Una deslumbrante novela sobre las huellas que dejamos, las huellas que borramos y las huellas que buscamos reconstruir.

In a calm and lyrical tone, Carlos Fonseca’s works ambitiously seek to incorporate everything. They flirt with unified theories and take joy in connecting ideas in unexpected ways, his protagonists often losing themselves in beguiling mental labyrinths of their own making . . . It is this very bravery that makes it such a pleasure to read his intellectual thrillers about art, nature, and the quest to remake oneself.” Rising star Fonseca’s new novel [is] a literary tour de force, impressively translated by Megan McDowell. Fonseca’s challenging and transcendent novel offers a prescient message about media fabrications and the unreliability of history.” Although throughout the years Julio has come across news about Aliza’s writing and her success as a novelist, the two of them have not been much in touch since their road trip. He’s married, living in Cincinnati, where he teaches at a university. She’s changed her name from Aliza to Alicia and switched from writing in English to Spanish, and she’s decided to take her work “in a new direction … To record the human on its true scale … To make it lighter, more playful, sporadic, like the silhouette of a solitary lion crossing an immense savannah.” Her project, titled The Human Void, includes “four ecological novels, each dedicated to one of the classic elements.” Jeolojik katmanlara sahip bir hikayeyle dönmüş Fonseca. Bu katmanları bir arkeolog olarak tek tek ayırıp önünüze seriyor. “Cenup” Julio adlı karakterin fiziksel ve zihinsel adımlarını takip ediyor. Julio, kısa süre önce ölen arkadaşı Aliza Abravanel’den gelen bir mektup üzerine, arkadaşının elementlere adanmış dörtleme kitaplarından sonuncusunu tamamlamak ve düzenlemek için yola koyulur. Bu son kitap da toprak elementine adanmıştır. a b Suárez, Carlos Fonseca (27 de septiembre de 2016). «Translation Tuesday: Colonel Lágrimas by Carlos Fonseca – extract». The Guardian (en inglés). ISSN 0261-3077 . Consultado el 30 de agosto de 2017.Austral (Anagrama, 2022). Translated by Megan McDowell as Austral (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023 and MacLehose Press, 2023) Coronel Lágrimas (Anagrama, 2015). Translated by Megan McDowell as Colonel Lágrimas (Restless Books, 2016) There are some great nuggets of wisdom and food for thought in here. I found the last section, Theatre of Memory, particularly affecting and the strongest of the many interrelated stories.

Austral is a testimony twice removed, about the contagion between literature and life. It references both what Gamboa has witnessed and what he has observed others witnessing. He writes down impressions, and when the time comes, he stops writing, letting things settle into place in the grander perspective. To witness and embrace solitude: “Literature is precisely what arises when language founders.” One character recollects a portrait of Edith Sitwell by the Chilean painter Álvaro Guevara, which another character misremembers as a fish on a newspaper. Mad ideas, fantasies, and literature impact the real; one image infects another and makes it transform. There is no such thing as essence; everything transfigures through mutual contagion. Juan de Paz birkaç saat önce ,"Yunanların iki ırmağı vardı ." demişti . " biri unutmak için , öbürü hatirlamak için. Lethe ve Mnemosyne." A reflection on identity, rootlessness and violence, written in admirable prose—Fonseca’s most ambitious, most complex and most accomplished novel to date.”Carrington’s life was geographically, artistically and romantically effusive, spanning continents and wars, romantic and artistic entanglements, and a profusion of creative formats.” Sonradan aklını yitiren antropolog Karl-Heinz von Mühlfeld’in anlattıklarını dinleyen Yitzhak Abravanel bu duyduklarını kızına, yazar Alicia Abravanel’e aktarır. Onun izini süren Julio ise romanımızın kahramanıdır. Orta Amerika labirentlerinde, Guatemala, San Salvador, Nikaragua’da geçen olaylarla Abravanel’in bulunduğu yerlerde yaşanılanlarla roman olgunlaşır. And he continued under this assumption as, sitting in his office facing the university campus where he’d spent the past twenty years, he read the beginning of the letter, in which Walesi introduced herself as a member of an artists’ community in the northern Argentine desert. The next lines, though, finally dispelled his confusion. He recognized the name Alicia Abravanel with the kind of muted emotion we feel when we greet our childhood home after years away: a mixture of joy, wonder, and nostalgia. But he didn’t want to give in to the games of memory. He put the letter aside and let his attention wander toward the students outside as they welcomed winter. It can take a long time for cycles to close, but sooner or later they come to their end with the most terrible precision.

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. He is the author of three novels, Coronel Lágrimas, Museo animal, and Austral all published in Spanish by Anagrama and in English by Restless Books and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His novels have been translated into more than ten languages. He is the author of the book of essays La lucidez del miope, a book that explores writers as diverse as Ricardo Piglia, W.G. Sebald, Marta Aponte, Joao Gilberto Noll and Enrique Vila-Matas, among others. For this book he was awarded the National Prize of Culture of Costa Rica, in the essay category. He has written articles on topics such as Simón Bolívar and Alexander Von Humboldt, Ricardo Piglia and technology, Roberto Bolaño and forensic aesthetics, Marta Aponte and the biographical archive, Enrique Vila-Matas and the avant-garde, Wifredo Lam and the postcolonial imagination, Teresa Margolles’s counter-forensic archives, Euclides da Cunha and geohistory, Antonion Artaud and his Mexican journeys, among others….

Arte

The day Julio receives the letter from Humahuaca, he thinks there’s been a mistake, believes it’s not meant for him. However, reading it, he finds out about Aliza’s death and her request that he edit her final manuscript. This letter opens a door to the past, and to almost forgotten memories. Julio recalls Aliza reciting William Carlos Williams, his father’s old Jeep, their road trip to Guatemala. Why did they separate at the end of the trip? He vaguely remembers a fight, but not what caused it. Fonseca is arguably one of the leading Latin American stylists of his generation, and Natural History fundamentally testifies to his belief in writing. At a time of extraordinary accumulation of information, one can think of Natural History as an attempt to redeem the task of writing by placing the creative moment at the center of its polyphony. Is there any greater purpose for literature?” Las tres historias reales hacen referencia a la colonia filonazi que una hermana de Nietzsche fundó, con su marido, en Paraguay, a finales del siglo XIX. La segunda es la sangrienta represión y casi exterminio de la población indígena, hace unas décadas, en Guatemala, por parte del siniestro general Efraín Ríos Montt. Y la tercera, la desaparición de una lengua. La ficticia tiene que ver con un libro inconcluso que la escritora (de origen judío) Aliza Abravanel, estaba escribiendo cuando murió, residiendo en una colonia de artistas, en el norte de Argentina. Estas cuatro líneas argumentales no estarían justificadas, si no fuera porque hay alguien que las vincula mediante un relato escrito en tercera persona. Ese alguien, Julio, es un narrador que curiosamente (y subrayo el adverbio) es presentado por una voz omnisciente, cuando lo más esperable hubiera sido la primera, dado el tono y el contenido con muchos tramos autobiográficos o confesionales. In Aliza’s last manuscript Julio reads about Nueva Germania, a village in Paraguay founded in 1887 by Bernhard Föster, a German nationalist married to Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister, and about Karl-Heinz von Mühfeld, an anthropologist who studies the Nataibo’s existence and their decline. Von Mühfeld works with Juvenal Suárez, one of the last four members of the tribe, which has been destroyed by missionaries and other outsiders. Aliza learns about these historical events while secretly reading the diary of her father, Yitzhak Abravanel. Yitzhak visits Karl-Heinz von Mühfeld in a Swiss sanatorium after the anthropologist has been interned there, and experiences firsthand, Mühfeld’s destruction of the cassette tapes he’s worked so hard to record with Juvenal Suárez. A beautifully knotted novel which unfolds with every traced layer of its deeply affecting narrative” GUY GUNARATNE