Samanta Schweblin: Passion and terror
Samanta Schweblin is an acclaimed Argentinian short-story writer whose compact debut novel Fever Dream is shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. A disorientating and utterly gripping psychological thriller and an unsettling exploration of family ties, panic and dread, it is told in spare dialogue between a woman called Amanda who lies dying in...
Malambo kings
Laborde, a town three hundred miles northwest of Buenos Aires in Argentina’s Côrdoba province, was founded in 1903, originally under the name Las Liebres. Populated at the time by Italian immigrants, it now has six thousand inhabitants and is situated in an oasis of wheat and corn dotted with mills. The wheat and corn brought...
Autobiography of a reader
I translate for myself, then for the novel, finally for any future reader. It is for the pleasure of the work of translating that I do it, but I can only begin when I meet a text that moves me as a reader – which for me means to write. Haroldo Conti’s Sudeste was the...
On the delta
Between the Pajarito and the river that’s an open sea, turning sharply northwards, narrowing and narrowing at first, to almost half its size, then widening again and drawing curves towards its mouth, coiling in on itself, secluded in the first islands, is the Anguilas Stream. Beyond the final bend the open sea breaks into view,...
The Pandora paradox
Throughout our convoluted histories, stories have had a way of reappearing under different forms and guises; we can never be certain of when a story was told for the first time, only that it will be not the last. Before the first chronicle of travel there must have been an Odyssey of which we now...
On destiny
As prestigious as he is chaste, a certain person called P likes abstract art, chamber music and Petrarchian poetry. He has devoted two-thirds of his life to a rigorous study of the arts; the remaining third, to dreaming about them. Scrupulousness and serenity are the hallmarks of P’s domestic existence. Very occasionally, he permits himself...
A mother ago
I entered the hospital filled with hatred and wanting to give thanks. How fragile is anger. We could shout, hit or spit at a stranger. The same person whom, depending on their verdict, depending on whether they tell us what we are desperate to hear, we would suddenly admire, embrace, swear loyalty to. And that...
Another side of Borges
We would begin our stroll down the Avenida Belgrano, a wide, busy, modern thoroughfare, trying to speak over the roar and fumes of the traffic. The ubiquitous snub-nosed buses crawled along in step with us, throbbing and belching their murderous black exhaust in our faces. Borges never seemed to notice. He was too busy discussing...
In living memory
Elena When someone you slept with dies, you begin to doubt their body and yours. The once touched body withdraws from the hypothesis of a re-encounter, it becomes unverifiable, may not have existed. Your own body loses substance. Your muscles fill with vapour, they don’t know what it was they were clutching. When someone with...
Oscar Zarate’s urban oasis
The tranquillity of a glorious early summer day on Hampstead Heath is interrupted when an angry blogger and a timid musician get embroiled in a tit-for-tat spat that threatens to escalate into a fractious but comical revenge drama worthy of Laurel and Hardy. So begins Oscar Zarate’s beautifully drawn graphic novel The Park, which charts...
The Park
A silent movie plays and those existential clowns Laurel and Hardy are trading blows in their endless feud. In the real world, things aren’t always black and white. In the technicolour glory of summer’s day in a London park, another cycle of tit-for-tat revenge is about to begin… Award-winning graphic novelist Oscar Zarate’s latest work...
