthest limits of what language can do. With this remarkable exploration of the traces we leave behind, those we erase, and how we seek to rebuild, Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.

From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling novel about legacy, memory, and the desire to know and be known. Julio is a disillusioned professor of literature, a perpetual wanderer who has spent years away from his home, teaching in the United States. He receives a posthumous summons from an old friend, the writer Aliza Abravanel, to uncover the mysteries within her final novel. Aliza had raced to finish her work as her mind deteriorated. In her manuscript is a series of interconnected accounts of loss, tales that set Julio hurtling on a journey to uncover their true meaning. Austral tracks Julio's trip from Aliza's home in an Argentine artists' colony to a forgotten city in Guatemala, to the Peruvian Amazon, and through Nueva Germania, the antisemitic commune in Paraguay founded by Elisabeth F rster-Nietzsche. A story of mourning and return--to one's native country, to one's darkest memories, to oneself--Carlos Fonseca's Austral interrogates the obsessions and upheavals faced by survivors of a rapidly globalizing world. A treasure map of intertwined experiences, each cleaving its own path through time, the novel is a fascinating investigation into the disappearance of culture and memory and a charting of the furthest limits of what language can do. With this remarkable exploration of the traces we leave behind, those we erase, and how we seek to rebuild, Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.

Just before the dawn of the new millennium, a curator at a New Jersey museum of natural history receives an unusual invitation from a celebrated fashion designer. She shares the curator's fascination with the hidden forms of the animal kingdom - with camouflage and subterfuge - and she proposes that they collaborate on an exhibition, the form of which itself remains largely obscure, even as they enter into a strange relationship marked by evasion and elision. Seven years later, after the death of the designer, the curator recovers the archive of their never-completed project. During a long night of insomnia, he finds within the archive a series of clues to the true story of the designer’s family, a mind-bending puzzle that winds from Haifa, Israel, to bohemian 1970s New York to the Latin American jungle. On the way, he discovers a cast of characters whose own fixations interrogate the unstable frontiers between art, science, politics, and religion: an aging photographer, living nearly alone in an abandoned mining town where subterranean fires rage without end, who creates models of ruined cities; a former model turned conceptual artist - and a defendant in a trial over the very nature and purpose of art; a young indigenous boy who has received a vision of the end of the world. Reality is a curtain, as the curator realises, and to draw it back is to reveal the theatre of obsession.

This book investigates how nature and history intertwined during the violent aftermath of the Latin American Wars of Independence. Synthesizing intellectual history and readings of textual production, The Literature of Catastrophe reimagines the emergence of the modern Latin American nation-states beyond the scope of the harmonious “foundational fictions” that marked the emergence of the nation as an organic community. Through a study of philosophical, literary and artistic representations of three catastrophic figures – earthquakes, volcanoes and epidemics – this book provides a critical model through which to refute these state-sponsored “happy narratives,” proposing instead that the emergence of the modern state in Latin America was indeed a violent event whose aftershocks are still felt today. Engaging a variety of sources and protagonists, from Simón Bolívar’s manifestoes to Cesar Aira’s use of landscape in his novels, from the revolutionary role mosquitoes had within the Haitian Revolution to the role AIDS played in the writing of Reinaldo Arenas’ posthumous novel, Carlos Fonseca offers an original retelling of this foundational moment, recounting how history has become a site where the modern division between nature and culture collapses.

This book investigates how nature and history intertwined during the violent aftermath of the Latin American Wars of Independence. Synthesizing intellectual history and readings of textual production, The Literature of Catastrophe reimagines the emergence of the modern Latin American nation-states beyond the scope of the harmonious “foundational fictions” that marked the emergence of the nation as an organic community. Through a study of philosophical, literary and artistic representations of three catastrophic figures – earthquakes, volcanoes and epidemics – this book provides a critical model through which to refute these state-sponsored “happy narratives,” proposing instead that the emergence of the modern state in Latin America was indeed a violent event whose aftershocks are still felt today. Engaging a variety of sources and protagonists, from Simón Bolívar’s manifestoes to Cesar Aira’s use of landscape in his novels, from the revolutionary role mosquitoes had within the Haitian Revolution to the role AIDS played in the writing of Reinaldo Arenas’ posthumous novel, Carlos Fonseca offers an original retelling of this foundational moment, recounting how history has become a site where the modern division between nature and culture collapses.

A dazzling novel about the traces we leave, the traces we erase and the traces we seek to rebuild, by one of the most innovative and powerful new voices in contemporary Latin American literature

A dazzling meditation on memory by one of the most innovative and powerful new voices in contemporary Latin American literature.

A dazzling debut about the demented final project of a brilliant mathematician, recalling the best of Bolano, Borges, and Calvino, Colonel Lagrimas is an allegory of our hyper-informed age and of the clash between European and Latin American history. Loosely based on the fascinating life story of the eccentric mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, Colonel Lagrimas is a world-spanning tour de force of history, politics, literature, mathematics, and philosophy that wears its learning lightly, forming an appealingly human story of the forces that created the modern world.

Una deslumbrante novela sobre las huellas que dejamos, las huellas que borramos y las huellas que buscamos reconstruir. En esta brillante novela hay tres pérdidas y tres búsquedas. La escritora inglesa Aliza Abravanel intenta, en batalla con la afasia, terminar su libro. Un último hablante indígena se confronta con el desvanecimiento de su cultura y su idioma mientras un antropólogo lucha por evitarlo. A través de la construcción de un esotérico teatro de la memoria, un superviviente del genocidio guatemalteco busca recuperar los recuerdos perdidos tras los traumas de guerra. Y tras esas tres historias, una muy íntima: la del narrador, Julio, un profesor de letras sin ilusión que, tras ser designado albacea literario de su amiga Aliza, viaja hasta la colonia de artistas donde esta pasó sus últimos días y logra, mediante la lectura de su manuscrito póstumo, ajustar cuentas con su pasado.