Fish Soup

by Margarita García Robayo, Charlotte Coombe (Translator)

From internationally acclaimed author Margarita García Robayo comes Fish Soup, a unique collection comprising two novellas plus the book of short stories Worse Things (winner of the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize).

Set on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, Waiting for a Hurricane follows a girl obsessed with escaping both her life and her country. Emotionally detached from her family, and disillusioned with what the future holds if she remains, she takes ever more drastic steps in order to achieve her goal, seemingly oblivious to the damage she is causing both to herself and to those around her.

The tales of Worse Things provide snapshots of lives in turmoil, frayed relationships, dreams of escape, family taboos, and rejection both of and by society. Skilfully painting just enough detail, García Robayo explores these themes and invites the reader to unravel the true significance of the events depicted.

The previously unpublished Sexual Education examines the attempts of a student to tally the strict doctrine of abstinence taught at her school with the very different moral norms that prevail in her social circles. Semi-autobiographical, the frank depiction of these opposing pressures makes it impossible to remain a dispassionate observer.

Throughout the collection, García Robayo’s signature style blends cynicism and beauty with an undercurrent of dark humour. The prose is at once blunt and poetic as she delves into the lives of her characters, who simultaneously evoke sympathy and revulsion, challenging the reader’s loyalties as they immerse themselves in the unparalleled universe that is Fish Soup.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Contemporary, Latin American, Literary Fiction, 21st Century, Spanish Literature

212 pages, Paperback

First published June 4, 2018

About the author

Margarita García Robayo nació en Cartagena, Colombia, en 1980. Desde 2005 vive en Buenos Aires, donde escribe la columna “La ciudad de la furia” en el diario Crítica de la Argentina. En la Revista C -del mismo diario- escribió la columna “Mi vida y yo” bajo el seudónimo de Carolina Balducci, y semanalmente escribe contratapas de opinión. Para la edición digital de Clarín, creó el blog Sudaquia: historias de América Latina* y colaboró en revistas de crónica como Soho, Don Juan, Travesías, Surcos, Gatopardo. En su ciudad fue columnista de cine de El Universal, profesora de análisis fílmico de la Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano y coordinadora de proyectos en la Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano. Fue elegida como uno de los 50 líderes de Colombia en la edición de liderazgo del 2007 de la revista Cambio. Escribió el libro de cuentos Hay ciertas cosas que una no puede hacer descalza (Planeta, 2009; Destino, 2010), que fue traducido al italiano. Participó en la antología de las mejores crónicas de la revista Soho, publicada por Editorial Aguilar en 2008.

Reviews

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

We would drive around the city in the pickup, burning rubber and caterwauling "And the sky was all violet!"

Charco Press is an exciting new, small UK publisher which “focuses on finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world” . In 2017/early 2018 its first set of 5 novels, all by Argentinian authors included “Die, My Love” – which I was, as a judge, delighted to shortlist for the 2017/18 Republic of Consciousness Prize for small presses and which then went on to be longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize; the deeply allegorical “President’s Room”; the delightfully playful “Fireflies”; and the flamboyant “Slum Virgin”.

This is the first of its 2018 set of novels – which this time features authors from five different countries – Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Brazil and Colombia.

Charco Press have said in interview that their intent is to showcase "the extraordinary talent that has been emerging ever since the days of García Márquez and magical realism, which remains one of the few literary references that UK readers have for the region." And this collection of writing by García Márquez’s compatriot - the award winning Colombian author Margarita García Robay - certainly fits that bill – a vibrant new voice (for UK readers) and a style that can best be described as (my term) cynical realism rather than magical realism.

The collection is translated by Charlotte Coombe – also translator of “President’s Room” – and although my complete lack of Spanish means I have no way to judge the fidelity of the translation, both books, despite their hugely contrasting styles, are very naturally translated and read extremely well in English.

The collection consists of two novellas (one unpublished) and one (award winning) short story collection

The first novella is “Waiting for the Hurricane” – a girl living on the Carribean coast of Colombia, despairs from a young age of her provincial life and obsesses on leaving the country

I was not like them, I very quickly realised where I was and at the age of seven I already knew that I would leave. I don't know when or where I would go. When people asked me, what do you want to be when you grow up? I'd reply: a foreigner

.

“You should learn when to go”.

In her quest to leave she is prepared to use those around her – initially she gets a job as an airline hostess so she can travel to America, and immediately focuses on finding someone who can help her there.

Thanks Johnny I had a great time. He lunged in for a kiss but I dished it. Johnny wasn't bad looking, but if he got his way now, I wouldn't have anyone to call next time I came to Miami. I was planning to go to Miami often, until I had found a way to stay there for good.

“Well they get what they want, and they never want it again”

Later she sleeps with the Captain of the plane in order to get pregnant, have the baby in America and inherit citizenship as its mother only to dump him mid assignation when he said he has had a vasectomy.

The short story collection is “Worse Things” – and although the stories are narratively unconnected but thematically related – with a constant theme of disassociation – with the main characters at odds with their families or societies and often with unvoiced or unacknowledged conflicts or differences of perspective.

"Something We Never Were" is a typical example, starting ( “Go on, take everything, take everything, I want you to” ) with:

When Salvador asked Eileen to be his girlfriend, she said no. She was having none of that boyfriend and girlfriend crap; what she was interested in was questioning certain paradigms. And seeing as all Salvador wanted to do was to sleep with her, he decided not to contradict her. >

“If I don't mind you don't mind”

But when, later Salvador says he wants to stop seeing Eileen, she reacts furiously, it does not fit her view of how their agreement would finish ("I told you from the start just how this would end") and in fact given their arrangement his very attempt to end things undermines its very conceptual underpinnings.

if the agreement consisted of our relationship being built on the basis that there was no relationship, that neither of us could impose the characteristics of the connection on one another ......

"You don't understand that the destruction of the non-condition is equivalent to the condition" she roared.

Other stories are: “Like A Pariah” by a woman may or may not have a diagnosis of incurable cancer; “You are Here” - a salesman whose flight home has been delayed and who spends a night in a huge Spanish hotel; “Worse things” - a boy suffering with a congenital condition causing severe, lifelong and degenerative obesity ( “Might last a day, yeah. Mine is forever”); “Better than Me” - an academic whose first daughter has committed suicide, wangles a place on a conference in Rome in an unsuccessful attempt to see his second daughter; the titular “Fish Soup” - a recently widowed bar owner is haunted in dreams by the smell of the soup his wife used to cook ( “And the sky was made of amethyst. And all the stars were just like little fish” ); “Sky and Poplars” a woman who appears to have just suffered a still birth or late miscarriage visits her family.

The final novella is “Sexual Education” – narrated by a schoolgirl in Catholic school where the strict abstinence teaching of the teachers ( “You should learn how to say no”) contrasts with the explicit sexual escapades and evasions of the pupils, the narrator a partly detached and cynical observer of both. The teachers for all their religious teaching seem more concerned at avoiding teenage pregnancies than the actual health or even sexual practices of their pupils, as becomes clear when their reaction to a terrible incident at the school brings their real motives into focus “And I'm the one with no soul.”

Overall this is a really excellent collection and a worthy addition to the publication list of this vibrant new small press.

All song lyrics I have added to my review are taken from the song the narrator in (the semi autobiographical) Sexual Education is listening to in the opening quote of my review - "Violet" by Hole (lead singer Courtney Love). I read this story first and the song carried on in my head as a I read the rest of the book.

[Henk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bleak tales about people wanting to leave their country behind, using sex as currency and the struggle which this entails, that undermines familial ties
’…insignificant people take longer to get disappointed because they are motivated by hope.’ Eileen was smoking. Her dishevelled blue hair looked like candy floss. ‘They spend a good part of their mediocre lives hoping that at some point, something amazing is going to happen to them, something that will change their life. But in the end, they’re all disappointed.’

Fish Soup consists of two novella's and a short story collection.
Waiting for a hurricane has a girl narrator who sees no perspective except for leaving the country. Her tone of voice reminded me of the main character from My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, dry, anti-social, using her looks to kind of get ahead. Callous. She becomes an airhostess (instead of pursuing an university degree) to be able to visit Miami and find a gringo to marry.
Poverty and struggle end up even undermining bonds between brother and sister.
Choosing what’s cool and appeasing but not seeing it through has dear repercussions later on for our ageing narrator. It's a tale in the style of The Catcher in the Rye. Someone is given a lot of cards in life but it ends up going south nonetheless.

Worse things is a story collection and as the title implies not the most uplifting in terms of subject matter. Like a Pariah features Inés, 57 and recovering from cancer, meeting her new neighbors for brunch. The feeling of physical decay, both of the body and the building, pervades the story. In the first novella the main character mentions that rich people can live well anywhere, and Inés is a good example of this, even though sadness is all encompassing in the story.
In You are here an accident at an airport leads Pedro to be stranded in the largest hotel of Europe, which is a sad place to contemplate life.
Worse Things indeed is a quite sad tale of a boy obese from his birth, with his conditions worsening through time.
Better than me again features an ageing person, this time a man isolated from his wife and with problems with his offspring. The main character is a professor at a conference, with trouble connecting to his daughter and the modern world and women in it.
Titular Fish soup revolves around an old man with a dead wife, also a recurring theme. Now he is haunted by dreams of his wife having intercourse in the bar they jointly owned.
In Something we never were Eileen and Salvador have a relation that reminded me of Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind and Show Them a Good Time by Nicole Flattery, with a quirky, uncertain and creative girl and an average joe. She says infuriating things and slowly disappointment sets in. A beautiful quote for instance is:
‘You can’t expect us to stop being something we never were.’
Finally Sky and poplars has Ema who seemingly lost a child and returns to her parents. There isn't sympathy or help, which a quote like the below one might explain:
He didn’t understand.
‘I hate beauty, that’s why I love you,’ she said to him, and reached out to stroke his face, but at that moment Jerónimo turned and she ended up poking him in the eye.

Sexual education kicks of with an hilarious sex education programme called Teen Aid. This scene reminded me of Mean Girls, where the PE teacher needs to take over this course, and tells the class that they'll die if they do sex
We have school girls convinced that the Virgin Mary talks to them, convincing them to do anal to preserve their virginity. This novella in my view is certainly the most darkly funny in the whole book. For instance this quote, about a neighborhood mom with a mentally impaired child:
My grandma had told me that the boy’s mother consoled herself with the myth that her son was an angel on earth. This annoyed my grandma: ‘If heaven is full of retards, I’d rather go to hell.’

In the end the potential for transformation and escape after high school seems to be here, or at least imaginable like a faint light at the end of a tunnel, as eloquently vocalised by the main character:
For a very brief moment I saw us grown. Not grown up, but grown: adult, slightly old and pitiful, at the bottom of a well that I could peer down, shining a torch. I glimpsed into the future. A future that looked dull, bland, and dark. I tried to imagine us different; transformed into something else.

Atheist. Nympho. Lesbian. Adulterous. Wild.

Or sane.

I wasn’t able to.

A bleak bundle of stories that shine a light on a Columbia firmly in the grip of economic disparity and with still major influences of the church.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charco Press were the most exciting new publisher in the UK last year. They became best known for the excellent Die, My Love which was longlisted for the Man Booker International and shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, but all 4 of their 2017 books I read were excellent, my favourite being Fireflies. Their mission statement:

Charco Press focuses on finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world. We aim to act as a cultural and linguistic bridge for you to be able to access a brand new world of fiction that has, until now, been missing from your reading list.

The first of their 2018 offerings is Fish Soup by Margarita García Robayo and translated by Charlotte Coombe. who also translated the enjoyable The President's Room for Charco Press last year.

Fish Soup consists of three separate original books.

- the novella Hasta que pase un huracán (2012), translated as Waiting for a Hurricane
- the award-winning short-story collection Cosas peores (2014), translated as Worse Things
- and the, I believe unpublished in the original, novella Educación sexual, translated as Sexual Education.

The narrator of Waiting for a Hurricane lives on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, where you turn left to continue North, but is desperate to escape. Even as a young child: When people asked me, what do you want to be when you grow up? I’d reply: a foreigner.

The story follows her attempts to make a new life for herself, for example becoming an air hostess, while ultimately struggling to escape. Her ultimate desire is more important than her relationships, which are mainly a means to an end, and when she imagines her life is she stayed and settled with one local boyfriend, she thinks: I’ll always be here, waiting for a hurricane to come.

The seven short stories that comprise Worse Things are all 10-15 pages and deftly sketched portraits of broken lives, with a strong emphasis on bodies that are decaying and places too. In the story from which the title of the English collection is taken, the main character is woken by the pungent smell of boiled fish, one he associates with his wife who used to make fish soup for the patrons of their bar. As he looks at his reflection:

The mirror on the wall reflected the image of a man worn out by working late nights: thin and saggy, his skin transparent like tracing paper, with blue veins snaking all over his body like a hydrographic map of a country with an abundance of rivers. Villafora was the owner of an old bar, which was also his home. The bar was named “Helena” after his wife, who had died from a long and painful disease that took hold of every bone on her body and left her prostrate in bed, delirious. The bar was on the ground floor, it was a spartan place, an industrial drinking hole with wooden tables and chairs, and a large bar with high stools. It had floor-to-ceiling windows looking onto a side-street - in the morning this alleyway was filled with grocery stalls and at night, with prostitutes who, for lack of clients, often came to hang out in a bar. The house was on the upper floor. It consisted of a small living room with a window, and an adjoining bedroom and bathroom. Through the living room window, there was a view of a harbour. It was more of a dumping ground for clapped-out old fishing boats. The city was a tourist resort, the kind of place backpackers and young runaway couples passed through.

In the final story, Sky and Poplars, Ema, although this is never stated explicitly, seems to have had a late miscarriage: a tragedy but her seeminly unemotional reaction has led her husband to leave her and, when she leaves the country to visit her parents, they also struggle to relate to her. A memorable passage 'contrasts' her mother and her sister, Ema's aunt who was neither ugly nor pretty. And as far as Ema could recall, neither was she good at anything in particular. She was utterly unremarkable, Her mother on the other hand was very good at being mediocre at everything she did. She excelled at that: she put a lot of effort into being mediocre.

For a celebrated author, the decision to translate an unpublished story for her English debut might seem odd, but is justified as Sexual Education is perhaps the strongest of the collection, with García Robayo's dark humour, that underlies the other stories, more to the fore.

The first-person narrator attends a strict Catholic girl school, where the girls are given lessons in abstinence, yet in practice the behaviour of even the seemingly pious girls is rather in contrast to what they are taught, with Bill-Clintonesque justifications of what exactly is or is not acceptable. Our narrator is a detached and rather sarcastic observer of both the excessively strict teaching and the contrasting excessively wild behaviour of her classmates.

In one pivotal scene, complete with a Nirvana reference, an older girl has her drink spiked and is then gang raped by 7 boys from the neighbouring religious boys' school. While the boys crime is rather hushed up, the school seems to reserve its greatest condemnation for her parents, for their crime of having a doctor prescribe her the morning after pill. As the headmistress announces the expulsion of the girl:

I was sitting at the back of the classroom, with my headphones hidden under a blanket. Oh no, I know a dirty word, Kurt was whispering in my right ear. The left air was listening attentively to the headmistress, who was announcing the apocalypse, because the unknown potential of a creature with seven fathers had been snubbed out.

Overall, a slightly uneven collection but an interesting and fresh new voice in English, very much fulfilling Charco Press's mission statement, and with another excellent translation from Charlotte Coombe.

3.5 stars rounded up to 4 because of the distinctiveness of Charco Press's output.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fish Soup contains two novellas (one of them, Sexual Education, was previously unpublished) separated by a set of seven short stories, and marks the first time the Colombian author Margarita García Robayo’s work has appeared in English. I especially liked the title story, in which a widower starts to smell his dead wife Helena’s fish soup in the bar that he owns and goes to investigate, all the while mixing up his dreams and memories with what’s really happening.

My other favorite piece was the opening novella, Waiting for a Hurricane, in which the narrator longs for escape from her seaside home, wanting nothing more than to be a “foreigner.” She starts a law degree but gives it up to become an air hostess, making flights to and from Miami and elsewhere. From her childhood onward, Gustavo has been a major presence in her life, teaching her to prepare fish and telling her stories, but there’s an uncomfortable element to their relationship that’s never really addressed. The mixture of quirky happenings and darker material reminded me of Swallowing Mercury, while the cancer theme of the story “Like a Pariah” recalls Hair Everywhere.

One of my frequent issues with short fiction is a preponderance of inconclusive endings that make you wonder what the point could be. I experienced that a few times with this collection, especially at the close of Waiting for a Hurricane . Judging by the title, though, the main message I drew from the novella is that you can’t just go around waiting for momentous things to happen to you, for your ‘real’ life to start; you have to recognize that this is life, here and now: in storytelling, in spicy stews, in everyday moments with friends and family.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is in three parts.

Waiting for a Hurricane

This is a novella in fourteen short, but engaging chapters. The first-person narrator is a young woman finishing school in Columbia and wanting out. So, you know, stop me if you've heard this before.

The narrator does indeed get out, by becoming a flight attendant and engaging in iffy sex. But does she ever really get out?

Worse Things

This second part is comprised of seven short stories. I enjoyed each of them. Not a clunker in the bunch. Cryptic, and a bit dark.

Sexual Education

Another novella, in six chapters. The title is apt. It starts with humor, a high school class that used to be sex education but whose paradigm has shifted to abstinence. The third-person female student protagonist is amused. And who wouldn't be, when the subject of the lecture du jour is MOISTURE. The feeling shifts though, with things learned outside the classroom. And ends poignantly.

You ask me: Are you okay?

And I answer: Am I okay?

But to whom am I speaking?

[Barbara McEwen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was really good. The female main characters are have so many fascinating qualities. They are definitely flawed but feel real. They are thoughtful and sexual beings. I enjoyed reading about women's sexuality from a female author. That sounds weird but it is a different perspective. They are sexual for themselves and not for men. Refreshing, unique stories.

[Professor Weasel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this, especially the two novellas. Very Ottessa Moshfegh. I especially loved reading about young Colombian women listening to Hole, and being very rude and punk-rock and aggressive - yassssss!!!!

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

#ReadAroundTheWorld. #Colombia

Fish Soup is made up of two novellas and an award-winning collection of short stories by Colombian author Margarita García Robayo, translated from Spanish.

The novella Waiting for a Hurricane is about a girl who dreams of escaping the poverty of her life in Colombia by any means possible. The people in her life are merely steps on her ladder to freedom.

The novella Sex Education is about a girl who struggles to reconcile her Catholic school’s teaching of abstinence with the morals and behaviour of everyone around her.

Worse Things is a collection of short stories mostly about people struggling with life and family.

The book is well-written, with a degree of cynicism, some keen observations on human nature and poetic descriptions. It is gritty, earthy, and touches on the dark side of life with allusions to rape and child sex abuse. I enjoyed Robayo’s style, my only complaint being the usual one for me with short stories: that they end too quickly, just as I am getting involved in the story. I would love to read a full length novel by this author.

[Zuberino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Garcia Robayo comes from Colombia’s Caribbean coast, the same region that was Garcia Marquez’s stomping ground. Maybe it is for that reason that she writes squarely (solidly? stolidly?) in the realist mode, her stories avoiding the faintest taint of any magical hocus-pocus. She is part of the post-post generation after all - they have their own row to hoe. And by the evidence of this book, she does hers rather well.

MGR left her native Cartagena when barely an adult and moved to Buenos Aires where she is now perma-settled. It is interesting to note the almost anonymous background of these stories - she is deliberately holding back from giving out too much in the way of specific detail, so that the reader has to work at imagining a Ciudad Algo, a Somewhereville where these isolated, atomised characters are living out their interior agonies. Her sufferers - and they all suffer, in one way or another - are inward-looking individuals who have invariably drawn the short straw in life’s lottery - cue the cancer patient, the obese child, the failed pregnant. In spite of tenuous threads linking them in (nonexistent) relationships to friends or family, the truth is that they are all fearfully alone, they are all stranded - often in a physical sense and almost always in a metaphysical sense. The effect is strongest in the two "middle-aged men lost in Europe" stories... they reminded me of nothing so much as the loneliness of space probes drifting through the cosmic darkness... She also has a nice way of leaving her stories open-ended, not giving readers the easier satisfaction of a well-worked conclusion. I am fifty-fifty on whether this makes the stories better or worse - but I am down with her bleak take on modern man, lost in his infinite anomie. A bit more verbal pop would have been nice maybe, but linguistic flair seems to have become almost déclassé in these benighted times...

As luck would have it, yesterday lunchtime found me in one of those spots in London where you can find serious Caribbean cuisine in a near-authentic setting. Seafood curry at Etta's in Brixton was the perfect accompaniment to a Caribbean story collection called “Fish Soup"!

Beautiful design, as always, by the brilliant folks at Charco Press. Long may they prosper.

[Carla (literary.infatuation) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is actually a collection of two novellas and a collection of short stories.

While reading, the question: “are you plot or character driven” kept coming up on my mind. Her characters are so unlikable, but I read in an interview that that’s on purpose. She wanted her characters to be flawed and real, with common passions and frustrations. And I think she managed that pretty well. I was definitely hooked on the plot, and liked how she set the environment, but these novellas and stories are still not action packed. You get the feeling that everything is left in the air, unresolved. Pretty much like real life.

I could relate to that feeling of frustration and stagnation that comes from being born middle class in Latin America. Nothing seems to happen in the middle, yet we all feel that social climbing is a possibility. Through trapped in a society where your family name and distance to power is the only way to ascend the social ladder, middle classes are still under the spell of meritocracy. If I go to the right schools maybe I’ll meet someone with connections that’ll take me somewhere. If I set up my small corner shop selling trinkets or get a taxi concession, a few years of hard work will reap great results. But in reality, we just barely make ends meet most months, get in debt those when we can’t, and generation after generation fight the same problems, carry the same burden.

Fans of American Dirt will say that this collection is not “Latinx enough”. There’s no drug violence, soap opera stars or migrants on top of trains. Just cabin-crew members with dreams of Miami, widows fighting cancer, fishermen struggling with the effects of climate change and catholic school girls sick of misogynistic messages been thrown at them left and right. But it’s definitely the Latin America I knew growing up.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frank and funny accounts (2 novellas, 7 shorter stories) of growing up/family/school/first sex/sex education as experienced by Catholic educated girls on the Colombian coast in the 2000s. Potty mouthed (do people still say that?), irreverent, glorious.

[Hannah Thuraisingam Robbins · Rating 2 out of 5]

CN: fatphobia, abuse, sexual assault, racism

Looking at other reviews I’m wondering if I just don’t get this book. I like the prose style and there are some darkly funny bits. She writes desire and apathy very well but...

1) there’s some striking fatphobia. The characters who are fat are all bad, distasteful, and disliked. In one story about an overweight child, the character is presented without compassion and there’s a horrible anecdote about children stabbing him with pencils to see if he will deflate.

2) there’s a lot of sexual violence against women and some of it appears to be gratuitous - includes disposable characters who are assaulted and then thrown away. In the first novella, a child is assaulted by an old man and it’s never really explored beyond saying she craves it again, which feels off.

3) it read (perhaps a translation issue) as anti-Black to me with examples like “foreigners like black women, my mother used to say” and then an aggressive hyper sexual story. Or later “he heard mixed race women smelled more than white women” and then how a white woman had been scentless but the black women smelt of sweat. It struck me more than once and is worth being aware of.

[Gilgamesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this. One of my favourite 2018 reads. Such a fresh voice.

[John Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent collection of 2 novellas and several short stories from Colombian author Margarita García Robayo; they remind me a lot of Joan Didion’s early stuff (Play it as it lays in particular) but they are more socially attuned and cunning. They are so sharp and the craft is really incredible. García Robayo never says anything superfluous and there are so many gaps left for a reader to fill in (which I love).

Everything is about sex in some way— it’s a feminist resolve to apathy and shapelessness. The narration is always too smart and too aware of the sexism in machismo sexual relations, as when someone shines a light on something vile it can no longer be abstracted and ignored as we so commonly do with shitty sexual norms: it is garish and disgusting and begs for a change in the status quo (but there is no change coming, nor is there hope for change either).

No one in this book is likable. People are complicated. Sex is hard. Being aware of things you can’t change sucks.

I disagree with the thesis of this book so hard but the vision is so biting and resolute I can’t help but love it.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

When this book is good it’s *good*

[ElenaSquareEyes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fish Soup is a bind up of two novellas and a short stories collection. Waiting for a Hurricane follows a girl who’s desperate to leave her life and her country. Sexual Education is about a student who tries to keep to the strict doctrine of abstinence taught in her school. Worse Things is a collection of snapshots about different characters who are all in different states of turmoil.

Trigger warning for child abuse in Waiting for a Hurricane. The main character forms an unlikely friendship with an old fisherman from a young age. There’s one moment where it seems like his touching her under her underwear but it’s something she never minds and isn’t really mentioned again, and as it’s from a child’s perspective it takes a while for you to figure out what’s happening. She’s so desperate to leave her home on the Colombian coast that she loses touch with friends and family but never seems to find any real connections.

All the stories in Worse Things, and in the two novellas as well, are about people who are suffering in some way. None of them appear to be happy and nearly all of them are unreliable narrators. This makes it difficult to connect to these characters, especially in Worse Things as each snapshot is a matter of pages so you can never truly understand them. Some snapshots I’d have preferred to be longer as I found the characters and their situations interesting whereas I found others very frustrating.

In both Waiting for a Hurricane and Sexual Education, punctuation around speech isn’t used which can make reading these stories a little difficult to begin with as you get used to the style of them. The way the towns and overall settings of the stories were described was incredibly vivid and I could see the beauty of the country even though so many characters didn’t like their home or saw all the problems with it. Fish Soup is an interesting collection of work from Margarita García Robayo. It’s probably a good place to start but I unfortunately found it difficult to like and connect with the majority of the characters which lessened my enjoyment.

[Gabby & Capri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Living by the sea is both good and bad for exactly the same reason: the world ends at the horizon.

I cannot articulate how much I loved this book. The whole time I was reading it felt like there was this almost compulsive need to keep going. The protagonists of the two novellas and short stories were so incredibly compelling no matter how dubious their morals. The unnamed protagonist of "Waiting for a Hurricane" stood out in particular- she asserted such tremendous agency, taking what she wanted from the world and the men around her, yet was still trapped by the circumstances she was born into. She was doomed to come and go, which is worse than having never left at all.

The novella "Sexual Education", however, was my favorite in the entire collection, bringing back memories of a conservative all-girls Catholic school. García Robayo tackles the issues at hand with great nuance. She depicts the pressure to remain chaste amidst the girls' burgeoning adolescent sexuality. She even deals with the hypocrisy of religion, and its role in upholding the patriarchy whilst further stifling the women who suffer under it.

Again, I cannot stress how much I loved this book! The ending left me breathless with a hollow feeling in my chest. I find I do not regret it.

We’ll always be here, waiting for a hurricane to come.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been thinking as I've been reading a series of books by women in translation about Thoreau talking about "the mass of men" and their lives of quiet desperation. It strikes me that maybe he had never met a woman?

The two novellas that bookend this collection are really excellent, closely observed portraits of young women in Columbia and the desperate attempts they are undertaking to escape their lives, to varying degrees of failure. It is always interesting to read stories wherein there is no question of using sex (whatever small amount of power/leverage it provides) to alleviate some suffering. Or if not suffering, then the stifling dullness of the lives the women in these stories lead and feel like they are stuck in for no reason whatsoever more than the circumstances of their birth. While there is unhappiness, the stories are never dour and never without some humor.

The short stories are often weird sketches, ranging from so-so to pretty great. I enjoyed this collection quite a bit. Charco press is a good one.

[Flawed H · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for the #invisibleCitiesProject

As a combination of stories there were ones I really liked and some left me stranded, making me feel as if I did not get the whole point of the story. Really loved "Waiting for the Hurricane" and "Fish Soup". The concise narratives are beautifully executed and I loved how she described the bodies and the features of the people. The aging skins. Beautiful descriptions.

[Bert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Margarita Garcia Robayo is serving us another Colombia. The starters were sublime. The dessert was lovely to digest. I wasn't sure about all the tapas in between. Their textures were great, but they weren't all my taste. A soup you have to fish the flavours out from to your liking.

[Yasmin M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a book!! Amazingly written, beautifully translated. One of my best reads this year.

[Kyubin Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this entire book to, at, and from, the Korean spa in New Jersey. Sue me🤟fav parts were the first and last stories

[Monica (Tattered_tales) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think it takes different people to look at different things from different perspectives. For example, I like the look of unfinished buildings, to me they look like stories that have unexplored potential, reverberating a deep poignancy with their search for an ending that may or may not materialize. I know that not everyone feels the same about them, but that's okay. When I read stories that have abrupt, ambiguous endings I usually don't tend to like them, I say usually because sometimes these endings work and other times they don't and Fish Soup by Margarita Garcia Robayo was the latter for me.

I'm more of a character driven person than a plot driven one. I tend to identify with the characters and that helps me to get into a book. Though the writing style in this book was fresh, amazing and nuanced, I felt a little let down by the characters. With two novellas and seven short stories, there is a lot that could have been done with the characters, but they all felt the same to me- apathetic, detatched, cynical. I struggled to connect with the stories when the characters- the link between the reader and the plot- themselves seemed unconnected from the stories as a whole.

The novellas started out great but they ended unresolved. I was waiting for something, anything to happen, but I got nothing. Same goes for the short stories, the author got me invested in the stories, but then she just left them in stasis. I want to know what happened to Tito, or whether the old man is still haunted by the smell of the fish soup that his dead wife used to make, did Salvador finally find a girlfriend that he understood better. So many unresolved stories just left there at the brink.

I didn't really enjoy this book as much as I hoped to, but don't let my experience dissuade you. There is an audience for this book as evidenced by the numerous five star and four star reviews on Goodreads, so maybe you might like this book more than I did. Also, special mention to the book's publishing company, Charco Press, that is devoted to bring to light contemporary Latin American literature to readers in the English speaking world.

[Karolina I-ska · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most likely, all that would happen is that the boys would be sent abroad for a while. Then they'd come back, go off to study some second-rate degree course at a university in Bogota, before returning to Cartagena to run their parents' businesses, get married and have children who they'd name after themselves, and who would appear on the social announcements pages when they got baptised, when they took their first communion, when they got confirmed, when they graduated, and when they got married to some bilingual girl who talked to the Virgin, with her hymen intact, but her ass in tatters.

For a very brief moment I saw us grown. Not grown up, but grown: adult, slightly old and pitiful, at the bottom of a well that I could peer down, shining a torch. I glimpsed into the future. A future that looked dull, bland, and dark. I tried to imagine us different; transformed into something else.
Atheist. Nympho. Lesbian. Adulterous. Wild.
Or sane.
I wasn't able to.

Sexual Education, a formerly unpublished novella, which finishes Fish Soup: comprised of another novella (Waiting for the Hurricane) and an award-winning collection of Hemingway-style short stories, is one of the best things I've read in a long time. Such a well-written book, so darkly comical, with cynical coming-of-age characters, graphically described decaying bodies and landscapes, and filled with a strong sense of detachment.

I was sitting at the back of the classroom, with my headphones hidden under a blanket. Oh no, I know a dirty word, Kurt was whispering in my right ear. The left ear was listening attentively to the headmistress, who was announcing the apocalypse, because the unknown potential of a creature with seven fathers had been snubbed out.

[Hester · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as part of the #invisiblecities 2021 project where we read translated fiction from around the world.

The book comprises two novellas and a clutch of short stories , all of which explore the lives of individuals whose options are limited by poverty , illness and powerlessness. All are hardened by their experiences in some way and the tone is often disinterested and fatalistic . If you're looking for happy endings, tortured self reflections and pat narrative arcs you'll be disappointed , here we are drop in on a series of episodes where the action itself describes the interior lives and we understand characters by their impulses and appetites.

The writing is good , especially in the last novella, Sexual Education, where the inventive vulgarity of the teenage girls hemmed in by a hypocritical Catholic education is simply wonderful .

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Really liked the novellas (so funny, jarring, feministy, memorable, deep), the short stories left me a bit meh. You can't deny the author knows what she's doing and is not messing around or underestimating the intelligence of the reader.

I liked the minimalist style of the writing but for some of the short stories, it wasn't really clicking for me.

This was my book club pick for this year and I'm happy with my choice! I still think my GOAT book club pick was the Emma Reyes memoir though...

Mega bonus points for being short.

[Mike Decker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gritty, determined yet quietly desperate humans in a fog, trying to match together their longing/desires with their reality while having their lives seemingly pre-determined not by their own volition. Robayo's writing is extremely approachable, loose but complete, giving wide space for the characters to feel real and relatable. And there is a sad darkness to these stories, a place where desperation meets bluster, where a character refuses to be resigned to their fate even though it appears they're in a straitjacket.

[David Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are some grimy stories, but dang if they aren't horribly fascinating. These are tales of people growing up, and people dying--possibly both at the same time--and the perverted prerogatives of living in either case. It's hard to recommend this to everyone, not because it shouldn't be read, but because it provides lessons that can be repellent and are no less true for it. That said, they are quick, if not light, and beautiful, if not particularly comely.

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once again, I think I'm just not that into short stories. There were definitely ones I liked, but they always feel so unfinished...because they're short stories.

Most interesting thing about this book is the very different way writers who are not N American (or probably even European) talk about sexuality. So openly and unashamedly, which is very refreshing.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Robayo's style (beautifully translated by Coombe) and was completely captivated by these quirky, dirty, often deeply sad short stories and novellas. I particularly loved the two short novels (really, long short stories) either end of this collection--in part because their sadness never diminishes their heroines.