Selva Almada – лучшие книги

The novel tells the story of two friends, Enero and El Negro, who take Tilo, the teenage son of Eusebio – their recently deceased friend – fishing to the Paraná River. While they drink and cook and talk and dance, they try to overcome the ghosts of their past and those of the present: their mood altered by wine and torpor. This intimate, peculiar moment connecting the lives of these three men also links them to the lives of the local inhabitants of this watery universe that runs by its own laws. There are losses, premature deaths… But there is also the stubborn vitality of nature: a bush covered with ancient trees, animals, birds; the river…

Tres adolescentes de provincia asesinadas en la década de 1980, tres muertes impunes ocurridas cuando todavía, en nuestro país, desconocíamos el término “femicidio”.
Tres asesinatos entre los cientos que no alcanzan para titulares de tapa ni convocan a las cámaras de los canales de Buenos Aires. Tres casos que llegan desordenados: los anuncia la radio, los conmemora un diario de pueblo, alguien los recuerda en una conversación. Tres crímenes ocurridos en el interior del país, mientras la Argentina festejaba el regreso de la democracia. Tres muertes sin culpables.
Convertidos en obsesión con el paso de los años, estos casos dan lugar a una investigación atípica e infructuosa. La prosa nítida de Selva Almada plasma en negro lo invisible, y las formas cotidianas de la violencia contra nenas y mujeres pasan a integrar una misma trama intensa y vívida. Con este libro, la autora abre nuevos rumbos a la no-ficción latinoamericana.

Un reverendo y su hija de viaje por el Chaco, en un clima de conflictos y tormentas, entreveros y catástrofes latentes, diálogos filosos y locura solapada. Casi cinematográfica, El viento que arrasa es una novela en la que los personajes son nítidos, corpóreos, se escuchan sus voces, sus modos. Y los del paisaje: el monte, el sol fuerte, los árboles achaparrados, los autos rotos, las camisas transpiradas y las vidas destruidas.

Almada narrates the case of three small-town teenage girls murdered in the 1980’s; three unpunished deaths that occurred before the word ‘femicide’ was even coined. In this brutal but necessary novel, Almada brings to the fore these crimes committed in the interior of the country, while Argentina was celebrating the return of democracy. Three deaths without culprits: 19-year old Andrea Danne, stabbed in her own bed; 15-year old María Luisa Quevedo, raped, strangled, and dumped in wasteland; and 20-year old Sarita Mundín, whose disfigured body was found on a river bank. Selva Almada takes these and other tales of abused women to weave together a dry, straightforward portrait of gender violence that surpasses national borders and speaks to readers’ consciousness all over the world.

Leni crossed her arms, said nothing, and watched the fight unfold. She was like a bored onlooker at a boxing trial, wasting no energy on the undercard, saving her passion for the moment when the real champions would step into the ring. And yet, at some point, she began to cry. Just tears, without any sound. Water falling from her eyes as water was falling from the sky. Rain disappearing into rain. The Wind That Lays Waste begins in the great pause before a storm. Reverend Pearson is an evangelist preaching the word of God across northern Argentina with Leni, his teenage daughter, in tow. When their car breaks down, fate leads them to the workshop of an ageing mechanic, Gringo Brauer, and his assistant, a boy called Tapioca.  Over the course of a long day, curiosity and a sense of new opportunities develop into an unexpected intimacy. Yet this encounter between a man convinced of his righteousness and one mired in cynicism and apathy will become a battle for the very souls of the young pair: the quietly earnest and idealistic mechanic’s assistant, and the restless, sceptical preacher’s daughter. As tensions among the four ebb and flow, beliefs are questioned and allegiances tested, until finally the growing storm breaks over the plains. Selva Almada’s exquisitely crafted debut, with its limpid and confident prose, is profound and poetic, a near-tangible experience of the landscape amid the hot winds, wrecked cars, sweat-stained shirts and damaged lives, told with the cinematic precision of a static road movie, like a Paris, Texas of the south. With echoes of Carson McCullers, The Wind That Lays Waste is a contemplative and powerfully distinctive novel that marks the arrival in English of an author whose talent and poise are undeniable.