The Mental Load: A Feminist Comic

Che and Aleida during a trip around the Cuban provinces, 1959.

When Aleida March first met Che Guevara, she was a twenty-year-old combatant from the provinces of Cuba, he an already legendary revolutionary and larger-than-life leader. And yet there was another, more human side to Che, one Aleida was given special access to, first as his trusted compañera and later as the love of his life.

But before that, Aleida March was a radical combatant in her own right, devoted to the revolutionary cause with a fervor that stands beyond her relationship with Che Guevara. In the excerpt below, you’ll find the story of the beginning of her political journey, from the start of her life as a soldier of the revolution to her initial, slightly clumsy meeting with Che.

With great immediacy and poignancy, Aleida recounts the story of their epic romance—their fitful courtship against the backdrop of the Cuban revolutionary war, their marriage at the war’s end and the birth of their four children, up through Che’s tragic assassination in Bolivia less than ten years later. Featuring excerpts from their letters, nearly one hundred never-before-seen photographs from their private collection, and a moving short story Che wrote for Aleida, here is an intimate look at the man behind the legend and the tenacious, courageous woman who knew him best—a story of passionate love, wrenching sacrifice, and unwavering heroism.

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An excerpt from Remembering Che: My Life with Che Guevara by Aleida March, translated by Pilar Aguilera

Why did I describe myself as a “combatant”? That word summed up our commitment to changing the status quo. We had complete confidence and faith in Fidel and were willing to fight in order to end once and for all the shame and moral degradation that Cubans had suffered.

There was no doubt or fear in my mind when, one day not long afterwards, on Faustino’s instructions, I approached the pharmacy on the San Pedro bridge. I was going to see Santiago Riera, who was the coordinator of the movement in the province at that time, to tell him I had joined. This was before the arrival of the Granma on December 2, 1956, bringing Fidel back from exile in Mexico, along with his intrepid followers.¹

Although there wasn’t much information about how or when the guerrilla expedition would arrive, the leaders of the July 26 Movement in the province took some measures to support the action, while Santiago Riera returned to Santiago de Cuba to meet with Frank País to find out what was happening. Our group of women, led by Margot Machado, prepared to help by providing first aid to the combatants if there was a clash or wherever else we were needed for other tasks.

We waited anxiously. We heard the initial reports about the events in Santiago de Cuba. On November 30,² in that town on the east coast of the island, young people led by Frank País initiated actions to support the arrival of the Granma and to distract the troops of the Batista dictatorship. Our leading compañeros, Santiago Riera and Guillermo Rodríguez, who had been a part of the National Revolutionary Movement along with Armando Hart and Professor Rafael García Bárcena, arrived to coordinate the actions of our group in Santa Clara. But they only got as far as Camagüey and had to return. We could not contact them and didn’t know what to do. In the end nothing happened in Santa Clara. There were no precise instructions for how we could support the landing of the Granma, even though Haydee Leal had received instructions from Mexico. The movement had a national structure, but was far from being cohesive. We lacked—and here I include myself—the necessary political education and experience to meet the challenges required by the struggle.

In those early days, Haydee Leal’s house was the central meeting place for compañeros of the July 26 Movement leadership in our province. We had the support of her mother, Luisa Díaz. It is important to emphasize it wasn’t only young people willing to lend their support to the struggle, but also many mothers, who understood that they, too, had to take a stand and join the movement.

Then we heard alarming news reports about what had happened on December 2 when the Granma landed. We were keenly aware of the lies spread on the radio and in the press on behalf of the regime. But because we lacked any real information, we were upset by reports that Fidel had apparently been killed. We were distraught with frustration and bitterness until Faustino came to Santa Clara on one of his short visits, and he confirmed the leader of our movement was alive, fighting in the mountains. He described the landing of the Granma at Las Coloradas beach and the clash that had taken place at Alegría de Pío, resulting in the dispersal of the guerrillas.³

I didn’t know that I, too, would soon experience my own baptism of fire. I still remember the trepidation I felt when asked to go and meet someone at the home of (Lolita) Dolores Rosell, a friend and fellow combatant. To my surprise, Gino Done, an expeditionary from the Granma, who had managed to escape the enemy, had come to Santa Clara to participate in sabotage actions—at least that was what I was told. Gino, an Italian who had fought in the Second World War, was a sailor who had made many trips to Cuba. He had worked as a builder in Havana and elsewhere in Cuba, so he had easily found his way to Santa Clara. The mission Gino had come to complete before January 15, 1957, with me as his accomplice was—believe it or not—to throw a grenade at a Christmas tree that decorated the lobby of the building of the provincial government. The objective of this action was to draw attention to the fact that the insurrection had extended to the center of the island.

Small groups had already been formed to carry out courageous actions and sabotage. One of their first aims was to cut the power lines in order to support the grenade attack on the government building, located in the center of Santa Clara. When I think now about how we prepared for this action, I’m embarrassed, although at the time I felt proud that I had been chosen to carry out such a risky mission. I had to go by Lolita’s house that afternoon to pick up the grenade and carry it in one of her handbags. While I waited, I went back home and placed the handbag on top of my wardrobe. I had no idea how to use a grenade and I was totally irresponsible by putting my family at risk, given that anything could have happened.

It was a popular pastime to take a stroll in Vidal Park in the center of town, so nobody at home objected to my going there. I met up again with Gino and, armed with the grenade in the handbag I carried under my arm, we headed toward the government building at the precise time the electricity would be cut off. Just as we were about to execute “the plan,” the lights came back on and we had to leave without being able to do anything. All we could do was go back to Lolita’s house, return the grenade and go home feeling sad and frustrated. Without overstating it, this was my little Alegría de Pío.

On December 5, 1956, at Alegría de Pío, in the former province of Oriente, Fidel and the other expeditionaries from the Granma (including Che, who had joined as the troop’s doctor) were caught by surprise by Batista’s troops. This episode is vividly narrated by Che in his book Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War. He describes how, after walking for long hours through saltwater swamps, suffering many calamities, the survivors of the Granma expedition were completely exhausted. Many of them had lost part of their equipment when they found themselves in an unequal fight in which Che himself was injured. This was the first armed clash for what would become the Rebel Army, and Che described it as their “baptism of fire,” even though it did not end in victory.⁴

We were not entirely aware the tasks we were given would often endanger the lives of our families. Now I look back and recall the number of times I had to lie in order to leave the house. My parents didn’t understand and they certainly couldn’t accept that a young woman would put herself and her reputation at risk, especially in the early days when they were not quite sure what I was doing. Sometimes compañeros would risk coming to my house to leave urgent messages for me. My little niece Miriam was always curious when she learned about such visits. Even when my mother told her not to say anything, she would come to me quietly and whisper, “They came to see you.”

I would always leave the house with the excuse I was going to study at my friends’ home (the González family) or that I was going to work. At the time, my parents never imagined the dangers we faced, or how my activities endangered them also. Batista’s repressive forces had no scruples in applying the cruelest forms of torture. Unfortunately we Cubans were among the first to experience some of bloody practices that in later years became widespread throughout Latin America. It is therefore understandable that, when my parents found out what I was doing, they forbade my outings. Although I was young, I was old enough to make my own decisions. I didn’t want to hurt anyone and was always clear about my role and what I would and wouldn’t do. I know that my parents supported me as best they could, especially towards the end. In fact, my mother accompanied me on more than one occasion, when it was late or when she suspected there might be real danger. As time went by they became more reconciled to my activities and I didn’t have to explain myself quite so much, which meant I didn’t have to lie. Then one day I didn’t return home…

We were always trying to perfect what we did. I had to carry out numerous assignments. There were only a few women and we were very good at distracting enemy soldiers, who became more cruel and despotic as time went on. Under Margot Machado’s orders, I often went to key parts of the city alone or sometimes with her. I also worked with Allán Rosell, who was the provincial coordinator of the movement, and with Osvaldo Rodríguez, head of action and sabotage. In 1957 they were the main local leaders of the movement. That year I also worked with Julio Camacho Aguilera and Raúl Peroso, a very special person, who told me about Vilma Espín, Frank País and the other leading compañeros in Santiago de Cuba.

I came to know the municipal leaders of the movement and later the five regional heads at the time. Undoubtedly, because of the knowledge I had gained and the security of certain contacts, I was used more and more frequently. I had knowledge of and participated in the preparations and plans of the provincial leadership. I also knew about the work of most of the other fronts, such as the workers’ sector led by David Salvador. I received an order to take him to the house of Guillermito Rodríguez’s mother- in-law to stay the night. From there we were to go to Cienfuegos where he would make contact with members of the July 26 Movement and the Revolutionary Directorate.⁵

On these assignments, I also regularly visited the municipalities of Cienfuegos, Sagua, Placetas and Sancti Spiritus; I passed through Cabaiguán and sometimes I had to go to Cruces and Remedios and end up in Yaguajay. My role was to reinforce the work of the various fronts and sectors, assisting in the work of the propaganda team.

In general, the underground movement was active throughout the entire province of central Cuba, which led to us considering actions on a broader scale. We prepared for an uprising on September 5, 1957, in Cienfuegos.

In the middle of all this activity, in May 1957, one of Margot Machado’s children was killed. Her son, Julio Pino Machado, died alongside one of his compañeros, Chiqui Gómez Lubián. It was a terrible, tragic accident, which happened when they were handling an explosive. It meant the loss of two young and valuable lives. I learned of their deaths when I returned from a mission to Sagua. I went to the funeral home immediately. Margot moved us all by delivering words of farewell to her son with extraordinary strength and dignity.

Despite this tragic event we continued to prepare for the September offensive. Margot sent me to Cienfuegos to get an M-1 rifle, but something alerted to me to danger. When I reached Cruces on a bus called La Ranchuelera, I stopped off at María’s house. She was a spiritualist and was used as the pretext for my trip. I was terrified at the prospect of torture that we knew was relentless and cruel; my greatest fear was pentothal, the “truth drug” that supposedly made a prisoner divulge whatever information their captors wanted. This spelled disaster for many lives and projects and the moral destruction of the individual combatant.

I arrived in Cruces on a Sunday morning. I took all the necessary precautions with my visit to the spiritualist, and then I went to see Enriquito Cañer, chief of action and sabotage in the area. He lived in a nearby sugar-growing town, and he decided to travel with me to Cienfuegos to get the rifle and drive me in his car back to Santa Clara. We returned and headed to Lolita’s house where Allán Rosell (coordinator of the July 26 Movement in Las Villas), Emilio Aragonés, Osvaldo Rodríguez and other compañeros were staying. We handed over the weapon without taking many precautions. Margot was horrified at our rashness. We called it a happy irresponsible act because we had completed our mission. In later years when Margot recalled aspects of the struggle, she remembered that incident. Considering the level of danger we had been in, she regretted having sent me on that mission. Nevertheless, I think she was just doing her job. We were all combatants in an underground struggle and there could be no differentiation between us. I believe that this high level of dedication and courage distinguished the combatants in our town from others.

The groundwork for the September 5 uprising was laid in three phases of organization throughout the province. During that period, 35 compañeros of the July 26 Movement were imprisoned due to a betrayal. They had been in a house in Cienfuegos waiting for orders. Despite being savagely tortured, none of them gave away the plans for the offensive and so our preparations continued. The insurrection of September 5, however, did not achieve its desired objectives due to poor organization and logistics. What really limited the possibility of further actions in Cienfuegos was the installation there of a military garrison.

Our combatants displayed great audacity and courage in challenging an enemy that vastly outnumbered them in terms of weaponry. The rebels only retreated when it meant further resistance would be heroic or suicidal. Then we would start over again, never allowing ourselves to be disheartened.

The national leadership of the movement decided to reinforce the province. Julio Camacho Aguilera was the coordinator of the region and his role, in particular, was to organize the September 5 offensive. He left after the uprising failed. Octavio Luis Cabrera was assigned as labor leader and Raúl Peroso became head of action and sabotage. Many of the compañeros, who had been in the leadership, went into hiding in other provinces or were taken prisoner. This caused much instability and was one of the many problems we had to face in our province.

We received an order from Faustino in Havana to contact Lazaro Artola, who had taken a group of about 40 armed men to the Escambray Mountains. I accompanied Guillermito Rodríguez on a trip there to determine if the conditions were favorable for an uprising in that region. Faustino and other compañeros decided to oppose this initiative, an error that caused more than one problem. There was much misunderstanding by members of the movement about other groups willing to participate in the uprising to extend the guerrilla war to an area offering favorable conditions. This area was later used by rebel forces to great advantage. It was a logical step to open a guerrilla front in the central zone, because it was difficult for many to join the war in the Sierra Maestra. Moreover, it would prove to be a crucial factor in bringing down the dictatorship.

Many of the conflicts between the different groups were due, in part, to the lack of unity in our movement. We did not have a single national unified leadership until after the strike of April 9, 1958. Nevertheless, despite these problems, I felt extraordinarily happy to be participating in such momentous events. I was also proud of the role women were playing in the struggle. I learned of the brutal assassinations of Lidia Doce and Clodomira Acosta, both loyal combatants and valiant messengers for Fidel and Che in the Sierra Maestra. Their example made a huge impression on me.

Some time later, Che told me he had written a piece about them and this was published in the first months of the revolution. He partly based his story about those two heroic women (Lydia and Clodomira) on what I had told him about my own experiences in the underground struggle. Lidia had worked under Che’s command in the Sierra Maestra and was devoted to him. Together with Clodomira, she undertook extremely dangerous missions. They were betrayed and brutally murdered. In Che’s tribute to these women, published in Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, he wrote: “I offer these words of remembrance in homage to her today, like a modest flower laid on the vast graveyard this once joyful island became.”⁶

I was rather upset when I learned from Margot Machado that Haydee Santamaría⁷ had been at her house and I had not had the chance to meet her, probably because they took extra precautions for her safety. After the revolution, I had the chance to tell Haydee how disappointed I was not to have met her on that occasion as she had always been a great inspiration to us. She was a woman I really admired, and she continued to amaze me with her courage and fine sensibility in later years.

Many important actions took place throughout the island at the start of 1958. Some of these were organized by the national leadership of the movement and others were initiated by local leaders, who were backed up by the rebel troops. These actions shook the foundations of the dictatorship. During the month of February we got a new coordinator, Enrique Oltuski, whom I introduced to the leaders. We began the formation of July 26 Movement guerrilla fronts, based on Víctor Bordón’s earlier initiative at Quemado de Güines. I later met Víctor Bordón in person.

I participated in the creation of almost all of these guerrilla fronts. My role was a practical one, determining their needs for weapons, clothes and whatever else we had at our disposal. I remember visiting Mongo (Faustino) Pérez sometime just before or after the April 9 strike in Santiago and also Julio Chaviano in Santo Domingo or La Esperanza. I had known Chaviano and his family for some time. In this way, we coordinated our work with operations of the guerrilla forces in the mountains. By this time, the Second Front of the Escambray and the Revolutionary Directorate were active in our province. The group, organized by members of the Popular Socialist Party (PSP),⁸ was active in Jobo Rosado, Yaguajay. It was led by Regino Machado. Members of the Authentic Party and July 26 Movement joined this group and we also provided them with resources.

Preparations for the April 9, 1958, general strike were coordinated by the national leadership of the movement. In the initial phase, it was my role to inform the municipal leaders of the mobilization, and not everyone was receptive to the idea. This reaction was understandable considering the difficulties and errors made in preparing the strike. These errors, along with the mistakes made at the heroic action at Sagua la Grande, were later acknowledged.

It was a different situation in Cienfuegos, where combatants, demoralized by the failure of the September 5 uprising the previous year, refused to participate unless they received sufficient weapons. Unfortunately, they were proven to be correct. The arms offered from Santa Clara did not arrive in time and were hardly used in the uprising in Cienfuegos. The most regrettable incident occurred when the combatants in Sagua had to retreat under indiscriminate enemy air force bombardment. Many lives were lost as young people were massacred trying to escape.

This terrible blow shook up the organization throughout the entire country, and as a result the movement was reorganized. The national leadership was assumed by Fidel’s group in the Sierra Maestra and Fidel became commander-in-chief of all the revolutionary forces, including the militias and the different secretariats of the movement. His prestige and authority were now consolidated.

In assessing the causes of the failure of the April 9 strike, clear differences were revealed within the movement regarding tactics and strategy, and on how the struggle against the dictatorship should proceed. Conflicts between the Sierra (the guerrillas in the mountains) and the Llano (literally: the plain, i.e. the urban underground) arose in almost every decision that was made. Due to a general lack of coordination and structure, the movement was not able to mobilize in towns throughout the country. We lost valuable cadres, among them Marcelo Salado, chief of action and sabotage, and others who gave their lives for the revolution.

As a combatant in the underground struggle, I can say we had many valuable compañeros, who selflessly and repeatedly risked everything. Our work in the towns was very difficult, especially as we never knew who might betray us. The repressive forces did not discriminate on grounds of sex, age or rank. From my experience as a guerrilla, I am convinced that both forms of struggle are necessary, each having an equally important role, independent of whatever errors might be made.

After the strike of April 9 and the subsequent reorganization of the movement, some combatants had to leave and others went into hiding. The provincial leadership ordered me to seek refuge in the Teachers Clinic for eight days until things had calmed down a bit. When we recommenced our activity, we were faced with an ever more ruthless enemy. Members of my own family became victims of the regime’s violent repression; my cousin Laureano Anoceto March and his son Eduardo Anoceto Rega were tortured and assassinated in the aftermath of the April 9 strike.

I continued in my role as the point of contact, a task I carried out along with Diego Paneque, a member of the provincial leadership and head of action and sabotage. Our compañeros were really like our brothers and sisters so it pains me to recall how some like Diego, whom I saw as a loyal, valiant man who had shown great courage, later found it difficult to adapt to the changes and abandoned the revolution.

We continued our contact with other guerrilla groups active in Corralillo, Santo Domingo, San Diego, La Esperanza and Yaguajay. I visited one of the groups located in San Diego in May. It was there I had my first experience of being bombed by aircraft. I hid under a guásima, a native tree. I can’t describe how terrified I was. We returned to La Esperanza taking extra precautionary measures until we reached Santa Clara.

During the offensive by rebel troops I made other trips. On one of these I saw army tanks heading east to the former province of Oriente. We were in a car transporting arms and provisions. I traveled to Matanzas and Camagüey and I went to Havana for the first time. I remember very little of that trip because I was so focused on the task at hand. That is how we all were: dedicated and focused on what we were doing. Every day the situation became more volatile. The dictatorship was destroying an entire generation of young people. Elections were proposed for November 3, 1958, but this ploy was soundly rejected by the people.

The revolutionary offensive began with the rebels moving down from the mountains, supported by forces in the towns. We knew that victory would not be far off. Having strengthened the foothold in the Sierra Maestra, Fidel ordered the invasion of Oriente in the east, and then a move toward the center of the island, repeating the famed exploits of the mambisa armies during the war of independence against Spain. Camilo Cienfuegos, one of the commanders, was selected to lead this perilous mission to move his troop toward Pinar del Río in the west of the island. Meanwhile, Ernesto Che Guevara (now also a commander) had the responsibility to bring together all the forces active in the Escambray Mountains (central Cuba), uniting all the different guerrilla groups including the Revolutionary Directorate, the Second Front of the Escambray, the Authentic organization and the PSP in Yaguajay. Once a united front had been created, Che was to advance and take the main towns, finally reaching Santa Clara, where the enemy’s communication with the east of the country would be cut off.

Camilo arrived first on the outskirts of Yaguajay, where he made contact with two guerrilla forces formed by the PSP and the July 26 Movement. Once we received word of his arrival, Diego and I went to their camp. This was my first meeting with the legendary commander. We ate a meal with Camilo and Sergio del Valle in a very pleasant atmosphere; Sergio was the doctor of the column and Camilo’s assistant. During this meeting we discussed the best way to move into the southern zone via Aguada. On another occasion I went with Serafín Ruiz de Zárate to establish the necessary support structure for the guerrillas. We stayed in a house where Camilo would often stay and I had to sleep in a bed close to his. I will never forget his nightmares; it seemed as though he was fighting the enemy in his sleep. I found it impossible to sleep that night.

Before the arrival of the commanders Camilo and Che, the situation of the small, isolated guerrilla groups in the center of the island was extremely difficult. I never visited Bordón in Quemados. After the strike of April 9, however, I received an order to bring him to the town of Cienfuegos. He could no longer stay in that area after he had participated in the ambush and execution of Colonel Pedraza’s son, who was an agent of the SIM, one of the regime’s most repressive organizations. I picked up Bordón at the Washington sugar mill near a cane field close to Sagua and Quemados. Bordón showed me Pedraza’s pistol that he had taken from the son. The weapon was dedicated to Trujillo, the dictator from the Dominican Republic. I wouldn’t allow him to keep the gun because of the danger it posed as evidence, so we headed for Cienfuegos unarmed. I left Bordón at a clinic in the care of Digna Sires, Ruiz de Zárate and Osvaldo Dorticós, who took him to the mountains.

I carried out a few other similar missions that year in a very dangerous and tense atmosphere. I was already being watched by Batista’s forces. They had been to my house to conduct searches on a few occasions. I was lucky to escape by pure chance or through the incompetence of the police—maybe it was both. But it was clear that my days in the underground struggle were numbered.

I carried out one of my last tasks as an underground activist after the fraudulent elections in November 1958. I received the order to go to the Escambray Mountains via Sancti Spiritus with the aim of taking funds to the leadership to help finance the guerrilla struggle. My mission also involved taking Dr. Rodríguez de la Vega to Havana where he was working with a section of Batista’s army, which supported the July 26 Movement. We were accompanied, on that occasion, by Marta Lugioyo, Serafín Ruiz de Zárate and Dr. Graciela Piñera, who was going to receive orders and new contacts for actions being planned.

Although this was an important mission, for me it was just another assignment. I knew I would meet the famous commander Che Guevara this time. Che had reached the foothills of the Escambray during October, heading the “Ciro Redondo” Eighth Column, named for the outstanding combatant of the assault on the Moncada barracks, who was killed in combat in the Sierra Maestra. Che was now leading the rebel force invasion of central Cuba. I should not need to stress here that my sole motivation was a desire to complete the task I had been given. I was like any other combatant following orders. I had no expectations beyond that.

Of course, I had heard about the legendary exploits of Ernesto Che Guevara. Stories about him were related almost on a daily basis on the clandestine Radio Rebelde (the rebel radio station). Batista’s government had labeled him a communist. “Wanted” photos of him and Camilo Cienfuegos were posted around the streets of Santa Clara. When I eventually met Che, I realized the photo on those posters looked nothing like him.

My journey climbing up the Escambray was most uncomfortable because, in order to avoid being robbed, I couldn’t tell anyone I was carrying money, which was taped to my torso. As darkness fell, I found it harder and harder to keep up with the others on our hike to Gavilanes, where Che first set up a camp in the liberated zone of Las Villas. On arrival, I met with Dr. Vincente de la O., the doctor who attended to the wounded. I stayed in the little hospital they had set up but could not remove the adhesive tape I had stuck to my body.

In the morning we set off again, this time on horseback, heading to El Pedrero. By nightfall we reached the guerrilla commander’s camp. This was my first close encounter with the much admired troops of the Rebel Army. We were greeted by Oscar Fernández Mell, the doctor of the guerrilla unit, who had come with Che from the Sierra Maestra, as well as Alberto Castellanos, Harry Villegas and others; everyone was trying to get a look at the new faces, especially mine, as I was young and one of the few women to visit—a rare presence in the guerrilla camp. In fact, some of the boldest in the group dared to ask if I was the girlfriend of one of the new arrivals.

Oscarito Fernández Mell showed us around and introduced us to everyone. As was to be expected, Che first met with Rodríguez de la Vega and then Ruiz de Zárate. Ruiz de Zárate had already been in the Escambray until he realized his expertise was not needed there; he then decided to return to his work in the underground struggle in another town.

Finally it was my turn to meet Che. I was standing next to Marta Lugioyo, a lawyer and member of the movement, who had met Che on a previous visit.

After being introduced to the commander, she took me aside and asked me what I had thought of him. I replied somewhat casually that I thought he wasn’t bad, and that I found his penetrating gaze rather intriguing. I saw him as an older man. Marta, on the other hand, commented on his beautiful hands, something I had not noticed at the time, but did later on. After all, we were just two women meeting a rather attractive man.

When I had the opportunity to speak to Che, I told him I had come to deliver a package. The adhesive tape was still giving me terrible pain, and I asked him for help to remove it. So that was our first meeting.

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FOOTNOTES

1. After his release from prison in May 1955, Fidel Castro went into exile in Mexico, where he continued to organize the revolutionary July 26 Movement.

2. On November 25, 1956, a group of 82 guerrillas left the Mexican port of Tuxpan in a yacht called the Granma. In order to distract Batista’s forces, Frank País, head of the underground July 26 Movement in the former province of Oriente, organized a general uprising on November 30, the date the expeditionaries were expected to arrive. The plan involved attacks on the headquarters of the National and Maritime Police in Santiago de Cuba in order to obtain arms for the guerrillas and prevent the concentration of the dictatorship’s forces. Unfortunately, this was not successful. Moreover, the landing of the Granma was delayed until December 2.

3. On December 5, 1956, with the help of campesinos from the area, the rebel forces reunited under the leadership of Fidel Castro in the area of Cinco Palmas.

4. See “Alegría del Pío” in Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War.

5. The Revolutionary Directorate (DRE) was one of the revolutionary movements opposed to Batista. It had been founded by student leader José Antonio Echevarría in 1955.

6. See Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War.

7. Haydee Santamaría was one of the two women who participated in the July 26, 1953, armed attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba. She was captured and imprisoned. During the revolutionary war, she fought as a guerrilla in the Sierra Maestra.

8. The People’s Socialist Party (PSP) was the former Cuban communist party.

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TALKING ABOUT ABOLITION: A collection of powerful interviews with scholars, organizers, and activists who are leading the movement to end policing and prison.

Abolitionist thinkers have been envisioning police-free communities for decades, but only in the aftershock of the racial justice uprisings of 2020 have their radical ideas entered into mainstream discourse.

“Through these powerful interviews, Sonali provides a window into the visionary work of on-the-ground organizers developing the concrete practices of an abolitionist future. In the process, she reminds us that abolition is not an abstraction, but instead a guide for the work we do now to build a better future.” —Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing

Jessica Sequeira’s translator’s note for “The Eighth Wonder” by Vlady Kociancich

Vlady Kociancich’s The Eighth Wonder, the first of her works to be translated into English in over 30 years, follows Alberto Paradella, a lawyer slash travel journalist slash fledgling translator in his early 30s who, in a fit of self-doubt and self-delusion, tells everyone he knows the very charming and relatable lie that he is writing a book. Set in the 1970s during the Argentine Dirty War, Paradella soon leaves Argentina, drifting across Europe and falling deeper into the schism between reality, memory, and fantasy.

In her compelling Translator’s Note, which you can read below in full, translator Jessica Sequeira breaks down the complexities, idiosyncrasies, and the joys of translating Kociancich’s novel, and rendering into English the many colloquialisms and layered references found in the work. And, of course, the inescapable presence of Joseph Conrad.

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Double Itinerary

Along with her novels, Vlady Kociancich worked on a translation of Joseph Conrad’s The End of the Tether, which according to her obituary by Daniel Gigena in La Nación, “había sido muy elogiada” (was highly praised). This translation is present in The Eighth Wonder, explicitly given that the narrator is working on a translation of this book, as well as in more hidden forms.

Alberto Paradella, the lawyer-turned-writer-turned-translator-turned-journalist-turned-scriptwriter at one point refers to the journey between the Spanish and English versions of the text he is working on as a “double itinerary”; the metaphor of the journey as a bidirectional translation, where the very process of moving alters the elements in movement, carries through the book in many ways. In the novel, Paradella cannot seem to finish the translation, due to distractions, heartbreaks, travels, and misplacements of the manuscript. In “real life,” Kociancich did finish the translation, which she worked on at the same time as she wrote The Eighth Wonder, and which was published as Con la soga al cuello by Emecé in an edition with a noose on the cover, later reprinted in an edition by Hyspamérica together with Sergio Pitol’s translation of El corazón de las tinieblas (Heart of Darkness) and a prologue by Jorge Luis Borges.

There are multiple Spanish translations of The End of the Tether—En las últimas, Situación límite, El cabo de la cuerda—but Kociancich’s title Con la soga al cuello, which can be more literally translated as With the Rope Around the Neck, is my favorite. It slightly shifts Conrad’s title, just as Borges’ title Otra vuelta de tuerca (Another Turn of the Screw) gave a further swivel to the novella by Henry James.

Which makes me think: maybe Paradella did finish his translation. The entirety of The Eighth Wonder could be read as Kociancich’s translation of Conrad’s The End of the Tether taken to its extreme, where the translator has entered so deeply into the book that what she translates are not just words, phrases, and ideas, but scenes and atmospheres, so that the book journeys from the colonial world of Singapore to the contemporary world of Buenos Aires. This is something different from “rewriting,” The dizzying movements in The End of the Tether across land and sea, from the English boardinghouse to the Malaysian coastline, with stops at temporary ports and the only home one’s boat, are mirrored in the Argentine travel journalist’s movements from Villa del Parque to the Berlin metropolis, passing through airports with only books and dreams as one’s home. Transition and movement become the only constant, until it becomes impossible to return or even locate home.

An endless journey, a trip one cannot escape, which might be a synonym for nightmare. Or as Conrad puts it: “Captain Whalley, substantial and dignified, left well-nigh alone in the vast hotel by each light-hearted skurry, felt more and more like a stranded tourist with no aim in view, like a forlorn traveler without a home.” From Conrad’s The End of the Tether to Kociancich’s La soga al cuello to Kociancich’s La octava maravilla to this translation The Eighth Wonder—this too has been a journey, one of many possible.

In an interview with Silvina Friera for Página/12, Kociancich said:

Quería incorporar la idea de que todos vivimos traduciendo la realidad, traduciendo a las otras personas, aunque nunca vas a conocer a alguien enteramente. Traduje una de las más hermosas novelas de Joseph Conrad, La soga al cuello, hice xtoda esa experiencia porque no estaba escribiendo ficción. Al traducir a Conrad, a quien venero, me di cuenta de que tenía que conseguir el tono de la prosa de Conrad. Lo que me quedó fue la experiencia de que realmente estaba traduciendo, dando una versión, porque, lo mismo en la vida, hay sentimientos que son intraducibles.

(I wanted to incorporate the idea that all of us live translating reality, translating other people, even if it’s never possible to know somebody completely. I translated one of the most beautiful novels by Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether, I went through that whole experience because I wasn’t writing fiction. While translating Conrad, whom I venerate, I realized that I had to achieve the tone of Conrad’s prose. What stays with me from that experience is that I was translating in the full sense, giving my own version, because just as in life, there are sentiments that are untranslatable.)

“The Eighth Wonder is both things [cinema and journey], because the cinema is a journey, and the journey is the substance of cinema. The two occupy time and space, but outside of the moment in which they exist, they have no reality at all.”
—Vlady Kociancich, The Eighth Wonder

“Whalley could in a half hour of solitude live again all his life, with its romance, its idyl, and its sorrow.”
—Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether

The Great Pyramid of Giza, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus: these were Herodotus’ seven ancient wonders. The eighth wonder, in this novel, is simultaneously the journey and the cinema. Both are all-absorbing; both are forms of movement that transform one’s mind. The seventh art of the cinema, and the seven wonders of the world: these are perhaps like the seventh note in a musical scale, the point of maximum tension before the eighth begins a new scale.

I think of the Spanish phrase “me paso la película” (I see it as if it were a film), which evokes the moment that one sees everything flash through one’s mind, as if it already happened. There is a pleasure in this capacity for fantasy, for viewing everything at once. Something like the complement to the bardo after death, but projected into the future, where one observes what is to come and develops the seed of the present into a satisfying narrative arc, with all its happiness or tragedy, its “risas y penas” (laughs and griefs), as the salsa singer Héctor Lavoe put it. The phrase cradles this paradox; depending on the context, the phrase could mean bliss or tragedy. “Me paso la película” could be used in almost any context, from the romantic (say, a fantasy about a person one desires) to the terrifying (say, fear of an accident). The capacity to envision bears everything.

Here we can move to an actual film. The brief 1978 documentary Borges para millones begins with the process itself of shooting, attentive to its own creation. Then it abruptly cuts to Borges, seated in a chair, with waxen-looking skin and carved features, in Technicolor. He speaks fast, like an automaton, without pauses, as if he’d spoken the same lines a million times before, opining that typical Argentines are from everywhere, “fácilmente cosmopolitos” (easily cosmopolitan), and should thus read all the books, live all the experiences, “no negarnos a nada” (deny ourselves nothing). He is currently learning Icelandic, he says. The documentary speaks of Borges as an incessant traveler, a mythical public figure; it speaks of his childhood memories with their endless mirrors, of his books of poetry, and of how one is constantly working at literature via the imagination. Images of the streets of Buenos Aires appear in faded yellow, including an inner patio with a palm tree.

Borges wasn’t just a poet shut away isolated in his library, the documentary argues, even if he spent infinite hours poring over Rafael Cansinos-Asséns’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights, the writings of Macedonio Fernández, and so many other works, along with writing for the magazine Sur and working at the Biblioteca Nacional. The death of his father hit him hard; the rain in “La lluvia” brings this figure back:

Porque ya cae la lluvia minuciosa.
Cae o cayó. La lluvia es una cosa
Que sin duda sucede en el pasado.

(. . .) Esta lluvia que ciega los cristales
Alegrará en perdidos arrabales
Las negras uvas de una parra en cierto

Patio que ya no existe. La mojada
Tarde me trae la voz, la voz deseada,
De mi padre que vuelve y que no ha muerto.”

(Because now the infinitely fine rain falls.
It falls, or fell. The rain is something
That no doubt happened in the past.

(. . .) This rain that blinds the glass
Will bring joy to a godforsaken suburb
And black grapes on a vine in a certain

Patio that no longer exists. The wet
Afternoon brings me the voice, the desired voice,
Of my father, who returns and has not died.)

An episode of septicemia, with its hells and paradises, its nightmares and hallucinations, transforms Borges into a story writer. There are lyrical scenes that show a guitarist playing for his shadow on the wall, a street fighter struggling with a never-seen assassin; there are psychedelic sequences of a hand plucking a yellow flower, sugar overspilling a teacup, a dead man lying on the steps, a woman dancing in gauzy white scarves and looking out from a balcony at ruins, a doll with red hair sitting in a chair in flames, in the middle of a battlefield.

The waxen Borges speaks of the fascinations of the labyrinth, a building purposely constructed for people to get lost in, and of the garden as a lost labyrinth, as in his story “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” (“The Garden of Forking Paths”). He speaks of writers as architects of labyrinths, of books that bifurcate and multiply, of dancers that weave mazes in time, of joy that becomes torment, and of how in the magical flipping of the pages, past, present, and future might coexist. Also of the Minotaur and the golden thread of Ariadne. Of how the fear we are lost coexists with the hope there is an architecture for the world, a secret center that, divine or demoniacal, means coherence, not chaos. Of how each language is a series of laws for the game, of how language is an artificial system compared with reality. Of how he writes with the starts and ends of books in mind, with the writing process a journey between them. He speaks of death as a consolation, and of how the task of man is to arrange the conditions for his own end. Of how immortality would be hell. And of his fascination in the idea that people might go on living after death, in oblivion. He speaks of his blindness, of how he has lost the colors red, white, and black (darkness is a myth, as he cannot find darkness even in sleep), of how he now lives in a yellow mist. He has returned to the gold of the tigers that fascinated him in his childhood, the title of his book of poems, El oro de los tigres (The Gold of the Tigers): the first and last color. He speaks of how he wants to die. He speaks of how he is happy.

The script is a work of art. Vlady Kociancich is the co-writer and appears in the opening credits. In a sense, The Eighth Wonder, with its subplot to do with writing a film script about an Indigenous poet lauded by millions, whom nobody genuinely knows, also translates this documentary about Borges, with its many images, into a different plot. Or perhaps the mirrors of its labyrinths began to weave themselves in the mind of Kociancich years before, in her student years, when she studied the verbal music of old English alongside Borges, her friend.

El mundo es unas cuantas tiernas imprecisiones.
El río, el primer río. El hombre, el primer hombre

(The world is a few tender imprecisions.
This river, the first river. This man, the first man)

Borges wrote these lines in his poem “Manuscrito hallado en un libro de Joseph Conrad” (“Manuscript Found in a Book by Joseph Conrad”).

“The happiness my translations gave me was not free of disquiet. Soon I discovered that my fear was ridiculous, that the people who lectured me on my contempt for reality, and themselves seemed so alert to it, were alert only to their own dream.”
—Vlady Kociancich, The Eighth Wonder

“What to the other parties was merely the sale of a ship was to him a momentous event involving a radically new view of existence.
—Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether

There is disquiet in the absorption that translation requires, the way the self enters another world at the possible expense of the current one. Others might perceive you as pie in the sky, head in the clouds, even take advantage of you in your perceived absence. This is, at least, how Alberto Paradella portrays translation in Kociancich’s novel; he admits that translation creates worlds for him more interesting to him than the “real” one, even as he realizes this is a possible synonym for what others see as madness, and insinuates that as he translates, his wife gets up to other activities. There is a fear at the root of Paradella’s argument that translated life outstrips real life, and that the real world seems less rich than the world of the book, to the extent one will not want to come back, or be unable.

To live, even write, is to be there, other. To translate is to be here, oneself. Similarly, for the protagonist of Conrad’s story, Captain Whalley, the true life is the life of ships, and changes of fates onshore seem only laterally relevant, near unreal. Even his beloved daughter exists as a figment of his imagination. Why could one possibly want to live somewhere else, or in constant movement, instead of existing wholly and firmly in the world? Where is the pleasure in this? I, thinking of Paradella (and Kociancich and Conrad) need to believe that translation in texts, and through air and sea, need not be masochism or escapism, or a form of going mad in the purgatorial back-and-forth waves of language. There must be a pleasure in losing oneself in the details of something not oneself. What is this pleasure?

The seventh definition of “love” in the Diccionario de la lengua española of the Real Academia Española is: “Esmero con que se trabaja una obra deleitándose en ella.” (The care with which one dedicates oneself to a work, finding delight in it.) The first is: “Sentimiento intenso del ser humano que, partiendo de su propia insuficiencia, necesita y busca el encuentro y unión con otro ser.” (Intense sentiment of the human being that, departing from their own sufficiency, needs and seeks out the encounter and union with another being.)

“When I discovered that this mutation, this sort of deformed dwarf that vigorously leapt about in language, was stretching out its hand to me, my admiration for the supposed whims of the language had no limits.”
—Vlady Kociancich, The Eighth Wonder

“Did words mean anything? Whence did the gift of speech come? The violent beating of his heart reverberated in his head—seemed to shake his brain to pieces.”
—Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether

A woman sitting in front of me at the notarial office has a tattoo on her back. It is a hot summer day and her minimal clothing reveals the entire ship, which has multiple overlapping sails. Tired, I look at it without looking. Then her number is called. When she turns toward the counter, the angle of her skin and the light shift. The tattoo briefly changes its form—now it looks like a claw—and then vanishes from sight. Is translation the ship? The focus of the light? The move to another seat, where one can see from another angle?

The tics of language, so easy to pick up almost without realizing—repetitions of transitional phrases like “you know” or “super,” colloquial local expressions, such as “me paso la pelicula,” localisms of a Galician waiter, or those Spanish refrains that prior to his phase as a translator Paradella copies from a book, which filter into his speech—replicate themselves with ease, making their way into one’s language as unconscious imitation. (Of writing from other parts of the world, too: Victoria Ocampo smiles toward France from her happy oblivion in the afterlife.)

Translation is a mutation of language, but not direct replication; something happens in the process that shifts the direction of the ideas. Language travels and shifts through time just like the characters in the book. And for those attentive to them, these shifts can be as world-configuring as external events.

When one is expecting to do so, it is easy to find a double of the person one has loved deeply, and lost. It is not a happy experience.

“It proves, painfully in my case, the never accepted reality of death.”
—Vlady Kociancich, The Eighth Wonder

“The old ship ought to have known the road better than her men, who had not been kept so long at it without a change; better than the faithful Serang, whom he had brought over from his last ship to keep the captain’s watch; better than he himself, who had been her captain for the last three years only.”
—Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether

I am reading neither the Emecé nor the Hyspamérica version of Kociancich’s Conrad translation, but the Austral edition, with a prologue by José María Guelbenzu that draws attention to how “the serang, the old and silent Malay, is at once a presence and shadow, ever attentive to the instructions of the captain, and carries out a key role in the difficulties of Whalley, in command of the Sofala. His inclusion in the novel is solely functional, but the mysterious weightlessness of his presence raises him above mere utilitarianism.”

In the colonial world of Conrad’s Malaysia, the serang is a native captain of a crew of sailors, and doubly able to do everything the white man does. He is the shadow captain, the one who knows the shore as well or better than the colonial skipper. The fact that Captain Whalley conceals his increasing blindness from the others on the ship does not, in some sense, matter; he already relies on others to do his work. In The Eighth Wonder, the fact Paradella is perhaps slowly going mad also, in some sense, does not matter. Others are the secret and invisible organizers of his life, who build him an infinite labyrinth of dreams and fantasies. The redheaded Paco Stein might be his serang, his alter ego, his author.

Or perhaps all of this is the reverse. Mirrors upon mirrors. Is Paradella the betrayer or the betrayed?

The word “serang” appears in Kociancich’s novel in an oneiric sequence where it is not capitalized, and emerges as a mere nightmarish sound in the brain of the anguished Argentine, who compares himself to a captain going blind. Without reading Conrad, I would have found the word impossible to understand. The reader, like the captain, needs landmarks. As a translator I added a few, not too many. (Thank you to Jorge Fondebrider for helping with the Argentine expression irse a Berlín, whose reference to the purgatory of childhood games I did briefly gloss.) Should I have left the reader completely unmoored?

Where in The End of the Tether, geographies are intimately interconnected through the systems of colonialism, in The Eighth Wonder they are connected through the networks of capitalism, encapsulated in the travel industry. Within these models, the authorial minds of Conrad and Kociancich build their worlds of dream, fear, fantasy. Often these worlds have to do with the double. I ask myself why, for Kociancich, the presence of a double illustrates the reality of death. The romantic idea of forever relies on the romantic idea of uniqueness; without this all people are interchangeable copies. The double is a threat that one is not unique, that one will be replaced easily enough and forgotten, that nothing is eternal. The double mocks tragedy. Even finding a replacement means little, for the replacement can be replaced. Wouldn’t this, instead, suggest a kind of hellish immortality, with all of the versions coexisting in time?

There is the double who works on one’s behalf, the shadow double. There is the double as proxy, the one who in a world of fantasy replaces an absent father or partner. There is the professional double, who is so similar in many cases it can produce, if not jealousy, then a challenge to one’s own sense of uniqueness, until one remembers the many differences that restore one’s sense of self. There are doubles in character who are totally dissimilar in physical form. There are doubles whose presence serve as reminders, déjà vus or premonitions. There is the soul. There is the scribe. Kociancich’s script notes that when Borges started to go blind, his mother became his amanuensis.

Guelbenzu’s introduction presents translation as a kind of anguished double or replacement for writing. Describing Conrad’s father, a Polish revolutionary, he says: “A partir de su regreso del exilio abandona la creación poética y, débil de salud, se dedica a la traducción.” (Starting from his return from exile, he abandons poetic creation, and with ailing health, dedicates himself to translation.)

“I was rescued from lucidity and terror, suspending until this moment, the moment I write, my memory of the advice of a madman. ‘Don’t depend too much on your witnesses. It’s going to hurt.’”
—Vlady Kociancich, The Eighth Wonder

“The only credential he could produce was the testimony of his whole life. What better recommendation could anyone require? But vaguely he felt that the unique document would be looked upon as an archaic curiosity of the Eastern waters, a screed traced in obsolete words—in a half-forgotten language.”
—Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether

The other day my sister said to me, “Remember when we dreamed up that script for a television series together in the car, to pitch to a network, about . . .” and as she kept talking, I did remember, vaguely, but at the same time I doubted that memory, thinking that I only believed it real because she had said it, and that I’d certainly never have remembered it if she hadn’t reminded me. And what if others do not remember, or talk about something else?

That, of course, is the usual way of things. And so one tries to be a witness to oneself, to become one’s own double in observing one’s actions, a private detective turned on the mind.

The madman in the garden becomes a nucleus, his selves past and present circulating around him like protons and electrons, his own being the sole fixed reference point. If witnesses cannot be trusted, the self becomes a constant translation of memories and intuited displacements. And maybe the opposite is true, too: The Indigenous poet in the novel has many witnesses to his movements—this could even be the definition of fame—but nobody understands his inner world. He is as lonely as the madman.

“The garden was a very dark pit from which the trunk of the palm rose up like the mast of a boat with gathered sails.”
—Vlady Kociancich, The Eighth Wonder

“Then you steered straight for the land, and by-and-by three palms would appear on the sky, tall and slim, and with their disheveled heads in a bunch, as if in confidential criticism of the dark mangroves.”
—Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether

The narrator’s garden with a palm tree is a reassuring symbol of home. It is the shoreline to which his boat always returns, the center of his labyrinth of love and anguish. Yet there is something strange about this garden with one plant from each species, as if it were a botanical encyclopedia full of “poor beasts in a zoo,” and about the palm, a “geometrical mutant.” This is not a place where beauty flourishes in the wilderness, but a private oasis of serenity cultivated within a hostility of cement. Who is the invisible gardener? Are they able to leave the garden of their own free will, or are they an inmate locked away like the plants and flowers? I keep thinking of that scrubby palm in the garden, not tame like the other plants, a bit of entropy in paradise.

In her essay “Urgencia por la maravilla” (The urgency of wonder), which introduces the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México edition of this book, Gabriela Damián Miravete discusses how the author belongs to the “race of the nervous”—one of Kociancich’s books is called La raza de los nerviosos—and can be read in the tradition of fantastical literature, the literature that contains what Cortázar described as “the sentiment of the fantastic.” Kociancich, she writes, was “interested in exploring the crevices that open every so often like tiny abysses in tangible reality, and are perceived by those alert to signs.” Influenced by the authors she loved such as H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Shakespeare, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Julio Cortázar, and P. D. James, but also by the glossy fashions of the luxury travel magazine she worked for, Kociancich read symbols, mythologies, and structures in the everyday as much as in literature.

What does the palm tree mean? becomes the writer’s question of, In what languages can we write about the palm tree?

“The dissonance occurred in both readings, and although I perceived it, I couldn’t manage to locate it. It was, to put it this way, beneath the syntaxis, hidden in the depths of the tale. Like a fish, it brushed against me and vanished.”
—Vlady Kociancich, The Eighth Wonder

“But the iron in the pockets of the coat had done its work; and the Sofala, heading north by the compass, made untrue by this simple device, was no longer making a safe course for Pangu Bay.”
—Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether

In the pockets of a coat, in Conrad’s story, a would-be assassin has hidden small lumps of iron, which in their magnetic power are capable of diverting the course of a boat. In pursuit of his own interests, he has made it his aim to shipwreck the boat, for the monetary benefit that would result. (The opposite of Captain Whalley’s noble desire to save up money for his estranged daughter.) I think of Paradella in Conrad, in Kociancich’s novel, translating this passage, and his fascination for the phrase at the start, “viaje invariable” (invariable voyage)—which to him seems a contradiction. How can a journey be invariable, if any accident, error or act of malice can change its course? Does destiny exist, so that every accident, error, or act of malice folds into some plan, and the ship always reaches its intended shore? The word “invariable” suggests that the journey toward the shore cannot be changed. Yet there is the soft iron in the pockets of the coat, invisible, working its effects . . .

Kociancich’s “real” Spanish translation of Conrad’s The End of the Tether and Paradella’s “fictional” Spanish translations aren’t identical, there are minor differences between them.

“I need to talk about Victoria, but it upsets me to do so. More than any other human sentiment, love belongs to the present.”
—Vlady Kociancich, The Eighth Wonder

“The Sofala would be headed towards the somber strip of the coast, which at a given moment, as the ship closed with it obliquely, would show several clean shining fractures—the brimful estuary of a river.”
—Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether

The narrator is in search of Victoria; he is in search of lost time. In the phrase above, “clean shining fractures,” it is the word “clean” that moves me, as if the shoreline were a manifest scar. Conrad’s novel Victory, about a rootless wanderer, speaks of “exercises of the heart fitting it for the encounters of a world, in which love itself rests as much on antagonism as on attraction.”

Meanwhile, at the center of the labyrinth, in the depths of the sea or depths of a mind, the minotaur of an Author grasps at passing fish.

—Jessica Sequeira, 2026

Below, you’ll find an excerpt from Fury by Clyo Mendoza, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. In this debut novel, Clyo Mendoza, a young, award-winning Mexican poet and novelist, weaves together multiple narratives into a lyrical, shape-shifting existential reflection on love, violence, and the power of myth.

Mendoza’s newest book Silencio, also translated by Christina MacSweeney, publishes on September 8, 2026.

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Fury by Clyo Mendoza
Translated by Christina MacSweeney

Before going into the supermarket to make the necessary purchases, María said goodbye as if she were never coming back; then she kissed his forehead and got out of the car. You’re crazy, he said, although she was by then out of earshot; she passed the guard and the glass door opened as she approached.

In the heat the strip of concrete was emitting diaphanous flames, the ground was buckling and Salvador fell asleep watching it.

It was five in the afternoon when he woke. The heat had died down a little but María hadn’t returned. Maybe she’d gotten bored watching him sleep or had felt hungry.

Salvador got out of the car and walked to a yellow stall gleaming in the distance. She wasn’t there. And she wasn’t at the flower stall either; there was no trace of her in the whole complex of awnings and guy ropes. A strong smell of rotting fruit hung in the air. Salvador went on searching, walking through all the places María might possibly be, and when he didn’t find her, he decided to enter the supermarket.

Anxiety was beginning to churn his guts. He experienced something like nausea every time the thought that she’d decided to leave him entered his head. Why hadn’t she told him? After so many years together, how could she have chosen to end it all in this way? Before passing through the glass door, as if knowing that once inside all his fears would become realities, he made up his mind to keep cool and talk to the guard.

It was the same man as three hours before, standing stoically impassive. Salvador said: I’m looking for a woman. Good afternoon, answered the guard. I’m looking for a woman, Salvador repeated. What does the woman look like? responded the guard’s expressionless face. A woman, Salvador repeated once again. And then he realized that the descent into a panic loop was affecting his speech: he was using the same letters to form the same two words. He felt as though he’d forgotten his own language and “a woman” was the only thing he truly understood. He clung to those two words and continued to utter them without pause before everything he knew could disappear. What does the woman look like, what does the woman look like, what does the woman look like? the guard responded, holding his gun a little tighter each time.

He couldn’t remember María’s body. He couldn’t even remember if María was a man or a woman, because he couldn’t even remember the name of the person he was missing so much.

I think it was a woman, Salvador eventually said, recovering a little confidence. The guard loosened his grip. If you don’t tell me what this woman looks like, I can’t help you.

Salvador couldn’t remember María. He didn’t remember her body, her face, or her hair. He did remember something about long, flowing tresses, but the image was mixed with the waves of heat rising from the sidewalk in the midday sun.

Sir, listen to me. You have to tell me the name of the person you’re looking for and what she looks like, otherwise I can’t help you.

The guard took his role very seriously. His eyes expressed nothing besides the automatic habit of obedience. Salvador was struggling with the bodies and faces walled up in his memory. Who were all those people presenting themselves in line before the one he was looking for? He looked down, clasping his hands, his face red with rage. Finally, he recalled a pair of eyes, or better, the sensation of looking into them. How could he explain that to the guard? He stammered something and while the man in the uniform went on asking him questions that seemed to have no answer, tears of frustration started to roll down his cheeks.

Sir, if you don’t tell me what the woman looks like, I can’t help you, shouted the man as Salvador slowly doubled over.

I can’t remember, sir. I can’t remember.

MARÍA

Perhaps the greatest test of human will is making up your mind. It wasn’t dragging your body to work each day or forcing yourself to give up certain types of food. The greatest test of the will is deciding, despite all, to continue existing. That’s more difficult than deciding to end someone else’s life, because when you die, anything that could produce a change in the world in which one’s own will functions dies too.

Salvador has never understood why his mother was killed. There’s no motive, he said, but if I hadn’t been so afraid of being alone after my father died, I wouldn’t have met you. He asserted this with conviction, but I can’t really remember how we found each other. He always said it was while he was running away from his hometown because he thought he was being stalked by the same man who killed his mother. That’s all he says on the subject. The only thing I’m certain of is that it was scorching hot that summer and I spent a lot of time cooling my feet in the river. The water smelled swampy and green scum would lap between my toes, but that was the best I could do: a creek hidden among a complex of tall glass buildings and miserable shacks covered in the dust the strong desert winds blow in. I remember I found him sleeping there. I watched him until he opened his eyes, and then we talked the whole afternoon, not holding anything back, like children, or old people who have spent their whole lives together.

Another of the tests of human will is deciding to love the same person forever. It’s almost like the decision to continue to exist, so that life will be the same for as long as our bodies survive. It’s deciding to share that body with one person, and although others might enter, the decision implies not allowing them to open the doors leading to places from which you can never eject them. That’s why I didn’t understand when I saw another shadow inside Salvador. After seeing him with that woman, my whole day was plagued by a sense of foreboding. For instance, I dreamed the world was tumbling down and as it fell, we found it was made of some light material, incapable of harming us. I was upset because when I saw everything collapsing, I felt a sort of relief, thinking that by the end of the dream I too would be destroyed. Yet when I opened my eyes, I was still alive in a crumbling world.

Why do you do these things to me, Salvador? I asked when I woke. He stared at me. I think I love her, he said.

There was a time when everything was fine. Or that’s what I thought.

Like that day; while we were hiking, a pair of birds passed us, and then the birds fell to the ground.

Did you see that? I asked, but Salvador didn’t stop to look, he went on walking, listening to his own voice—always weak when he sang—issue from his mouth.

It’s dangerous to hike where nobody else does, he suddenly pronounced, almost in a shout.

He was annoyed, truly annoyed with me, because on that trip we’d decided to hike off the beaten track. When I suggested that we’d be okay, we were together and had a knife, he snapped: How can you be sure that I really am here?

Maybe he was already tired of me, because, after a while without saying another word, he ran off into the llano, so far that I lost sight of him in the blue hues of the distant hills.

We were hungry but hadn’t wanted to kill rabbits. Salvador always became grouchy when he hadn’t eaten. I knew he’d be back, so I sat down and waited there for him.

I passed the time thinking of the day my mother abandoned me outside the supermarket. That memory—which rarely came into my mind, and on this occasion was sparked by something as simple as Salvador running off—took up residence and discreetly grew into a sensation, a virus.

My mother abandoned me, although, to be honest, she did later come back. She was crying when she returned. Her eyes were red and brimming with tears, we boarded a bus and never again mentioned the subject, or at least not until I was an adult and asked her what had happened. She told me I’d imagined the whole thing: You just imagined it all, María, how silly of you to think that; you must have wandered off in the supermarket or I went to put something in the trolley. Wow, the way children exaggerate things!

I was only four, but I can’t have gotten it wrong: she’d put some bills in my pocket and a piece of paper with writing on it that I kept until it vanished from the notebook where I’d stashed it. She took it from me before I could learn to read.

I remember I made a huge effort to try to read and write my name because of that note, as though that simple achievement would immediately endow me with what I considered adult superpowers.

I used to crawl under the table with a marker pen and, hidden there, write in red letters: A I R A M.

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In a desert dotted with war-torn towns, Lázaro and Juan are two soldiers from opposing camps who abandon the war and, while fleeing, become lovers and discover a dark truth. Vicente Barrera, a salesman who swept into the lives of women who both hated and revered him, spends his last days tied up like a mad dog. A morgue worker, Salvador, gets lost in the desert and mistakes the cactus for the person he loves. Over the echoes of the stories of these broken men—and of their mothers, lovers and companions—Mendoza explores her characters’ passions in a way that simmers on the page, and then explodes with pain, fear and desire in a landscape that imprisons them.

After winning the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Poetry Prize, Clyo Mendoza has written a novel of extraordinary beauty where language embarks on a hallucinatory trip through eroticism, the transitions of conscience, and the possibility of multiple beings inhabiting a single body. In this journey through madness incest, sexual abuse, infidelity, and silence, Fury offers a moving questioning of the complexity of love and suffering. The desert is where these characters' destinies become intertwined, where their wounds are inherited and bled dry. Readers will be blown away by the sensitivity of the writing, and will shudder at the way violence conveyed with a poetic forcefulness and a fierce mastery of the Mexican oral tradition.

Praise for Fury:

“I loved the churning gyre of Fury, an enigmatic and audacious novel that proves the truest stories aren’t told, they’re repeated.” —Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X

“An amazing, hypnotic and beautiful novel, like contemplating the desert.” —Juan Pablo Villalobos, author of Invasion of the Spirit People

“Fury has the poetic and savage force of the desert. Its pages are full of tenderness, fear, and a persuasive, rhythmic prose with unforgettable images. It deals with the violence of desire that turns us into drooling, howling dogs that bite, but also with love amidst hostility and neglect. That makes it an unsettling and, at the same time, profoundly moving novel.” —Mónica Ojeda, author of Jawbone

“There is something timeless about Clyo Mendoza’s Fury. It has the music of Scheherazade’s stories, and it tells of an ageless desert and an ageless violence that gives birth to itself with every new generation. It touched upon an open wound in Mexico, and I’m sure that readers everywhere will be enthralled by its power.” —Jazmina Barrera, author of Linea Nigra and On Lighthouses

“By tracing the genealogical tree that intertwines the fates of Juan and Lázaro, eternal soldiers in a phantasmagoric limbo of the Mexican Revolution, and a handful of women, whose bodies and loves mutate though they remain as powerful as vengeance, Clyo Mendoza introduces us to dozens of stories of sex, hatred, abandonment, and magic, narrated and deformed by the potent oral traditions that influence the language she conjures to render the ghosts real; it is the hallucinatory and brutal language of the desert.” —Dolores Reyes, author of Eartheater

Below, you’ll find excerpt from Em by Kim Thúy, translated from the French by Sheila Fischman. Em is a love story of sorts, steeped in history, about those most impacted by violence. Written in Kim Thúy's trademark style, near to prose poetry, Em reveals her fascination with connection. In many ways, Em is perhaps Kim Thúy's most personal book, the one in which she trusts her readers enough to share with them not only the pervasive love she feels but also the rage and the horror at what she and so many other children of the Vietnam War had to live through.

The paperback edition of Em publishes on August 25, 2026.

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A genesis of truth

War, again. In every conflict zone, good steals in and edges its way right into the cracks of evil. Treason complements heroism, love flirts with abandonment. The enemies advance towards one another, all with the same goal: to triumph. In this shared exercise, what is human shows itself to be at once strong, mad, cowardly, great, crude, innocent, ignorant, devout, cruel, courageous . . . That is the reason for war. Again.

I’m going to tell you the truth, some true stories at least, but only partially, incompletely, more or less. Because it’s impossible for me to re-create the blue nuances in the sky just as Rob, the marine, was reading a letter from his lover, while at the same time the rebel, Vinh, was writing to his own love during a brief lull, a moment of deceptive calm. Was it a Mayan and azure blue, or a French and cerulean blue? When Private John discovered the list of insurgents hidden in a pot of manioc flour, how many kilos were there? Had the flour just been milled?

What was the temperature of the water when Monsieur Út was thrown into the well before being burned alive by Sergeant Peter’s flame-thrower? Did Monsieur Út weigh half as much as Peter, or two-thirds? Was it the itching of his mosquito bites that so unsettled Peter?

For nights at a time, I tried to imagine Travis’s walk, Hoa’s shyness, Nick’s fear, Tuân’s despair, the bullet wounds of some and the victories of others in the forest, in the city, in the rain, in the mud. Every night, to the rhythm of ice cubes dropping into their container in the freezer, my research assaulted me with the know-ledge that my imagination would never be able to grasp the whole reality. In one testimony, a soldier remembers seeing the enemy running full speed towards a tank, carrying on his shoulder an M67 rifle, 1.3 metres long and weighing seventeen kilos. Facing that soldier was a man ready to die in order to kill his enemies, ready to kill while dying, ready to let death triumph. How to imagine such selflessness, such unconditional commitment to a cause?

How to contemplate that a woman might carry her two small children into the jungle over hundreds of kilometres, tying the first to a branch in order to protect him from wild animals while she moved off with the second, tied him up in turn, and went back to the first child to repeat the journey with him? Yet this woman described her trek to me in her ninety-two-year-old combatant’s voice. Despite our six hours of conversation, there are still a thousand details I lack. I forgot to ask her where she got the ropes, and if her sons still bear marks on their bodies from being tied up. Who knows if these memories have not been erased to leave behind only one, the taste of wild tubers she chewed into mush to feed to her children? Who knows . . .

If your heart shudders on reading these stories of fore-seeable madness, unimagined love, or everyday heroism, know that the whole truth would very probably have provoked in you either respiratory failure or euphoria. In this book, truth is fragmented, incomplete, unfinished, in both time and space. Then is it still the truth? I’ll let you reply in a way that relates to your own story, your own truth. Meanwhile, I promise you in the words that follow a certain ordering of the emotions, along with feelings whose disarray cannot be denied.

Rubber

White gold flows from wounds inflicted on rubber trees. For centuries, the Maya, the Aztecs, the peoples of the Amazon, collected this liquid and used it to make shoes, waterproof fabric, and rubber balls. When European explorers discovered this material, they first used it to manufacture elastic that would hold up their garters. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the demand increased at the meteoric speed with which automobiles multiplied, transforming the landscape. The need then became so great and so demanding that synthetic latex, a material that meets seventy percent of our current needs, had to be produced. Despite all the efforts made in lab-oratories, only pure latex, whose name of caoutchouc in French means “the tears (caa) of the tree (ochu),” can withstand the acceleration, the pressure, and the thermal range imposed on airplane tires and the joints in a space shuttle. The more humanity succeeds in accelerating its rhythm, the more it requires a latex produced naturally, at the speed of Earth’s rotation around the sun, in accord with lunar eclipses.

Thanks to its elasticity, its resistance, and its impermeability, natural latex swathes our extremities like a second skin in order to protect us from the consequences of desire. During the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and the following year, the rate of infections contracted sexually by the troops grew from less than four percent to more than seventy-five percent, which later led, during the First World War, to the German government’s giving high priority to the production of condoms to protect its soldiers, even though there was a serious shortage of rubber.

Certainly, bullets kill, but so, perhaps, does desire.

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A novel of the emotional intricacies of trauma and exile, from the author of international bestselling Ru.

Emma-Jade and Louis are born into the havoc of the Vietnam War. Orphaned, saved and cared for by adults coping with the chaos of Saigon in free-fall, they become children of the Vietnamese diaspora. Em is not a romance in any usual sense of the word, but it is a word whose homonym — aimer, to love — resonates on every page, a book powered by love in the larger sense. A portrait of Vietnamese identity emerges that is wholly remarkable, honed in wartime violence that borders on genocide, and then by the ingenuity, sheer grit and intelligence of Vietnamese-Americans, Vietnamese-Canadians and other Vietnamese former refugees who go on to build some of the most powerful small business empires in the world.

Through the linked destinies of characters connected by birth and destiny, the novel zigzags between the rubber plantations of Indochina; daily life in Saigon during the war as people find ways to survive and help each other; Operation Babylift, which evacuated thousands of biracial orphans from Saigon in April 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War; and today’s global nail polish and nail salon industry, largely driven by former Vietnamese refugees—and everything in between. Here are human lives shaped both by unspeakable trauma and also the beautiful sacrifices of those who made sure at least some of these children survived.

“Nadia Terranova’s narrative style captivates us with its precision and sensitivity.” —Annie Ernaux

Below, you'll find an excerpt from Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. The novel follows Ida, a married woman in her late thirties, living in Milan and working at a radio station, who returns to Sicily to help her mother clean out Ida’s childhood home. Surrounded by the objects of her past, Ida is forced to deal with the trauma she experienced as a girl, twenty-three years earlier, when her father left one morning, never to return.

Beautifully translated by Ann Goldstein, who also translated Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, Farewell, Ghosts is a poetic and intimate novel about what it means to build one’s own identity while grappling with profound loss.

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Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.

One morning in the middle of September my mother called to tell me that in a few days work would begin on the roof of our house. She said it just like that: “our.” But for some time I’d had another house to take care of, in another city, a house rented by me and another person. The house I would have called ours no longer existed, that label had been removed when I left, and in the following years I had wiped it from my memory with thorough violence. Yes, I knew that the roof was falling down—it had begun to fall down when I was born, and had been crumbling, raining down in the form of dust and flaking plaster, for all the life I had lived there—but I wasn’t in any way responsible, we can’t be blamed for the things we don’t want to inherit and have already disowned. I wrote fake true stories for the radio that had had an unexpected popularity; I had a man, a job, another city, new evenings, and a different time.

My mother said that she had had to deal with every problem by herself; she was tired now and the house was a burden to her. Redoing the roof, which was flat and tiled and functioned also as a terrace, would be her last act of generosity—because certainly she couldn’t put the house on the market with all that damage—before buying a smaller and more solid place. She said that a contractor would repair the holes caused by bad weather, poor insulation, and the neighbors’ old renovations, while in our house—she repeated: our—under the roof, under the feet and labor of the workmen, she and I would sift through furniture, utensils, and books to begin to empty it: she didn’t want me to be able to reproach her one day for giving away my things, and so I had to return and choose what to let go.

I thought it would be easy, because, apart from a red iron box kept at the bottom of a drawer, I didn’t care about anything.

I packed a suitcase with a few clothes and some underwear, and bought a train ticket on the Internet for the next day: I would look out the window for the long stretch of sea beside the Calabrian railroad all the way to Villa San Giovanni; from there I would take the ferry to Messina, bringing my mother the help she’d asked for.

That night I dreamed I was drowning.

My husband’s foot, propped against my ankle, warmed the bed, and at some point I began to move from the warmth under the sheet into the water.

I was walking as if I knew where to go, and the water cooled ankles, calves, knees, and then thighs, hips, belly, breast, and shoulders, and then chin and mouth, until I tried to speak and immediately disappeared, swallowed up by a wave. A moment before, I was walking; a moment after, I was drowning. My sight didn’t dim, and my strength didn’t evaporate, only this thing happened: I entered the sea and in an instant my body no longer existed.

I woke and sat up. In a whisper, I called to Pietro, my husband, not because I needed him but because I didn’t want to keep from him the fact that I was dying. It seemed important, dying, and I wanted him to witness it. My arms and armpits were sweaty, sweat dripped across my forehead and shoulders, he grabbed me by one elbow and, with an effort, opened his eyes and sat up next to me. There was nothing we could say to each other that would console me, and I felt unable to share either the burden or the fear of my dream.

Once, more than ten years before, when we’d been together only a few months, I reproached him for having so little interest in my nightmares; when I was a child my paternal grandmother urged me to tell them—if you don’t tell them you won’t be free of them, she said—and now that she was gone, if he didn’t ask I couldn’t tell, and wouldn’t be free of anything. So at night when I woke suddenly, and in the morning before going to work, Pietro had begun to ask how I was: Tell me what you dreamed, he insisted and insisted, and I tried to answer, but it didn’t work. Things never work when they’re transported from one era to another, they’re fine where they are, and there’s always a reason that memories should remain memories and not come to disturb the present. I had been wrong to tell him about my grandmother: in her big bed with its scent of fine old sheets, the account flowed naturally, whereas opening myself to him was an effort. It was the same that night, too, neither of us had a desire for words; it was an agreement we’d made long ago, as long ago as the times when we responded to fear with desire, to nightmares with sex.

I grabbed the plastic water bottle from the night table and took long swallows. My husband touched my back with the sort of love we had then, a weary love, made up of hands that, never too intimate, caressed the stomach around the belly button, desperate hands that gripped the edge of a T-shirt, the elastic of underpants, a love that seldom became something else and pushed beyond, spinning in circles of static affection and splitting in two by itself, withdrawing after a brief illusion and letting us return to being two very separate entities. I drank and swallowed and Pietro took my arm, I lay down, and he lay down, too, I turned onto one side and he turned first toward me, spoonlike, and then onto his opposite side, and finally we rubbed against each other, back to back, to rock ourselves and try to go to sleep again. Struggling to follow me, even sleepily, was his way of loving me, the way people can still love each other after ten years. At a certain point our bodies had stopped functioning together, stopped fitting together in sleep and the waking that precedes it; we had become shields for one another.

Sex is a language, and many words had been uttered between Pietro and me in the early days of our relationship, when I was running away from Sicily and from a family that was maimed and full of silences, and he welcomed me in Rome, becoming companion, parent, brother. So, along with the city, I found a new self, and he was there, always there, and that availability was moving. In those first months we took off our clothes as soon as we could and after having desired each other to exhaustion we were happy, even though one detail might have warned us that it wouldn’t last: we never made love twice, the first time satisfied us, and immediately we began to separate and get dressed. Everything we sought we managed to give each other in a minimum time that never expanded, after which we reestablished our singularity, the separateness that had also been our rule of attraction. But soon—too soon for a romance that claimed to be the romance of a lifetime—that separateness became an enemy. The body stopped being the place of communication. The sweetness was poured out in daily rituals, in dialogues and kindnesses, and even if we fought during the day we never really hurt each other: we lived each in the shadow of the other, each watching over the other with a care I’d never known; after desire ended we had developed a ritual for giving each other pleasure anyway, then, after a time, that exchange, too, became unusable, like an old dictionary.

The fault, I knew, was mine. It must have been I who closed myself off first, unaccustomed as I was to openness, to sharing.

But to Pietro, and only to him, I had told the story of my father and he hadn’t raised questions, he had accepted the anomaly. We had known each other for three weeks and neither of us was much over twenty, when on our first real date he showed up with a package: inside was a blue skater’s T-shirt and a diary with a hard cover. At that moment I saw in him the man I was waiting for. He didn’t know that as a girl I had skated for long hours, he didn’t know that I had written a lot about myself in various diaries hidden in drawers. And yet he knew.

So I confessed to him that my father had disappeared when I was thirteen. Not died, just disappeared into nothing, I continued, waiting for the question I feared: Didn’t you and your mother do anything to keep him?

But Pietro never asked that question. He asked nothing, listening attentively to the few sentences I was willing to concede: my father, a high school teacher, had left the house one morning and hadn’t returned. And then he changed the subject. He said that the work I was looking for at a secondary school would be wrong for me: the lives of others, of students, parents, and colleagues, would overwhelm me, and I would soon find myself enslaved and unhappy. He didn’t say that lives don’t repeat and that it didn’t make sense to follow my father’s, to become a teacher like him: he had put the emphasis on something else. The crowding in classrooms and halls wouldn’t give me any respite; I should write, instead, and put into my stories the pain that couldn’t go elsewhere.

Until that moment Pietro and I had always met on happy occasions, and thus I discovered that my eyes exposed that pain, and I was convinced that his capacity to read it was outside the ordinary. On that conviction I had based our life. Day by day I relied on him, his seriousness was a rock and, like all rocks, had walls that could be difficult, hostile, to climb. Sometimes I said to myself that I wouldn’t know how to make an appointment with the dentist by myself and wouldn’t pay bills or taxes if I didn’t know that I would put the receipts in the folders he had organized for the apartment we rented. Being together every day, making every decision together, knowing by heart the smell, the sex, the character of the other: that was marriage. The rest was a stormy, unknown sea, and there was no point in crossing it.

I felt my husband rubbing against my back for five, ten minutes and then he fell asleep again, while I stayed curled up toward the wall, hoping not to have to confront the water again; the night hid weapons for my defense, but I had already used them up. I was becoming invisible again, while if I drowned, if I died, I would have wanted Pietro to see me.

The counterpart of the darkest fear is an unexpected lightness: I wanted to make love as if we could devour each other, as in the early days. I turned and began to caress him impetuously, but from him came a sound that interrupted the rhythm of his breathing, while his body contracted defensively. We could touch each other and cradle each other, but the possibility of making love made us retreat like terrified animals: it would mean having not more intimacy but less, losing that little physical closeness that with difficulty we had gained. We knew each other too well to challenge our reticence to see each other naked, a view that allowed neither of us to let go, not because we didn’t find the body of the other beautiful or attractive but because we would no longer know what to say or how to say it, now that that unused dictionary was sleeping between us.

I also withdrew, onto my other side, and again turned my back to him. I took his hand and put it on mine near my belly button, brooding with my eyes open. I thought I was grateful to him for that advice ten years earlier. In my fake true stories I put part of my pain and the water that overflowed from the past, and I hoped that writing would be enough to save me, but then came a murmur, a disruptive voice suggesting that gratitude wasn’t enough to keep a marriage from drowning.

So in the insomnia that had no end, between my sweat, Pietro’s regular breathing, and fear of a shipwreck, I waited for a dawn that would never arrive. But everything arrives, sooner or later, destroying the people we were or think we are: at the first light of the sun I got up silently, kissed him on the lips, and went to the station, leaving him asleep.

Through the end of August, take 25% off translated books by women authors! Please note that all forthcoming books are available for preorder at 10% off, while all currently available books are 25% off.

Created by Meytal Radzinski in 2014 to highlight the literary contributions of women writers and translators, Women in Translation Month has since grown into a global event celebrated each August throughout the English-speaking world.
 
Browse our collections to discover books by women in translation from all over the globe, now up to 25% off list price, featuring authors like Annie Ernaux, Neige Sinno, Jacqueline Harpman, Clyo Mendoza, Kim Thúy, Guadalupe Nettel, Nadia Terranova, Ulrike Meinhof, Olga Tokarczuk, Marjane Satrapi, Assia Djebar, and more. 

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Books for Children, Tweens, and Teens 

Novelist and critic Gary Indiana, born July 16, 1950, discusses the work of novelist and critic Renata Adler. The below essay is excerpted from Indiana’s 2022 collection Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984–2021, published by Seven Stories Press.

 

PEAK ATTITUDE: The Novels of Renata Adler
by Gary Indiana

 

Renata Adler’s newly reissued novels, Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983), consist of anecdotes, vignettes, jokes, aphorisms, epigrammatic asides, and longer passages of prose—eclectic inventories of consciousness. Their immediate effect is that of a flea market in Samarqand or Ouagadougou, where the items on display (vintage clothes, military decorations, photo albums, broken appliances) are fractionally different enough, in style and provenance, from their cousins at the local swap meet to look like artifacts of an alternate universe. Adler’s eye and ear for the peculiar are unmatched in American letters.

Adler herself is regarded as peculiar in literary circles; her reluctance to publish anything is almost as legendary as Fran Lebowitz’s writing block. At a more prolific time, Adler wrote often, mainly for the New Yorker, reporting with great perspicacity on civil rights marches in the South, the ’60s student movement, Biafra. For slightly over a year in the late ’60s, she was the daily film reviewer for the New York Times, a job no one else has filled quite as memorably since. (“Even if your idea of a good time,” began her first review, “is to watch a lot of middle-aged Germans, some of them very fat, all reddening, grimacing, perspiring, and falling over Elke Sommer, I think you ought to skip The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz.”) Since then, Adler’s work has appeared with diminishing frequency, though almost always with seismic reverberation.

Her 1980 review, in the New York Review of Books, of When the Lights Go Down, a collection of film reviews by Pauline Kael, is still being written about, albeit for the wrong reason—i.e., that it was “mean.” In the Kael review, as in, among other things, her pieces on Watergate, the Starr Report, Monica Lewinsky’s biography, and the “institutional carpet bombing” she received from the New York Times in reaction to four lines about Watergate judge John Sirica in Gone, her book about the New Yorker, Adler has diagnosed systemic maladies that the media hue and cry over transient symptoms—the Jayson Blair affair, for example—have effectively masked from public view. In Kael’s case, a debased use of language spreading into every area of public discourse. With respect to the Times, the abuse of institutional power to stifle dissent. In such matters, Adler has taken the high road, according to her lights, and suffered the opprobrium of doing so, at a time when the high road is scarcely visible to many people, in large part because of the problems Adler has written about.

Adler’s fiction has received less contentious reception than her essays, although an excerpt of Pitch Dark, deemed by a narrow band of cognoscenti to be “about” real people, prompted the go-sip columnist Liz Smith to issue her only known work of literary criticism. The two novels range over many subjects treated in her nonfiction, but the difference, I think, is this: the equivocal, insecure, self-doubting cogitations of Adler’s first-person narrators are instantly disarming in ways that Adler, speaking with relentless logic as herself, in polemical mode, is not. No one else has a dog in a fight against yourself, and despite countless minor casualties in Adler’s two novels, the main event in both of them is “I” versus “I.” The writer-narrator of Speedboat, Jen Fain, travels a lot, for work and fun. Sometimes she reports for a newspaper, or teaches at a city college. Her friends are lawyers, doctors, other writers, judges, politicians, socialites. She encounters many other sorts of people too. At least as often as she speaks of “I,” she relates stories about “we”—meaning her generation, the one that went to college during the second Eisenhower administration. How their childhoods were, what school was like, what they expected to happen next, and how they are faring so far: “Dispersed as we all are, though, what we seem to have entirely in common is a time, a quality of meaning no harm, and a sense that among highly urban and ambitious people we are trying to lead some semblance of decent lives.”

These stories convey a class solidarity that has less to do with money than with education and an interest in politics and culture, a fair degree of social polish (often observed in the breach), and ethical scruples that preclude certain forms of success and facilitate others—in the legal field, medicine, publishing, scholarship, science. Also a fair degree of patriotism, faith in incremental progress, and the durability of democratic institutions. Of this cohort’s influence on the state of things, Speedboat keeps a running score. “We may win this year. We may lose it all. It is not going as well as we thought.”

Various riffs present themselves as witty examples of Hobson’s choice, or coercive inanity, or misapplied wisdom. Often, Adler records nuances outside the perceptual range of any other recent American novelist:

We were talking about No, No, Nanette. I said I thought there was such a thing as an Angry Bravo—that those audiences who stand, and cheer, and roar, and seem altogether beside themselves at what they would instantly agree is at best an unimportant thing, are not really cheering No, No, Nanette. They are booing Hair. Or whatever else it is on stage that they hate and that seems to triumph. So they stand and roar. Every bravo is not so much a Yes to the frail occasion they have come to make a stand at, as a No, goddam it to everything else, a bravo of rage. And with that, they become, for what it’s worth, a constituency that is political.

Jen Fain ruminates on everyday ephemera: allegedly bulletproof taxi partitions, for example, or the enigma of the “self-addressed envelope,” or bizarre form letters. In company, she is drawn as if by hypnosis to the flaw, and, implicitly, the void. Attuned to the wrong word, the malapropism, the gauche remark, the fatuous rejoinder, she finds something wildly skewed, insensible, ominous, untenable, intolerable, or at least a little off in nearly every situation. Hilarious in description, this something is essentially monstrous. Whether it is a symptom of a world gone mad, or evidence of herself cracking up, is another question she ponders in her spare time. Her tendency to paranoia and the giggles is extreme.

I don’t think much of writers in whom nothing is at risk. It is possible, though, to be too literal-minded about this question. In a magazine, under the heading “$1,000 for First-Person Articles,” for example: “An article for this series must be a true, hitherto unpublished narrative of an unusual personal experience. It may be dramatic, inspirational, or humorous, but it must have, in the opinion of the editors, a quality of narrative interest comparable to ‘How I Lost My Eye’ ( June ’72) and ‘Attacked by a Killer Shark’ (April ’72). Contributions must be typewritten, preferably double-spaced . . .” I particularly like where the stress, the italics, goes.

Speedboat reveals at every turn bewildering forks in the route ahead, confusions between literal and figurative, a widespread misapprehension of scale and scope, a general loss of equilibrium; in the episodes of daily life, nothing presents itself in the form of a single entendre. Seduction and threat are indistinguishable; reciprocal incomprehension begins to look like the salient feature of social existence. A friend’s idea of a little surprise before dinner turns out to be five hours of Parsifal. The incipient horror of it all is diffused throughout by framing each occurrence as a funny thing that happened on the way to somewhere else—exactly where, though, is never indicated.

Jen shuffles life’s imponderables in a vain search for cause and effect, an elusive organizing principle that is surely somewhere, some secret raison d’être, just really any kind of explanation. Reality’s failure to make sense promotes feelings of panic that oblige her to draw her own conclusions, invariably in the form of nervous jokes.

The second rat, of course, may have been the first rat farther uptown, in which case I am either being followed or the rat keeps the same rounds and hours I do. I think sanity, however, is the most profound moral option of our time. Two rats, then.

She writes directly to the reader, in sections of a single line, a paragraph, a page. The epigraph quotes Evelyn Waugh; many of this novel’s bit players would be at home in A Handful of Dust, or Scoop. Speedboat is very funny, in an archly reserved way. It is so diverted by eccentric data that Jen is scarcely more present as a character than the odd people she runs across, or the men she is involved with at different periods, who are practically spectral. She is there on the page; she tells us things about herself, about the world. Still, we wonder who she is, and so does she.

The staccato brevity of Adler’s contes keeps them at the constant temperature of a well-turned after-dinner recitative at a table in Elaine’s, with what that implies of a coterie sensibility, gamesmanship, and emotional cool. The conspicuous limitation of this novel is that it looks like something written for the New Yorker, by the New Yorker. But Adler accomplishes something reachier simply by adhering to the New Yorker’s notions of decorous writing with a kind of defeating fanaticism. From a certain abstracted angle, Speedboat evokes an antic American version of a Robbe-Grillet novel—not quite Le Voyeur as a musical, but still—its narrator a mental camera, incidents pared to the bone, sinews hidden in negative space.

The “missing page,” what we sense behind what’s shown, is a deferred awareness of death coming—not now, not yet, but sooner or later, none of this is going to last forever; not a shadow narrative, exactly, but a steady inference between the lines, in the white space where everything evaporates. I do not mean to suggest a prevailing spirit of morbidity, but rather a tropistic avoidance of it that becomes ominous. In the end, this assemblage of anecdotal evidence that appears to build a case, and regales us so implacably with sinister ironies, arrives at no conclusions, but opts for an agnostic optimism that could easily travel south.

Pitch Dark is murky—not in a turgid sense, but clouded, rather, by troubled reflections, ambivalence, regrets. The weather of Pitch Dark is colder. Secondary figures are fraught with shadowed histories. Incidents and asides illustrate a hapless, estranging condition of things: a bitter libel case, a dying raccoon, solitary escape to charmless islands, The Blue Angel, “how I both was and failed to be a citizen of my time.” A central episode in Ireland resembles a parody of gothic horror. Kate Ennis is an older version of Jen Fein, acquainted with disappointment and less innervated by amusing minutiae. She too writes. And travels, though more to flee her life than for any sort of fun. She often addresses one particular reader, a man she has left, or is leaving, or who is leaving, or has left, her. Her stories are longish and less sanguine in contrast with the ones in Speedboat.

Comparing Gertrude Stein and Thomas Wolfe, she writes, “She went on and on, too, of course, but only in a state of tension: drawn to the sentimental rhythm and the sentimental substance, but mocking and concealing it, reining it back.” This could suitably describe the precarious balance Kate Ennis maintains between observant detachment and a nervous breakdown. The central matter obscured by Kate’s tales—of Penelope sleeping with all the suitors, of hate mail received since high school from Rosalie Kamarski, the story of the dragon of the passport office, the one about the Chinese hypnotist, and so on—the long love affair ending, ended, or maybe not, seeps into narrative cracks, sounds a medley of stuttering refrains. (“Look here, you know. I loved you.” “You are, you know, you were the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life.”) The faits divers in Pitch Dark frequently end on these plangent, mournful notes of heartbreak. One wishes they were less plangent, and less frequent, since they don’t always work, though scenes depicting Kate and her lover, Jake—at night, for instance, after leaving a party, with Jake’s wife also in the car—are brilliant.

Late that night, on the road back, he said, “Honey, right there in that heavy snowstorm, I saw two deer.” There was a silence. I thought, he calls her honey. I could not imagine what his wife thought, or why she said nothing, or why the silence seemed so long and deep. His words were clearly not addressed to me. He had already told me about the deer. He has never called me anything but Kate. Then it dawned on me. He had told his wife, too, and forgotten that he’d told her. She must have thought he was telling me for the first time, and that, whatever honey has come to mean between them, he now calls me that. I could be wrong, of course. She may not even have been listening, or maybe she never answers at that hour. There we both were, though, together in our silence.

For Kate, everything has started to make too much sense, and to point all in one direction. The comparatively blithe era of Speedboat has segued into twilight time, decline and fall.

But from the highest public matters to the smallest private acts, the mugger, the embezzler, the burglar, the perjurer, tax chiseler, killer, gang enforcer, the plumber, party chairman, salesman, curator, car or TV repairman, officials of the union, officials of the corporation, the archbishop, the numbers runner, the delinquent, the police; from the alley to the statehouse, behind the darkened window or the desk; this is the age of crime. And recently, I think the truth is this, over a period of days and nights some weeks ago, I became part of it.

Adler’s novels employ time like a keyboard, playable in either direction, and proceed unfettered by plot, qualities they share with Robert Walser’s stories and feuilletons, Burroughs’s cut-ups, and Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights. They follow associative patterns we’re not given a key to, conceivably akin to the synonymies expounded in Speedboat:

“So for these purposes, digitalis, adamantine, apple orchard, gonorrhea, labyrinthine, motherfucker, flights of fancy, Duffy’s Tavern, Halley’s Comet, birthday present, xenophobic are all synonyms,” the great professor said. “Synonyms in terms of meter, that is.”

“I see.”

“And words that rhyme,” he said, “are synonyms, in terms of rhyme, with all the words they rhyme with. Cat, gnat, flat. Fang, sang, sprang, you see.”

“Yes.”

“So that in the study of poetics, we have. Rhyme synonyms. And meter synonyms. I leave aside pure synonyms of meaning. There are not really very many. And there are other factors, of course.”

“Of course.”

Jen Fain and Kate Ennis are children of the kind of liberal Jewish family where the Dow Jones Averages are toasted on the father’s birthday. Products of genteel country life and first-rate universities, they entered adulthood expecting the world to be a certain way. Not necessarily their shucked oyster, but at times, at least, a place that would yield something to reason and recognize worthy behavior. Coming of age in the 1950s, setting out for the city in the ’60s, they encountered instead a culture of irony spreading everywhere like kudzu, choking off the oxygen supply, and epidemic dissonance dissolving every solid value. From Pitch Dark:

We watched The Newlywed Game. The moderator had just asked the contestant, a young wife from Virginia, What is your husband’s least favorite rodent? “His least favorite rodent,” she replied, drawling serenely and without hesitation. “Oh, I think that would have to be the saxophone.”

And from Speedboat:

They were saying “Make peace, not war,” and so, the Commander of the Ohio State National Guard testified in the course of the Kent State trials, he threw a rock at them.

A perception of important things becoming lost to history figures in the literature of every era. In Sentimental Education, Flaubert describes a moral and emotional aphasia produced by the Revolution of 1848; the First World War, in Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity, erases an entire code of sentiments particular to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Adler is a cartographer of surface disturbances d’avant-guerre, like Musil in The Man Without Qualities, observing the slow fade of values and ideals associated with liberal Republicanism. One tension in Adler’s novels arises from their narrators’ desire to stay engaged with the world as it worsens, and the evident futility of trying to do so with the tools at hand—training in logic, reflectiveness, criticality, kindness, good manners, and basic morals being clearly inadequate to a criminal era that begins with the Kennedy assassination and the Kitty Genovese story, and runs rampantly on to this day.

That the narrators of Adler’s novels are versions of Renata

Adler by Renata Adler is hardly a question, and barely remarkable, except that Adler’s other writing and what is publicly known about her make these seem even less fictitious than most novels.

It should be added that even if she had named these women Renata Adler, the novels, and Renata Adler, would still be works of fiction; diverse works such as Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Aldo Busi’s Sodomies in Eleven Point, and Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin, among many others in which the narrator or protagonist shares the name of the author, are salutary reminders of why we have fiction. The imagination needs a safe harbor, insured against any documentary form of reality; our lives consist of many things besides facts. In fiction I may incarnate, even in my own name, someone who is not me, a person I might be if I were not constrained by the exigencies of my existence, who has other qualities, different habits of thought, a different sexuality, less money, more money, someone else’s problems, a fondness for other things. Or, the fictional “I” can coincide with myself at every point, but live in a different country, behave differently toward other people, only know people I invent for him, etc.

No current literary label appealingly describes the kind of narratives Speedboat and Pitch Dark are. I doubt that any is needed. Their formal design, of self-contained pieces separated by a line space and periodic chapter breaks, is hardly sui generis, having been used in many different kinds of writing for over a hundred years, in collections of aphorisms, feuilletons, philosophical treatises, compendia like Humphrey Jennings’s Pandaemonium and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, as well as seed catalogues, political pamphlets, and cookbooks, and works of fiction as diverse as Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

The kind of thought debris you find on the internet describes novels in this form as “experimental,” which is predictive of a certain off-putting difficulty and self-indulgent esoterica. Often, too, it is declared by a gatekeeping sort of criticism that anything that deviates far from a nineteenth-century template is “not a novel.” It seems late in the day for such parsing. But in fact, classifications that formerly reflected a delight in all literary forms and the intellectual pleasure of differentiating them—Mary McCarthy’s essays “Novel, Tale, Romance” and “The Fact in Fiction” come to mind—now serve as filtering screens for the literary market, which is currently dominated by aesthetic conservatism of a depressingly conformist ilk: middle-class marriage saved, or ruined, or attacked by vampires.

Adler’s novels concede the necessity of making fiction quicker, more terse, descriptively less elaborate than the traditional thing called a novel, not so much in deference to shrunken attention spans, but as the most plausible way of rendering the distracted, fragmentary quality of contemporary consciousness. Their reportorially even tone is quite distinct from the distorting lyricism found in most novels of sensibility; omitting much of what we expect in first-person narratives, Adler gets at the overfull yet depleted condition we find ourselves in now, peripatetic and restless, ever more deprived of the time and mental space to reflect on what we are really doing, or who we really are. They describe what it’s like to be living now, during this span of time, in our particular country and our particular world. This is what the best novels have always done, and with any luck will continue to do.

(2013)

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Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984–2021
Gary Indiana

The novelist, cultural critic, and indie icon serves up sometimes bitchy, always generous, erudite, and joyful assessments from the last thirty-five years of cutting edge film, art, and literature.

“One of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche.” —The Guardian

Introduction by Christian Lorentzen

Whether he’s describing Tracy Emin or Warhol, the films of Barbet Schroeder (“Schroeder is well aware that life is not a narrative; that we impose form on the movements of chance, contingency, and impulse....”) or the installations of Barbara Kruger (“Kruger compresses the telling exchanges of lived experience that betray how skewed our lives are…”), Indiana is never just describing. His writing is refreshing, erudite, joyful.

Indiana champions shining examples of literary and artistic merit regardless of whether the individual artist or writer is famous; asserts a standard of care and tradition that has nothing to do with the ivory tower establishment; is unafraid to deliver the coup de grâce when someone needs to say the emperor has no clothes; speaks in the same breath—in the same discerning, insolent, eloquent way—about high art and pop culture. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it’s also political, plus it’s a riot of fun on the page.

Here is Gary Indiana on Euro Disney resort park in Marne-la-Valée outside of Paris:

John Berger compares the art of Disney to that of Francis Bacon. He says that the same essential horror lurks in both, and that it springs from the viewer’s imagining: There is nothing else. Even as a child, I understood how unbearable it would be to be trapped inside a cartoon frame.

Isle McElroy’s afterword to the 2025 edition of Orlanda: A Novel by Jacqueline Harpman, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz. Now available from Seven Stories Press.

Afterword by Isle McElroy

The restless, demoralized quality of life under fascism was ingrained in Jacqueline Harpman from an early age. Harpman was born in Belgium in 1929, but her family fled to Morocco to escape the Nazis at the beginning of World War II and did not return to Belgium until after the war. Escape is a common theme in her fiction—at least, in those books of hers translated into English by Ros Schwartz. The impact of both the dictatorship that spurred her exile and the rupture of her leaving home at such a young age is apparent in one of her most popular books, I Who Have Never Known Men. The novel follows a group of thirty-nine women who wake up imprisoned in a bunker, with no memory of why they’re being held captive; they are kept alive by a crew of male guards who sporadically deliver them meals. When the women eventually escape, they find the outside world mystifying and desolate, full of similar bunkers where prisoners have died in captivity. I Who Have Never Known Men is a bleak tale about the unique threats of imprisonment and freedom, a novel in conversation with other feminist dystopian works, like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Before writing this slim novel about living through a misogynistic dystopia, however, Harpman published the quieter, more fantastical novel Orlanda. Unlike I Who Have Never Known Men, where imprisonment and escape are literal actions undertaken by characters, Orlanda approaches those topics from a metaphorical—and at times a metaphysical—angle in order to explore the psychological impact of misogyny and repression on women.

Orlanda, winner of the 1996 Prix Médicis, makes no attempt to hide its debt to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Harpman’s novel opens with a thirty-five-year-old literature professor, Aline Berger, rereading Orlando at a train-station café in Paris in preparation for a seminar she teaches. But Harpman is not writing an ode to Woolf. Rather, Aline is only rereading Orlando out of an obligation to teach the book in her seminar. She would rather crack open the sci-fi novel she has tucked in her bag. Harpman is both indebted to Woolf and attempting to move beyond the celebrated author—she’s writing nearly seventy years after Woolf first published Orlando—for she understands that what served as a challenge to gender norms in 1928 won’t work in 1996. Though Harpman wrote Orlanda in the midst of feminism’s third wave, the book is relatively quiet on some of the era’s primary concerns, like sexual harassment and workplace equality. Instead, Harpman focuses her attention on the psychological impact of gender discrimination and misogyny.

In Orlanda, Aline is bored with her life. Unmarried, she lives with a man out of inertia and convenience; she long ago stopped finding him handsome. She believes herself happy but is severely depressed. This has Betty Friedan written all over it. Harpman, a psychotherapist, brilliantly reimagines this kind of late-century ennui through psychological means. Aline is depressed in large part because she’s been repressing her inner spirit since she was twelve. That spirit—whom Harpman names Orlanda—represents Aline’s masculine counterpart. He is aggressive, confident, and unbelievably horny. Prior to Aline’s train ride, Orlanda gains corporeality when he spies an attractive, young rock journalist named Lucien Lefrène and then wills himself out of Aline’s body and into Lucien’s. 235

Here is where Harpman makes her separation from Woolf most apparent. Whereas, in Orlando, Woolf sought to chart the duality within a single person, in Orlanda, Harpman instead wishes to show why that duality struggles to exist. Set free from Aline, Orlanda experiences a kind of freedom he didn’t know existed when he was entwined with his previous host. Harpman’s interest in the themes of imprisonment and escape are made manifest through the character of Orlanda, and in this way, the book lays the groundwork for these theme’s more literal expression in I Who Have Never Known Men. Orlanda is direct in treating his previous existence, Aline’s repressed masculine energy, as a form of imprisonment. On his own, he achieves an authentic self, pursuing desires that Aline never even considered.

But for Harpman, the erotic charge of the book is less about the union of bodies than it is about the discovery of desire. And the pursuit of desire is tantamount to the pursuit of freedom. What stands out in these passages is not what Orlanda is up to but how Harpman details the scenes. She evokes Orlanda’s escapades with a cheeky, self-conscious modesty that feigns respect for Woolf. Her modesty feels especially curious to a reader in 2025. It occasionally reads like an unnecessary performance—were people really so prudish in the ’90s?—but through it, Harpman calls attention to the way characters perform their roles in the text: Aline as a professor and girlfriend, Orlanda as a toxic boyfriend. The most explicit performance is, unsurprisingly, how these two main characters express their genders. At times, Harpman’s views on gender does capitulate to a frustrating gender essentialism that sees something inherently sexual and free in Orlanda and something demure and sacrificing in Aline. But, this kind of essentialism is necessary to the body-swap trope.

Though Orlanda is not technically a body-swap novel, it borrows from the moralizing impulse traditionally expected of body-swap stories. These stories commonly act as empathy parables, where characters are forced to reckon with how the other half lives. From Mark Twain’s 1881 novel, The Prince and the Pauper, to the 2003 film adaptation of Freaky Friday (loosely based on Mary Rodgers’s 1972 children’s book), body-swap stories force characters to gain a deeper understanding of people whose lives are far distant from their own. Freaky Friday, for instance, forces a mother and daughter to empathize with each other’s plights; when these stories force characters to swap genders, it often results in reductive narratives where men finally see how hard life is for women.

Unsurprisingly, this genre of story is also ideal fodder for erotic writing—a great deal of trans erotica centers on body swaps, including many of the texts I read before coming out. Body-swap stories tend to pick a side—they’re either erotic or chaste—but Harpman slyly situates her novel between the moralizing and the erotic. Orlanda is excited by his new body because Aline would be excited by his body. I’m reminded of Andrea Long Chu’s essay “On Liking Women” where she argues for the simple urgency of longing for femininity as an important part of transitioning. Does Orlanda’s excitement in Lucien’s body make him trans? No, it doesn’t. But it leaves space for an erotic understanding of the self that feels very modern, a sexualized self-love that has become increasingly popular on social media.

Impressively, Harpman not only pins her book between the erotic and the empathetic— she also complicates her characters’ expectations of empathy. Orlanda discovers a great deal about Lucien; this does not, however, lead him to care more deeply for Lucien, as one might expect from a character in a body-swap story. Similarly, as Aline grows closer to Orlanda, she comes to resent the dynamic expression of herself. There is something cunning and malevolent about how the novel proceeds. Harpman does not moralize about understanding the other. Rather, Aline takes advantage of Lucien’s otherness to deepen her relationship with the parts of herself that are antisocial and cruel. By the end of the novel, she accepts those parts of herself she once worked so hard to reject.

Though Orlanda does not, like I Who Have Never Known Men, directly address the global creep toward fascism and dystopia, it accomplishes something more nuanced and, at times, more compelling: the difficult question of how to deal with the problem of being a person. It is a novel of freedom and transformation that refuses to moralize. It is honest in its portrait of envy and desire, in tracing the unsettling addiction a person can have to themself, an arc that feels like a literalization of our contemporary obsession with our social media selves. This is the genius of Harpman’s work: she deftly makes literal the abstractions that shape our lives. What would it look like to give space to the parts of ourselves we’ve been repressing? Her answer—which feels especially radical in an era of personal growth and hyper-psychologizing—is something of a cautionary tale. The problem is not that you might not like what you find. Rather, you might like it a little too much, you might continue embracing that self, to the detriment of the life you were already living.

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ISLE McELROY’s debut novel, The Atmospherians, was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Their second novel, People Collide, was named a best book of 2023 by Vulture, NPR, Vogue and was a New York Times Critics’ Pick. Their third novel, Satellite, will be published by Viking in 2027. Other writing appears in The New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Vulture, The Cut, The Atlantic, Esquire, and elsewhere.

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From the author of I Who Have Never Known Men and We Were Forbidden, Orlanda is a groundbreaking, exquisitely funny novel about a woman whose subconscious mind splinters and finds itself in the body of a young man.

Now in paperback with a new afterword by Isle McElroy for the 30th anniversary of its original publication.

One afternoon in a café across the Gare du Nord train station in Paris, Aline Berger, a literature professor, struggles to re-read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, when an odd feeling comes over her. Suddenly, part of her consciousness splits off and finds itself in the body of an attractive young man named Lucien Lèfrene, who works as a rock journalist. In this newfound body, Aline’s splintered mind names themselves Orlanda in homage to Virginia Woolf as a woman who has now become a man.

Orlanda begins to follow Aline. And when the two meet again in Belgium, Aline subconsciously sheds her prim tendencies for a more assertive presence, as she begins to understand that Orlanda was born from her own psyche. Orlanda is the assertive, confident, and amorous person, who loves men unabashedly, that Aline has always aspired to be but could never become. The more time the two spend together, the less time they can stand to be apart.

Jacqueline Harpman’s lyrical novel is a stunning, remarkably comedic portrait of a woman who is forced to confront every part of her soul and embrace herself fully.

GETTING FREE OF THE MASTER NARRATIVE
BY A. NAOMI PAIK

Along with my elementary-school classmates growing up in Lubbock, Texas, I learned about the 1836 Battle of the Alamo. At a fort in Texas, which was then part of Mexico, American settlers sought freedom from Mexican oppression. They fought to the death inside the fort, leaving no man standing. (As children, we did not ask how the story was known, if no one had lived to tell it.) We watched the John Wayne film that showed the white cowboys as heroes and the Mexican characters as evil. Now, years later, I think that the adults in the school never considered how this narrative might strike the many Mexican American students and teachers. 

Some of them, I can guess, felt the way I did as an Asian American high-school student when my US-history teacher told our class that Japanese Americans were jailed in prison camps during World War II for their own safety, with their support. I entered high school with more than seven hundred students in my grade, but fewer than three hundred and fifty of us remained when I graduated. Did that fact have something to do with what we were taught? Our education was rooted in what Ronald Takaki called the “Master Narrative.” 

It was not until college that I learned a fuller history of the Alamo. Mexico invited white American settlers into Texas to help take over the territory from Indigenous nations who had long lived in these lands. But when the Mexican state abolished slavery, those white settlers revolted, refusing to give up their human “property.” The Battle of the Alamo and the war for Texan independence was a revolt to preserve slavery. 

It has been decades since I attended school in Texas. It seems the education offered there continues to selectively edit history by the unspoken rules of the Master Narrative. As a college professor, I now use excerpts from Texas history textbooks to teach about how language, including the passive voice, can be used to reinforce those rules. Take this short passage: “Some slaves reported that their masters treated them kindly. To protect their investment, some slaveholders provided adequate food and clothing for their slaves. However, severe treatment was very common. Whippings, brandings, and, even worse, torture were all part of American slavery.” 

What do you notice about this passage? “Masters” and “slaveholders” are identified as acting humanely, with kindness and charity, but they disappear when the passage shifts to the passive voice to describe the violence of slavery. Who treated severely? Who whipped, beat, and tortured? And who was on the receiving end of this brutality? The same textbook called enslaved people taken from the shores of Africa “workers” who “immigrated” to the United States. 

I believe that you, the young person reading this book, deserve better. I trust that you can handle the truth. You’re smarter and stronger than we might think! I know that you can face and learn from the hard parts of our history and use that knowledge to create a better present and future. My belief in you is what motivated me to become a scholar and teacher in the first place. My students continue to drive me to study, discover, and tell the truth, even in those times when the truth is rewarded with punishment. My students, and you, make me brave.

The work of Ronald Takaki, the author of this book, helped make my own work possible. Takaki was part of a generation of scholars who helped build ethnic studies, a field of inquiry born out of social movements that confronted structural racism, the laws and practices built into government and other institutions that keep racial and ethnic inequality alive. Ethnic studies arose as people worked to create a more just and equitable world for everyone. On campuses like the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State, students, faculty, campus workers, and community members came together to demand education that they could use to serve their communities. Together, they went on strike, shut down campuses, and created their own shared spaces of learning. 

These organizers and activists understood that education and knowledge are tools of power. Like enslaved people who taught themselves to read in secret, and Indigenous people who held to their languages and traditions even when the government used force to erase them, these activists demanded an education that would empower them to make positive change against oppressive systems.

Their opponents who ran those systems understood the power of education and knowledge, too. Blocking education is a way of blocking power. In response to campus protests in the 1960s, politicians took funds away from public higher education to prevent the growth of an educated working class. Making students take on huge amounts of debt not only puts education out of reach for many but also inspires resentment against educated people. But it is an educated population that creates the foundation for a robust democracy. 

This book comes out of this legacy of knowledge, power, resistance against oppression, and building a better world together. It is an effort toward achieving a US democracy like the one expressed in documents like the Declaration of Independence, which states “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This vision of US democracy is still in a state of becoming. It is yet to be realized. 

As the early decades of the twenty-first century show, our democracy is fragile. All of us must fight for and defend it. Part of that democratic work is understanding US history in all its complexity— the successes and failures, the parts that make us proud and the parts that make us want to do better. Defending democracy requires getting real about why and how we have strayed from core US principles and learning how, as our nation moves forward, we can respond differently to similar challenges. 

The history offered in this book offers many examples of people working together to change the country! One of them was James G. Thompson, a Black soldier who returned from fighting in World War II to fight for equality at home. He and others never stopped believing in US principles, even when they had every reason to do so. As Thompson powerfully stated: “Though these questions often permeate my mind, I love America and am willing to die for the America I know will someday become a reality.” I hope this history inspires and moves you to bring the United States closer to its ideals, to help make it a place defined by equality, liberty, and justice for all. 

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A. NAOMI PAIK is an associate professor of Criminology, Law, & Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She published Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (UNC Press, 2016; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017). Her book Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020, University of California Press), examines the long-developing criminalization of foreign-born people in the United. Her research and teaching interests include comparative ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration. https://naomipaik.com/