“The Family”, by Sara Mesa. Anagram, 224 pp. $3,450.
when the novel “One Love” was published in Argentina about a year and a half ago, Sara Mesa was almost unknown among us. Although this 46-year-old Spanish writer had already written several fiction books, this novel (Book of the Year for the newspaper El País, in 2020) was the first to have an impact on Argentine readers. In it, Mesa told the story of a young woman who decided to go and live in a small town, where she struggled to fit into the local community. The “love” of the title ironically alluded not only to the violence of relations with neighbors, but also to a concrete, impossible and unsatisfactory relationship, which reproduced the worst nightmares of bad love stories.
His new book, the tenth of his production, is called “The family” and in it, Mesa it repeats its main strength: achieving a lot with very little. A realistic plot, simple language, a story that seems to have been told a thousand times yet moves to unpredictable places. The title family consists of a married couple and four children. Like any family, this is a kingdom or state with its own rules. “Father”, as his children call the chief of the tribe, has Gandhi as a model of life and system of ideas halfway between progressivism and flat earth. He is against consumption, television and games. He hates secrets, swearing and self-determination. Check, always. How do you grow up so isolated from the usual evolution of the world? Every son does it as he can. As in life, there are many strategies for coping with suffocation. Thus, this novel could be read as the story of various adjustments to oppression, with happier endings than we might have imagined at the outset.
Funny and disturbing, “La familia” is a good opportunity to meet one of the most interesting authors of current Spanish literature. After an apparent simplicity, the stories Mesa imagines continue to generate unanswered questions, even after a long time.
In search of paradise, by Nathalie Léger, Chai, 76 pp. $2,050.
As far as Chai translated his novel “About Barbara Loden”, Léger was an unknown author in Argentina. The impact of that reading was such that the publisher decided to repeat the experience. “In search of paradise” is an atypical text, between fiction and poetry, where the personal experience of losing a partner is told. Heartbreaking and intimate “Nouvelle”, his words are a mirror for any reader who has gone through a similar situation: the surprise of absence, pain and writing as the only way to talk about what nobody wants to know.
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Source: Yenny and El Ateneo bookstores.
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