Austral
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling novel about legacy, memory, and the desire to know and be known.
Julio is a disillusioned professor of literature, a perpetual wanderer who has spent years away from his home, teaching in the United States. He receives a posthumous summons from an old friend, the writer Aliza Abravanel, to uncover the mysteries within her final novel. Aliza had raced to finish her work as her mind deteriorated. In her manuscript is a series of interconnected accounts of loss, tales that set Julio hurtling on a journey to uncover their true meaning. Austral tracks Julio’s trip from Aliza’s home in an Argentine artists’ colony to a forgotten city in Guatemala, to the Peruvian Amazon, and through Nueva Germania, the antisemitic commune in Paraguay founded by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
A story of mourning and return—to one’s native country, to one’s darkest memories, to oneself—Carlos Fonseca’s Austral interrogates the obsessions and upheavals faced by survivors of a rapidly globalizing world. A treasure map of intertwined experiences, each cleaving its own path through time, the novel is a fascinating investigation into the disappearance of culture and memory and a charting of the furthest limits of what language can do. With this remarkable exploration of the traces we leave behind, those we erase, and how we seek to rebuild, Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fonseca (Natural History) explores art, violence, and madness in his stunning latest. After celebrated author Alicia Abravanel dies before finishing her final novel, her old friend Julio Gamboa receives a letter expressing Alicia's wishes that he edit the work. Upon arriving in Humahuaca, Argentina, where Alicia chose to spend her last days, Julio's given the sprawling manuscript of A Private Language, which takes the form of a journal based on diaries from Alicia's father, Yitzhak Abravanel. In it, Alicia describes his experiences in a Swiss sanitorium, where he listened to a renowned anthropologist recount his travels to Paraguay in the 1960s to write about the failed Aryan colony of New Germany, which was founded in 1886 by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. As Julio burrows into Alicia's recollections, his own past mistakes come to the surface. Unspooling the story across multiple timelines and places, Fonseca brilliantly interrogates the notion that, as Yitzhak states in his journal, "Repeating the past is a way of doing it justice." This is an evocative excavation of memory, loss, and legacy.
