Böcker av Carlos Fonseca

From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling novel about legacy, memory, and the desire to know and be known.Julio is a disillusioned professor of literature, a perpetual wanderer who has spent years away from his home, teaching in the United States. He receives a posthumous summons from an old friend, the writer Aliza Abravanel, to uncover the mysteries within her final novel. Aliza had raced to finish her work as her mind deteriorated. In her manuscript is a series of interconnected accounts of loss, tales that set Julio hurtling on a journey to uncover their true meaning. Austral tracks Julio's trip from Aliza's home in an Argentine artists' colony to a forgotten city in Guatemala, to the Peruvian Amazon, and through Nueva Germania, the antisemitic commune in Paraguay founded by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.A story of mourning and return-to one's native country, to one's darkest memories, to oneself-Carlos Fonseca's Austral interrogates the obsessions and upheavals faced by survivors of a rapidly globalizing world. A treasure map of intertwined experiences, each cleaving its own path through time, the novel is a fascinating investigation into the disappearance of culture and memory and a charting of the furthest limits of what language can do. With this remarkable exploration of the traces we leave behind, those we erase, and how we seek to rebuild, Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.

"A tender and thoughtful exploration of the painful irony of being alive and our attempts to make sense of the past as well as the present" KATHARINA VOLCKMER, author of The Appointment"A reflection on identity, rootlessness and violence - Fonseca's most ambitious, most complex and most accomplished novel to date" JAVIER CERCAS, author of Soldiers of Salamis"A beautifully knotted novel which unfolds with every traced layer of its deeply affecting narrative alongside a meditation on memory, mystery and vanishing. Sebaldian in its turns, Austral is a novel of profound questions" GUY GUNARATNE, author of Mister, MisterA dazzling novel about the traces we leave, the traces we erase and the traces we seek to rebuild.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.From the Guatemalan wilderness to the high Peruvian Amazon, passing through Nueva Germania, the anti-Semitic commune founded in Paraguay by Nietzsche's sister, Austral takes us on a long journey south, following a trail of ecological and cultural destruction to excavate contemporary xenophobia."Reminiscent of the best of Bolaño, Borges and Calvino" GuardianTranslated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling novel about legacy, memory, and the desire to know and be known.Julio is a disillusioned professor of literature, a per­petual wanderer who has spent years away from his home, teaching in the United States. He receives a posthumous summons from an old friend, the writer Aliza Abravanel, to uncover the mysteries within her final novel. Aliza had raced to finish her work as her mind deteriorated. In her man­uscript is a series of interconnected accouncs of loss, tales that set Julio hurtling on a journey to uncover their true meaning. Austral tracks Julio's trip from Aliza's home in an Argentine artists' colony to a forgotten city in Guatemala, to the Peruvian Amazon, and through Nueva Germania, the anti­semitic commune in Paraguay founded by Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche. A story of mourning and return-to one's na­tive country, to one's darkest memories, to oneself­ Carlos Fonseca's Austral interrogates the obsessions and upheavals faced by survivors of a rapidly glob­alizing world. A treasure map of intertwined ex­periences, each cleaving its own path through time, the novel is a fascinating investigation into the dis­appearance of culture and memory and a chart­ing of the furthest limits of what language can do. With this remarkable exploration of the traces we leave behind, chose we erase, and how we seek to rebuild, Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.

From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic epic of art, politics, and hidden realities.

Translated by Megan McDowell. A debut about the demented final project of a brilliant mathematician. An allegory of the clash between European and Latin American history.