Austral

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I have tried in this review to convey the sense of a reading experience. I’m also thinking about the Metropolitan Museum of Art in my hometown, which is currently renovating its galleries for “the art of indigenous peoples”. The new galleries will be white, gleaming and flooded with light. The better to enhance the viewing experience of the lost civilizations of the Aztecs, the Mayans, and the Incas, the conquered peoples of the South Sea Islands and Africa. Cultures that had been, and are presently, fighting off the enforced silences that sometimes have been imposed on them by countries that speak European languages. Those histories are also relevant to the stories and concerns of Austral. A few lines down, we read: “Now he [Gamboa] is there, in the desert, but he keeps on staring at the same postcard … he turns the card over. The name on the piece and its photographer — Elevage de poussiére, Man Ray, 1920 — are crossed out with a fine red line. In their place she has written: Humahuaca, Argentina. A simple gesture that transforms the work.” Transformation, both personal and artistic, is an important theme in Fonseca’s novel.

Austral (Anagrama, 2022). Translated by Megan McDowell as Austral (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023 and MacLehose Press, 2023) El texto está disponible bajo la Licencia Creative Commons Atribución-CompartirIgual 4.0 ; pueden aplicarse cláusulas adicionales. Al usar este sitio aceptas nuestros términos de uso y nuestra política de privacidad. a b «Carlos Fonseca & The Liberated Novel – Electric Literature». Electric Literature. 4 de octubre de 2016 . Consultado el 30 de agosto de 2017.Un autor que va a por todas, a por la gran novela latinoamericana, desde el primer asalto» (Jesús Nieto Jurado, El Mundo). Aliza, romanın bir noktasında genç bir Julio’ya ‘uzun yolculukların problemi, aslında var olmayan bir amacı varmış gibi göstermektir’ diyor. Austral’da o kadar fazla katman var ki, kitabın aslında ne üzerine olduğunu okuyucuya bırakıyor : Kayıp diller ve kültürler, eski dostluklar, hatırlanan In Austral, Carlos Fonseca is pouring out labyrinths. He liquifies them, spilling them out over the reader’s head, an anointing into vanishing languages and peoples.

Fonseca is setting up the reader up for an appreciation of human vanishing. Throughout Austral, a parallel tracing of people, documents and landscapes will, like a wilderness trail, lead the reader forward. But the reader will need to do the work of following the clues in this deep probing literary mystery story. It’s a novel of ideas where the characters tend to get submerged. You’re hoping our hero Julio survives in the story’s cognitive surge . In this innovative novel three losses and three quests are pursued. English writer Aliza Abravanel tries, in a battle with aphasia, to finish her book. A last indigenous speaker is confronted with the fading of his culture and language while an anthropologist struggles to prevent it. And through the construction of an esoteric theatre of memory, a survivor of the Guatemalan genocide of the 1970s and ’80s seeks to recover the memories lost after the traumas of war. And behind these three threads lies the narrator’s own story: Julio, a disillusioned university professor, must try to understand and complete his friend Aliza’s novel, and come to terms with a past he shared with her but has blanked for thirty years. Recall we are still within Alicia’s text that is within Austral. We are still in the land of italics…in the manuscript that Olivia declares may be fiction or memoir, leaving it to editor Julio to decide. “A long chain of narrators trying to understand by retelling a story…” After attending high school at Colegio San Ignacio in Puerto Rico, he attended Stanford University where in 2009 he graduated with a degree in Comparative Literature. He then attended Princeton University where he obtained a PhD. It opens with Julio Gamboa, Costa Rican by origin and a professor at a university in the US, looking at a postcard sent to him from Humahuaca, Argentina, which he first instinctively see as a desert, then a salt plain, before reminding himself of what he already knows - this is a photograph of dust gathered on glass, the 1920 work Elevage de poussière by Man Ray with Marcel Duchamp: https://davidcampany.com/dust-breedin...

For readers interested in climate change and the natural world―but who prefer books a little less on the nose― Natural History offers a layered and at times wonderfully beguiling story about art, history, and mystery that hops generations. Animal lovers will delight at the protagonist’s obsession with creaturely furtiveness and wild animals’ natural ability to self-camouflage. And fans of ambitious structure-benders like Italo Calvino will appreciate the novel’s planet-and decade-spanning mystery that connects 1970s New York to the jungles of Latin America. As the protagonist, a curator at a natural history museum, pieces the clues together, he discovers links between art, science, and religion that change forever how he sees the world.” The words, coming from the kitchen, crossed the living room on that December morning to reach Julio, who had sat in one of the armchairs farthest from the door to try and escape the freezing breeze that periodically slipped in. Recognizing the expression, he stopped rolling the cigarette he had in his hands and looked up. He saw no one. Olivia had excused herself to make more coffee, and the only thing that moved in the room was the Italian greyhound that had jumped up into the chair she’d just vacated. He had the impression that they were acting out a previously rehearsed scene. Just last night, in fact, they’d been right here, sitting in these old leather chairs with three small lamps lighting the scene, telling the story that today she was recounting with variations. It was as if she were afraid he’d already forgotten it, or maybe she thought repeating it was a way of understanding it. Two strangers who were seeing each other’s faces for the first time, united by the trust placed in them by the fragile ghost of the mutual friend under whose roof they were speaking. Just like this, they’d settled in with a couple of beers from seven in the evening until well past ten, though now the morning exposed what yesterday had been only shadow.