Ischia

by Gisela Heffes

Ischia is a portrait of an unnamed narrator and protagonist who, along with her friends, wanders through the margins of different cities, especially Buenos Aires, searching for something they don’t know and seems unfathomable. An intricate, gutsy, and raw novel, Ischia is populated with outsiders who navigate the vicissitudes of life in Argentina and the world. Ischia, the first-person female narrator, is the youngest in a family of seven brothers and relates her experiences as she waits for a ride to the Argentine international airport. Told through the dizzying would-have-could-have of conditionals, Ischia overlaps the past, present, and future of three young characters defined by lack of certainty or expectations. These three lives unfold between disenchantment and humor, and the narration transports the readers into a universe of memories, desires, and dreams. The novel advances lyrically through themes both solemn and lighthearted, shaping the contours of imaginaries, hilarious, and sometimes even surreal experiences.

Genres: Fiction

252 pages, Paperback

Published March 14, 2023

About the author

Gisela Heffes is a writer, ecocritic, and public intellectual with a particular focus on literature, media, and the environment in Latin America. Her highly reviewed book Políticas de la destrucción / Poéticas de la preservación (2013), received the 2015 First Honorable Mention in the Humanities of the LASA Southern Cone section, and has recently been published in a revised, expanded and updated English translation with Palgrave (marking its tenth anniversary) as Visualizing Loss in Latin America: Biopolitics, Waste, and the Urban Environment (2023). Although informed by current concerns that originated in recent debates within American and English environmental humanities, Visualizing Loss argues that the aesthetic productions analyzed in the book operate at the intersections of biopolitics and ecocriticism, placing Latin American figurations within a bioecocritical paradigm that defines the material conditions of human and nonhuman relational networks while constituting different meanings and enabling new forms of understanding. Her previous book, Las ciudades imaginarias en la literatura latinoamericana (2008), is a detailed study of the literary representations of non-existent urban spaces and their significance in the wider political and cultural framework of Latin America, oscillating between utopian promise and dystopian warning. Since the early 2010s, she has widened her research on environmental and biopolitical issues in Latin America, for instance, with regard to the cultural significance of trash, habits of consumption, and toxic bodies. Together with Jennifer French, Heffes edited The Latin American Ecocultural Reader (2020), the most comprehensive anthology of literary and cultural texts about the natural world across Latin America from the early colonial period to the present. The following year, Heffes published with Carolyn Fornoff (Cornell University) Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema. This essay collection represents the first endeavor to bring into sustained conversation Latin American cinema with the theoretical discussions in the nascent field of the environmental humanities, with particular attention to posthumanism and postanthropocentrism.

Heffes is currently completing several research projects. Material Dissonances: Toxic Matters and Matters of Toxicity in Latin America is a book-length study that examines narratives, the visual arts, and digital media at the turn of the twenty-first century that catalyze an aesthetics of toxicity grounded in discourses of exposure, environmental (in)justice, bodily experiences, and material entanglements. In dialogue with this scholarly manuscript, Heffes is preparing a co-edited volume with Arndt Niebisch (University of Vienna), Uncontained Toxicity: The Dialectics of Loss and Control, a collection of essays that explores the counteracting dynamic of toxicity from a perspective that focuses on environmental, political and social processes and their aesthetic manifestations in literary, cinematic and other artistic media and artifacts that deal with the dialectics of containment and intractability.

In addition to her scholarly work, Gisela Heffes is an active fiction writer, having published the novels Ischia (2000), Praga (2001), and Ischia, Praga & Bruselas (2005). This was followed by Glossa Urbana (2012), a collection of short stories, Aldea Lounge (2014), a series of poetic chronicles, the novella Sophie La Belle and the Miniature Cities, which appeared in both Spanish and English in 2016. In 2020, she published El cero móvil de su boca/The Mobile Zero of Its Mouth, a bilingual book of poetry, the novel Cocodrilos en la noche –which was reprinted with Tusquets (Grupo Editorial Planeta – Colombia / Ecuador) in 2023 and will be released in English with Deep Vellum Press in 2024 as Crocodiles at Night. Also in 2023 Heffes published with Miami-based Suburbano Ediciones the book Aquí no hubo ni una estrella, which combines poetry with essays, dia

Reviews

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

In some ways, this reminded me of Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress, in that it charts the isolated inner life of a narrator who envisions boundless freedom. Known only as Ischia, a nickname she gives herself in reference to a destination she imagines she'd like to visit, the narrator reveals her life largely through dreams, with natural twists and turns of objective reliability further abstracted, in an engaging and completely integrated way, by alcohol and drugs. Ischia lives, she dreams, she aches and hopes and imagines. Gisela Heffes' novel is dense and beautiful, and I expect it to open up even more on rereads.

"I'd ask myself who I am, if I am, if I exist, or if I'm only a verb, a virtual word, the possibility of something still unknown to me, some novelty from the next millennium." (55)

[Bryan Fox · Rating 2 out of 5]

Can a book be well-written but still boring and tedious? What if that book is full of sex and drugs? The answer, apparently, is "yes", and I'm not sure if that counts as an achievement here. The book certainly does create a mood and a feeling. I'll give it that. But I also felt completely uninvested in it. Perhaps it was the odd literary device of framing most of the text in the conditional form ("Then I would..." "He'd be there..."), a disorienting choice that left you wondering what the author wanted you to think was real. Or perhaps it was the stream-of-consciousness, no line breaks, no paragraphs style, which almost demands that you read the book quickly (where can you pause?) but also makes it much more difficult to find points of real weight or meaning in the text. I don't know, but frankly, by the end, I was just turning pages here.

[Andrew Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was utterly compelling. Had an Argentine version of "Kids" (1995 movie) to it though not existing for shock value. Spirals off in every evolving scenarios in the narrator's head where each are immersive and the prose carries it intensely. (I need to up my Spanish a bit to attempt this.) This one is gonna stick with me for a while.

[Greg Walklin]

Review forthcoming in Literal Magazine

[Mali]

Disorienting and weird and sometimes too much however I really liked it