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Family Album: Stories
Family Album is Ecuadorian author Gabriela Alemán’s rollicking follow-up to her acclaimed English-language debut, Poso Wells.
Alemán is known for her spirited and sardonic take on the fatefully interconnected—and often highly compromised—forces at work in present-day South America, and particularly in Ecuador. In this collection of eight hugely entertaining short stories, she teases tropes of hardboiled detective fiction, satire, and adventure narratives to recast the discussion of national identity. A muddy brew of pop-culture and pop-folklore yields intriguing, lesser-known episodes of contemporary Ecuadorian history, along with a rich cast of unforgettable characters whose intimate stories open up onto a vista of Ecuador’s place on the world stage.
From a pair of deep-sea divers using Robinson Crusoe’s map of a shipwreck to locate sunken treasure in the Galapagos Archipelago, to a night with the husband of Ecuador’s most infamous expat, Lorena Bobbit, this series of cracked “family portraits” provides a cast of picaresque heroes and anti-heroes in stories that sneak up on a reader before they know what’s happened: they’ve learned a great deal about a country whose more well known exports—soccer, coffee and cocoa—mask an intriguing national story that’s ripe for the telling.
Alemán is known for her spirited and sardonic take on the fatefully interconnected—and often highly compromised—forces at work in present-day South America, and particularly in Ecuador. In this collection of eight hugely entertaining short stories, she teases tropes of hardboiled detective fiction, satire, and adventure narratives to recast the discussion of national identity. A muddy brew of pop-culture and pop-folklore yields intriguing, lesser-known episodes of contemporary Ecuadorian history, along with a rich cast of unforgettable characters whose intimate stories open up onto a vista of Ecuador’s place on the world stage.
From a pair of deep-sea divers using Robinson Crusoe’s map of a shipwreck to locate sunken treasure in the Galapagos Archipelago, to a night with the husband of Ecuador’s most infamous expat, Lorena Bobbit, this series of cracked “family portraits” provides a cast of picaresque heroes and anti-heroes in stories that sneak up on a reader before they know what’s happened: they’ve learned a great deal about a country whose more well known exports—soccer, coffee and cocoa—mask an intriguing national story that’s ripe for the telling.
120 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
12 people are currently reading
244 people want to read
About the author
Gabriela Alemán
31 books64 followersGabriela Alemán, a writer based in Quito, Ecuador, has played professional basketball in Switzerland and Paraguay and has worked as a waitress, administrator, translator, radio scriptwriter, and film studies professor. She received a PhD at Tulane University and holds an MA in Latin American literature from Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar. She received a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and was included in Bogota39, a 2007 selection of the most important up-and-coming writers in Latin America in the post-Boom generation. She was one of five finalists for the 2015 Premio Hispanoamericano de Cuento Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia) for her story collection La muerte silba un blues and has won several prizes for critical essays on literature and film. Her other books include the short-story collections Maldito corazón, Zoom, Fuga permanente, and Álbum de familia; and the novels Body Time, Poso Wells, and Humo. Her stories have appeared in anthologies in French, English, Chinese, Hebrew, and Serbo-Croatian. Poso Wells is her first full-length work to appear in English.
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November 28, 2023
‘Is your membership to the human race paid up?’
Storytelling is a powerful vessel for communication, one that transports not only the details of events but has stowaways hiding within the narrative to communicate so much more through our framing and underlying implications. Family Album, the short story collection from Ecuadorian author Gabriela Alemán and wonderfully translated into English by Mary Ellen Fieweger and Dick Cluster, understands this and uses the vessel of storytelling as an investigation into the stories we are told like a noir detective searching for the truth in a coordinated sea of lies and half-truths. A scuba instructor suspects a deeper motivation from his eager, aging client, a journalist uncovers a truth their own work helped to obscure, affairs and secret identities come to light and a woman claims a sexual assault delivered sainthood upon her. Each of the eight stories is set in Alemán’s home country of Ecuador with each a snapshot of life that overtakes you with surprise by the end, often revealing a mystery you didn’t even know you were seeking.
‘The kind of thing that sometimes provides a reason to go on living, allows the present to hold together, and lets one imagine that what one sees is all there really is.’
This little collection captures so many elements that I enjoy. Gabriela Alemán is the grandaughter of Hugo Alemán, one of his generation’s best-known poets and a founder of Ecuador’s Socialist Party, and she carries on his legacy with grace through her succinct narratives told with sharp poetic quality. In an interview with Southwest Review, Alemán says ‘I’ve written a 300-page novel only to realize, while editing, that there could be a good fifty-page novella or a long short story in there, so I got rid of the 250 odd pages and worked on those fifty.’ This is something I truly respect, the condensing of a work to focus on the heart of what truly matters and only keeping the elements that harmonize together to create an effect louder than the sum of their parts. Everything is very pared down and direct, inconspicuous on the page until the moment things really hit home. The framing of the novel is fun as well:
Each story is like a snapshot of an individual tied to the larger society of Ecuador. In many ways it functions as a criticism of the notion of individualism, as the largest hurts come from those who seek individual aspirations over those of their family or community. There is a deceptive simplicity to these stories as well, that often end with you questioning what the point may have been until the collective weight of each implication begins to wash over you. These are stories that read more like an experience than a lesson, and I quite enjoyed this.
‘Why hadn’t I seen it before? Because I let myself be carried away by the other story, the scandalous one, the one the papers of the 1930s wanted to sell to their readers.’
‘The mechanism is perfect; the gearing, precise; the house of cards, fragile,’ writes Alemán, ‘and the story? Who cares? It can pass for perfect.’ With any narrative, we also have to question who it serves and why.In a collection of stories where lies or secrets lurk everywhere, these stories have the reader serving almost like an investigative journalist into these lives. ‘I just think that people assume too many things, one of which is that somebody who writes always tells the truth,’ says the narrator in the opening story (and perhaps most moving of the collection), Baptism, where accounts of a sunken treasure may simply be a fool’s quest. This theme is most pronounced in the story Summer Vacation, where a journalist is tipped off to documents that pull the rug out from under a long standing narrative of the real life Baroness Wagner (several real figures appear in the book, including John Wayne Bobbitt) that ‘placed her in the present, under a new light.’ Truth is hiding in fiction, which is often a clever way to disguise what is underneath until it is suddenly revealed. As the narrator in Costume Party says:
Yet even when there are incredible revelations, the characters seem to carry on without making much of them. ‘On the way to the hotel, I thought — only for an instant, then it was gone — that I needed to do something with what I’d learned,’ the narrator in Summer Vacation admits, ‘but, as I said, it was just an instant and then it disappeared, like a hook and a line lost at sea.’ These stories are about the journey to discovery, the narrative of uncovering truth, yet once we arrive the characters seem resigned to carry on as usual. It can be read as a realistic outcome when all one wants is to keep on keeping on (think of the Panama Papers and the nearly nothing that came of it), a society that prefers to brush things under the rug.
Which is why we tell stories, right? To pass these things along, to frame them in a way that might prove useful. The final story involves a woman retelling her story over and over again, every day much to the narrator’s distress, as if seeking to find a meaning within it. It reminds me of the final lines to Raymond Carver’s Why Don’t You Dance? where he writes ‘She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out.’ Similarly in School Trip, we find the telling of a basketball game decades later to be the framing instead of the actual game itself, because it is the retelling, the mulling over of details to polish them like stones against the waves of our minds, that Alemán seeks to reflect in her works. Perhaps this is why many of the characters are quite old, they are now vulnerable and with less ahead of them and seeking some narrative of the past to validate the years spent on earth.
‘More than fifty, but to him it’s yesterday, and that’s where he’s stuck. He drinks to put himself to sleep and his humiliation on a shelf.’
This is a very brief and compact collection that delivers in subtle but magnificent ways. Alemán’s work through this lovely translation is thought-provoking as it is elusive and I quite enjoyed the ride towards discovery.
4/5
‘It didn’t matter who was behind the mask, because the eternally deferred mystery was the answer to everything.’
Storytelling is a powerful vessel for communication, one that transports not only the details of events but has stowaways hiding within the narrative to communicate so much more through our framing and underlying implications. Family Album, the short story collection from Ecuadorian author Gabriela Alemán and wonderfully translated into English by Mary Ellen Fieweger and Dick Cluster, understands this and uses the vessel of storytelling as an investigation into the stories we are told like a noir detective searching for the truth in a coordinated sea of lies and half-truths. A scuba instructor suspects a deeper motivation from his eager, aging client, a journalist uncovers a truth their own work helped to obscure, affairs and secret identities come to light and a woman claims a sexual assault delivered sainthood upon her. Each of the eight stories is set in Alemán’s home country of Ecuador with each a snapshot of life that overtakes you with surprise by the end, often revealing a mystery you didn’t even know you were seeking.
‘The kind of thing that sometimes provides a reason to go on living, allows the present to hold together, and lets one imagine that what one sees is all there really is.’
This little collection captures so many elements that I enjoy. Gabriela Alemán is the grandaughter of Hugo Alemán, one of his generation’s best-known poets and a founder of Ecuador’s Socialist Party, and she carries on his legacy with grace through her succinct narratives told with sharp poetic quality. In an interview with Southwest Review, Alemán says ‘I’ve written a 300-page novel only to realize, while editing, that there could be a good fifty-page novella or a long short story in there, so I got rid of the 250 odd pages and worked on those fifty.’ This is something I truly respect, the condensing of a work to focus on the heart of what truly matters and only keeping the elements that harmonize together to create an effect louder than the sum of their parts. Everything is very pared down and direct, inconspicuous on the page until the moment things really hit home. The framing of the novel is fun as well:
‘When I wrote Family Album, I wanted the book to have the feel of a photo album (something that had begun to disappear from people’s homes). From the beginning, I had thought up the title with the idea that the “frame” of the photograph or story was always going to be Ecuador, while the image “inside” was going to be the story I wanted to tell. And each story had a specific genre it was going to belong to (adventure, thriller, detective, dark comedy, etc.), so its tone was dependent on that.’
Each story is like a snapshot of an individual tied to the larger society of Ecuador. In many ways it functions as a criticism of the notion of individualism, as the largest hurts come from those who seek individual aspirations over those of their family or community. There is a deceptive simplicity to these stories as well, that often end with you questioning what the point may have been until the collective weight of each implication begins to wash over you. These are stories that read more like an experience than a lesson, and I quite enjoyed this.
‘Why hadn’t I seen it before? Because I let myself be carried away by the other story, the scandalous one, the one the papers of the 1930s wanted to sell to their readers.’
‘The mechanism is perfect; the gearing, precise; the house of cards, fragile,’ writes Alemán, ‘and the story? Who cares? It can pass for perfect.’ With any narrative, we also have to question who it serves and why.In a collection of stories where lies or secrets lurk everywhere, these stories have the reader serving almost like an investigative journalist into these lives. ‘I just think that people assume too many things, one of which is that somebody who writes always tells the truth,’ says the narrator in the opening story (and perhaps most moving of the collection), Baptism, where accounts of a sunken treasure may simply be a fool’s quest. This theme is most pronounced in the story Summer Vacation, where a journalist is tipped off to documents that pull the rug out from under a long standing narrative of the real life Baroness Wagner (several real figures appear in the book, including John Wayne Bobbitt) that ‘placed her in the present, under a new light.’ Truth is hiding in fiction, which is often a clever way to disguise what is underneath until it is suddenly revealed. As the narrator in Costume Party says:
‘for the first time somebody seemed about to tell me something out of script. Something that hadn’t been rehearsed, something that due to its frequent handling had acquired the sheen of truth.’
Yet even when there are incredible revelations, the characters seem to carry on without making much of them. ‘On the way to the hotel, I thought — only for an instant, then it was gone — that I needed to do something with what I’d learned,’ the narrator in Summer Vacation admits, ‘but, as I said, it was just an instant and then it disappeared, like a hook and a line lost at sea.’ These stories are about the journey to discovery, the narrative of uncovering truth, yet once we arrive the characters seem resigned to carry on as usual. It can be read as a realistic outcome when all one wants is to keep on keeping on (think of the Panama Papers and the nearly nothing that came of it), a society that prefers to brush things under the rug.
Which is why we tell stories, right? To pass these things along, to frame them in a way that might prove useful. The final story involves a woman retelling her story over and over again, every day much to the narrator’s distress, as if seeking to find a meaning within it. It reminds me of the final lines to Raymond Carver’s Why Don’t You Dance? where he writes ‘She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out.’ Similarly in School Trip, we find the telling of a basketball game decades later to be the framing instead of the actual game itself, because it is the retelling, the mulling over of details to polish them like stones against the waves of our minds, that Alemán seeks to reflect in her works. Perhaps this is why many of the characters are quite old, they are now vulnerable and with less ahead of them and seeking some narrative of the past to validate the years spent on earth.
‘More than fifty, but to him it’s yesterday, and that’s where he’s stuck. He drinks to put himself to sleep and his humiliation on a shelf.’
This is a very brief and compact collection that delivers in subtle but magnificent ways. Alemán’s work through this lovely translation is thought-provoking as it is elusive and I quite enjoyed the ride towards discovery.
4/5
‘It didn’t matter who was behind the mask, because the eternally deferred mystery was the answer to everything.’
February 19, 2023
Indie press City Lights continues to bring the work of Gabriela Alemán into English, first in 2018 with Alemán's novel Poso Wells, and now with Family Album, originally Álbum de familia, a collection of stories translated by Dick Cluster and Mary Ellen Fieweger. The entries in this slim volume are set in Alemán's native Ecuador and feature an intriguing mix of genres and styles. At 120 pages, this is a nice introduction to Alemán's work and a relatively light read for literary fiction. I didn't find any of the eight stories particularly groundbreaking or memorable, but on the other hand there wasn't a weak entry in the bunch.
March 10, 2023
When I wrote Family Album, I wanted the book to have the feel of a photo album (something that had begun to disappear from people’s homes). From the beginning, I had thought up the title with the idea that the “frame” of the photograph or story was always going to be Ecuador, while the image “inside” was going to be the story I wanted to tell. And each story had a specific genre it was going to belong to (adventure, thriller, detective, dark comedy, etc.), so its tone was dependent on that. — this is how Gabriela Alemán explains in an interview the brilliant concept and daring structure of her Family Album (2010), the collection of eight short stories. I found her idea captivating and original but the execution proved disappointing.
The problem with quirkiness and black humour in literature — and not only black, all shades of it, actually — is that either they click with a particular reader or not. Not many other options available in between. I am sorry to report that Gabriela Alemán's irony and mine seem to operate on completely different wavelengths. Most of the time I found her take on macabre with a wink aimless.
For me reading Family Album was like pouring water through a colander: the stream of words flowed through me without leaving any trace. The dynamic of the collection is weird: the first two stories, especially Baptism, truly appealed to me but the rest either let me down or left me indifferent. It has been a month since I read this book and my memories of it are already blurry. Such a pity the sky-high level of the first story has not been maintained throughout the collection and the literary magic it evoked has been lost irretrievably.
According to Barry Gifford, Gabriela Alemán's stories are like lizards lying on rocks in the sun. When you try to pick one up it darts away and disappears. Sometimes a tail comes off in your hand or the thing bites your fingers and drops of blood decorate the rock. The metaphor is striking but my experience with Family Album was not as spellbinding and compelling as Barry Gifford's. I doubt if I will ever go on the lizard quest again.
Artwork by Washington Andrade, Ecuador.
The problem with quirkiness and black humour in literature — and not only black, all shades of it, actually — is that either they click with a particular reader or not. Not many other options available in between. I am sorry to report that Gabriela Alemán's irony and mine seem to operate on completely different wavelengths. Most of the time I found her take on macabre with a wink aimless.
For me reading Family Album was like pouring water through a colander: the stream of words flowed through me without leaving any trace. The dynamic of the collection is weird: the first two stories, especially Baptism, truly appealed to me but the rest either let me down or left me indifferent. It has been a month since I read this book and my memories of it are already blurry. Such a pity the sky-high level of the first story has not been maintained throughout the collection and the literary magic it evoked has been lost irretrievably.
According to Barry Gifford, Gabriela Alemán's stories are like lizards lying on rocks in the sun. When you try to pick one up it darts away and disappears. Sometimes a tail comes off in your hand or the thing bites your fingers and drops of blood decorate the rock. The metaphor is striking but my experience with Family Album was not as spellbinding and compelling as Barry Gifford's. I doubt if I will ever go on the lizard quest again.
Artwork by Washington Andrade, Ecuador.
May 22, 2025
This short collection of about 100 pages consists of 8 stories that take place in Ecuador. A couple of truly outstanding short stories alternate some less compelling ones.
The first two are my favourites. In the first story, ‘Baptism’, a diving instructor in the Galapagos takes a dying man on an expedition to find Robinson Crusoe’s lost gold. In the second, ‘Summer’, a journalist slowly unravels the mystery of two strange German couples and a quaint baroness that established themselves on a remote, uninhabited island of the Galapagos in the 1930s. I also very much enjoyed ‘Marriage’, a story about a woman who discovers her husband, who died recently, had a second family.
The titles of the stories all refer to typical pictures in a family photo album and I guess the idea is that the picture does not tell the whole story – secrets can be revealed if one takes the effort to investigate the past.
I have been enjoying some excellent South-American short stories collections recently (Mariana Enriquez, Federico Falco, Maria Fernanda Ampuero) and this did not disappoint either.
Overall the collection feels a little uneven to me, but the first two stories alone make this more than worthwhile.
Many thanks to City Lights for the ARC via Edelweiss
The first two are my favourites. In the first story, ‘Baptism’, a diving instructor in the Galapagos takes a dying man on an expedition to find Robinson Crusoe’s lost gold. In the second, ‘Summer’, a journalist slowly unravels the mystery of two strange German couples and a quaint baroness that established themselves on a remote, uninhabited island of the Galapagos in the 1930s. I also very much enjoyed ‘Marriage’, a story about a woman who discovers her husband, who died recently, had a second family.
The titles of the stories all refer to typical pictures in a family photo album and I guess the idea is that the picture does not tell the whole story – secrets can be revealed if one takes the effort to investigate the past.
I have been enjoying some excellent South-American short stories collections recently (Mariana Enriquez, Federico Falco, Maria Fernanda Ampuero) and this did not disappoint either.
Overall the collection feels a little uneven to me, but the first two stories alone make this more than worthwhile.
Many thanks to City Lights for the ARC via Edelweiss
February 12, 2023
Longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, US & Canada
In his account of traveling along the Orinoco, Humboldt describes a strange ritual in which the native people go into the depths of a cave to catch birds with pitch-black feathers that they call tayos. As they penetrate the cave, the men bang together enormous river-bottom rocks and shake rattles made of dried animal hooves. This bewilders the tayos, blind birds with oily plumage, who are extremely sensitive to sound. Then the men hurl themselves at the birds, but seizing them is not easy because they are slippery as greased pigs and the floor of the cave tilts abruptly toward an abyss. In the German naturalist’s description, the tayos’ faces resemble those of aged children and the empty sockets of their eyes are only slightly less disturbing than the spearing of their chicks that follows. As night falls, after impaling the birds, the men set them on fire. The sustained and steady light will illuminate the men’s nocturnal excursions.
None of Humboldt’s writing succeeds in describing the terror he felt on witnessing the hunt, the impaling, and the subsequent conversion of the birds into torches. He takes refuge in the language of science, but this proves insufficient, and he finally abandons it. The caves of the Ecuadorian Amazon are full of tayos, those birds in whose empty eyes it is not hard to imagine hell or its terrestrial equivalent: the decaying expanse of jungle that propitiates dissipation and disappointment, where only the dregs are likely to prosper.
* * *
I picked up the notebook dropped by the geologist who was recovering next to me in the infirmary of the drilling platform off the Louisiana coast, and I read that passage in his diary. This was my introduction to Ecuador, which I had never heard of before. It came just as I had decided I needed to flee the country, because no place in it seemed safe for me. I had left too many tracks in too many places. I needed to start over. The Ecuadoran jungle sounded like just the ticket.
Family Album: Stories (2022) is the translation by Dick Cluster and Mary Ellen Fieweger of the collection Álbum de familia (2010) by Ecuadorian author Gabriela Alemán. It is published by the small independent press City Lights Publishers:
In an interview in the LA Review of Books at the time of her English-language debut Poso Wells [also by City Lights Books and translated by Dick Cluster] Alemán explained her cross-genre approach and literary references:
And that flavour extends to this book which, in a Q&A on City Light's website the author herself described as follows:
The eight stories, in a variety of genre styles, are each named after family events - Baptism, Summer Vacation, School Trip, Family Outing, Marriage, Honeymoon, Costume Party and Moving Day. Or at least they are in this collection - I haven't checked the original, and when two of the stories appeared previously in English they had different titles (Spears for Family Outing, Superheroes to Costume Party).
Each also draws on some real-life history or cultural reference ranging from the 18th-19th century naturalist von Humboldt and the 17th-18th century privateer Alexander Selkirk (the model for Robinson Crusoe) to pop-cultural icons El Santo, the Mexican wrestler and the infamous John Wayne Bobbitt (whose wife Lorena was a native of Ecuador), as well as the fascinating real-life story of 'Baroness' Eloise von Wagner Bosquet. There is also a story on kids 'biddy basketball', drawing on the author's own background as a professional basketball player, but as with so many of the stories this is merely the starting point - e.g. the von Humboldt story (Spears or Family Outing) turns into a tale of a missionary expedition that goes horribly wrong and is then exploited by mining companies.
The stories are well-sketched and pleasingly compact (8-15 pages) and Alemán said in another interview, with her translators, at SouthWest Review when describing her writing (words that warm my heart):
And while not each of the stories works equally successfully, the collection to me is most successful as a short novel (the total length is < 100 pages) of Ecuadorian history and culture. 3.5 stars rounded to 4.
In his account of traveling along the Orinoco, Humboldt describes a strange ritual in which the native people go into the depths of a cave to catch birds with pitch-black feathers that they call tayos. As they penetrate the cave, the men bang together enormous river-bottom rocks and shake rattles made of dried animal hooves. This bewilders the tayos, blind birds with oily plumage, who are extremely sensitive to sound. Then the men hurl themselves at the birds, but seizing them is not easy because they are slippery as greased pigs and the floor of the cave tilts abruptly toward an abyss. In the German naturalist’s description, the tayos’ faces resemble those of aged children and the empty sockets of their eyes are only slightly less disturbing than the spearing of their chicks that follows. As night falls, after impaling the birds, the men set them on fire. The sustained and steady light will illuminate the men’s nocturnal excursions.
None of Humboldt’s writing succeeds in describing the terror he felt on witnessing the hunt, the impaling, and the subsequent conversion of the birds into torches. He takes refuge in the language of science, but this proves insufficient, and he finally abandons it. The caves of the Ecuadorian Amazon are full of tayos, those birds in whose empty eyes it is not hard to imagine hell or its terrestrial equivalent: the decaying expanse of jungle that propitiates dissipation and disappointment, where only the dregs are likely to prosper.
* * *
I picked up the notebook dropped by the geologist who was recovering next to me in the infirmary of the drilling platform off the Louisiana coast, and I read that passage in his diary. This was my introduction to Ecuador, which I had never heard of before. It came just as I had decided I needed to flee the country, because no place in it seemed safe for me. I had left too many tracks in too many places. I needed to start over. The Ecuadoran jungle sounded like just the ticket.
Family Album: Stories (2022) is the translation by Dick Cluster and Mary Ellen Fieweger of the collection Álbum de familia (2010) by Ecuadorian author Gabriela Alemán. It is published by the small independent press City Lights Publishers:
City Lights has always been a champion of progressive thinking, fully committed to publishing works of both literary merit and social responsibility. With over 200 titles in print, we publish cutting-edge fiction, poetry, memoirs, literary translations and books on vital social and political issues.
In an interview in the LA Review of Books at the time of her English-language debut Poso Wells [also by City Lights Books and translated by Dick Cluster] Alemán explained her cross-genre approach and literary references:
I love crossovers between horror and fantasy or historical fiction and suspense or between social realism and poetry. If you look at my bookcases, the breaking of boundaries starts out right there. I have Toni Morrison next to Angela Carter next to Grace Paley next to Eudora Welty next to Silvina Ocampo next to Anne Rice next to Ursula K. Le Guin next to Octavia Butler next to Joyce Carol Oates next to Poppy Z. Brite next to Kurt Vonnegut next to Neil Gaiman next to Dostoyevsky and Karel Čapek and Bioy Casares and Borges and César Dávila Andrade.
And that flavour extends to this book which, in a Q&A on City Light's website the author herself described as follows:
Family Album is a collection of eight short stories that explore minor characters in Ecuadorian pop-folklore or lesser-known episodes of Ecuadorian contemporary history. The idea behind the title (a photograph album) is that in each story Ecuador can, in some ways, be thought of as the “frame” of the story, while the “inside,” or the “photographs,” are the stories themselves, which are more universal in theme and deal with sickness, dreams, memories, identity, beliefs, fame, violence, desire, and friendship.
The eight stories, in a variety of genre styles, are each named after family events - Baptism, Summer Vacation, School Trip, Family Outing, Marriage, Honeymoon, Costume Party and Moving Day. Or at least they are in this collection - I haven't checked the original, and when two of the stories appeared previously in English they had different titles (Spears for Family Outing, Superheroes to Costume Party).
Each also draws on some real-life history or cultural reference ranging from the 18th-19th century naturalist von Humboldt and the 17th-18th century privateer Alexander Selkirk (the model for Robinson Crusoe) to pop-cultural icons El Santo, the Mexican wrestler and the infamous John Wayne Bobbitt (whose wife Lorena was a native of Ecuador), as well as the fascinating real-life story of 'Baroness' Eloise von Wagner Bosquet. There is also a story on kids 'biddy basketball', drawing on the author's own background as a professional basketball player, but as with so many of the stories this is merely the starting point - e.g. the von Humboldt story (Spears or Family Outing) turns into a tale of a missionary expedition that goes horribly wrong and is then exploited by mining companies.
The stories are well-sketched and pleasingly compact (8-15 pages) and Alemán said in another interview, with her translators, at SouthWest Review when describing her writing (words that warm my heart):
I’ve written a 300-page novel only to realize, while editing, that there could be a good fifty-page novella or a long short story in there, so I got rid of the 250 odd pages and worked on those fifty.
And while not each of the stories works equally successfully, the collection to me is most successful as a short novel (the total length is < 100 pages) of Ecuadorian history and culture. 3.5 stars rounded to 4.
October 5, 2018
Pequeña colección de relatos sin más pretensión que contar historias con premisas interesantes, un ritmo ágil y fácil lectura. Tal vez los cuentos carezcan de experimentación o de técnicas narrativas novedosas, pero las tramas de los mismos son envolventes, con un marcado énfasis en anécdotas de la cultura popular ecuatoriana (algunas ya casi olvidadas). Mi favorito fue, probablemente, "Verano", en el que se cuenta la historia de la condesa de las Islas Encantadas y que por momentos adopta el tono de un cuento policiaco.
June 13, 2022
I was very excited to pick this up based on its setting in the Galapagos (it turned out only the first 2 of 8 stories took place on the islands). Each story focused on one individual with some sort of hidden backstory. The stories contained beautiful descriptions but the actual storylines often left something to be desired. I do get the feeling that some of the original strength of these stories was lost in translation a little bit. I think the story about the martyred missionaries will stick with me the most.
January 22, 2024
This collection of short stories has some highlights: "School Trip", "Family Outing", "Honeymoon". Other stories are unfortunately forgettable.
I think this is due to the point of view from which the stories are being told. All the stories are seemingly being told "stream of consciousness" style by a narrator to someone (maybe you, the reader). But, as a result, it feels like you're popping into someone's conversation and spending the first couple of pages of the story just getting situated. For stories that tend to run under 10 pages, that's a lot of time just figuring out what's going on. I guess the stories' shortness welcomes quick re-readings, but despite considering it on several occasions I never followed through on re-reading earlier stories.
Due to the style of storytelling, the humor is more obfuscated, as well. The stories are definitely funny, but the punchline feels lost in the immediate narrative. It's only upon reflection that I found myself cracking a smile.
The collection continues the style of writing that I first enjoyed in Gabriela Aleman's novel, Poso Wells: a sense of humor mixed with surrealist scenarios, but falls a bit short of being fully gratifying.
I think this is due to the point of view from which the stories are being told. All the stories are seemingly being told "stream of consciousness" style by a narrator to someone (maybe you, the reader). But, as a result, it feels like you're popping into someone's conversation and spending the first couple of pages of the story just getting situated. For stories that tend to run under 10 pages, that's a lot of time just figuring out what's going on. I guess the stories' shortness welcomes quick re-readings, but despite considering it on several occasions I never followed through on re-reading earlier stories.
Due to the style of storytelling, the humor is more obfuscated, as well. The stories are definitely funny, but the punchline feels lost in the immediate narrative. It's only upon reflection that I found myself cracking a smile.
The collection continues the style of writing that I first enjoyed in Gabriela Aleman's novel, Poso Wells: a sense of humor mixed with surrealist scenarios, but falls a bit short of being fully gratifying.
December 22, 2023
City Lights' submission longlisted for the inaugural U.S./Canada Republic of Consciousness Prize...
It's taken me nearly the whole year to get through the longlist for a contest whose prize was awarded back in March (2023). I was going to give up on the last two unread titles but their reading position was determined solely by their availability in comparison to the other titles on the list. I'm glad I didn't as this collection of 8 stories (translated by Dick Cluster and Mary Ellen Fieweger) might end up being my favorite of the competition (I still have to read Blood Red). None of the stories is overwhelming in their impact, but each has a kind of insidiously slippery nature about them that worked its way under my skin. Nothing about these feels repetitive, often they utilize quite different and playful voices, and combined, they create a thread of memorable characters enigmatically unraveling through the pages. A playful, funny, subtle, and unexpected gem.
------------------------------------------------
My Longlist Rankings for the U.S./Canada Republic of Consciousness Prize
1) Family Album: Stories by Gabriela Alemán
2) A New Name: Septology VI-VII by Jon Fosse
3) Moldy Strawberries: Stories by Caio Fernando Abreu
4) Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing by Robin McLean
5) God's Children Are Little Broken Things: Stories by Arinze Ifeakandu (Prize Winner)
6) The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr
7) New Animal by Ella Baxter
8) Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce Padilla
9) Pollak's Arm by Hans von Trotha
10) New and Selected Stories by Cristina Rivera Garza
"… it was like the sky opened for the first time in so long, I could see. But not that I could see, just that I went from one hallucination to another. Because appearances, you know, their thing is to be deceiving."
It's taken me nearly the whole year to get through the longlist for a contest whose prize was awarded back in March (2023). I was going to give up on the last two unread titles but their reading position was determined solely by their availability in comparison to the other titles on the list. I'm glad I didn't as this collection of 8 stories (translated by Dick Cluster and Mary Ellen Fieweger) might end up being my favorite of the competition (I still have to read Blood Red). None of the stories is overwhelming in their impact, but each has a kind of insidiously slippery nature about them that worked its way under my skin. Nothing about these feels repetitive, often they utilize quite different and playful voices, and combined, they create a thread of memorable characters enigmatically unraveling through the pages. A playful, funny, subtle, and unexpected gem.
------------------------------------------------
My Longlist Rankings for the U.S./Canada Republic of Consciousness Prize
1) Family Album: Stories by Gabriela Alemán
2) A New Name: Septology VI-VII by Jon Fosse
3) Moldy Strawberries: Stories by Caio Fernando Abreu
4) Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing by Robin McLean
5) God's Children Are Little Broken Things: Stories by Arinze Ifeakandu (Prize Winner)
6) The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr
7) New Animal by Ella Baxter
8) Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce Padilla
9) Pollak's Arm by Hans von Trotha
10) New and Selected Stories by Cristina Rivera Garza
February 25, 2025
Gabriela Alemán es la mejor.
Este es un libro de relatos, el primero que leo de la autora. Conocía un par de sus novelas, impresionantes las dos, pero recién ahora he constatado su destreza cuentística.
No le pongo las cinco estrellas porque es un libro hecho para ecuatorianos, por lo que es necesario haber nacido y crecido en Ecuador para poder apreciar el cien por ciento del mensaje que está presentado en clave de humor y nostalgia.
Recomendadísimo si nacieron en ese país en la mitad del mundo. Y si no también, aunque no reirán lo mismo. Pero si se entristecerán igual.
Este es un libro de relatos, el primero que leo de la autora. Conocía un par de sus novelas, impresionantes las dos, pero recién ahora he constatado su destreza cuentística.
No le pongo las cinco estrellas porque es un libro hecho para ecuatorianos, por lo que es necesario haber nacido y crecido en Ecuador para poder apreciar el cien por ciento del mensaje que está presentado en clave de humor y nostalgia.
Recomendadísimo si nacieron en ese país en la mitad del mundo. Y si no también, aunque no reirán lo mismo. Pero si se entristecerán igual.
January 30, 2023
This book is one of the ten books on the inaugural longlist for the US & Canada Republic of Consciousness Prize.
There are 8 stories in this short book, all set in Ecuador. As is typical, I liked some much more than others but overall the book is very good. I will comment on the stories below but for an excellent review of what the author is doing here read this wonderful review -- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Baptism -- Bartender/scuba diver instructor strikes up friendship with old guy with map of buried treasure. He's swimming with the turtles, they're heading toward the far wall. This is my favorite. It is a beautiful story. 5*
Summer Vacation -- Strange man provides author with information about the Baroness he had once written about and it bears no resemblance to what the assumed truth is. What does he do with the information? I thought - only for an instant, then it was gone - that I needed to do something with what I'd learned. 4.5*
School Trip -- Did you know that Ecuador once almost beat the US for the world championship in basketball in 1967 and the MVP of the tournament was one of the Ecuadorian kids? Something important seemed about to happen and then Henry belched. 5*
Family Outing -- Armed missionaries seek to convert natives and die. Guns and bullets left out of all reports. I decided to forget about it, and, so as to bury the episode completely, I converted. I did if for the same reason that makes believers of us all, because in the end you believe what's good for you. 5*
Marriage -- Woman discovers dead husband was not who she thought. Closing one's eyes wasn't enough. All that was left was to assume a temporary blindness and go on living. 4*
Honeymoon -- Older women soothes older man who breaks down in movie theatre and takes him home. Lorena must have cut him for some pretty good reason, I was ready to bet. 3*
Costume Party -- Reporter spends years tracking down truth about El Santo. And the story? Who cares? 3.5*
Moving Day -- Woman repeats story over and over. Friend tells her she is going to ask her long-term partner to leave and all will be okay. She looked at me like she had no idea what I was talking about or, if she knew, she wasn't letting on. 2.5*
There are 8 stories in this short book, all set in Ecuador. As is typical, I liked some much more than others but overall the book is very good. I will comment on the stories below but for an excellent review of what the author is doing here read this wonderful review -- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Baptism -- Bartender/scuba diver instructor strikes up friendship with old guy with map of buried treasure. He's swimming with the turtles, they're heading toward the far wall. This is my favorite. It is a beautiful story. 5*
Summer Vacation -- Strange man provides author with information about the Baroness he had once written about and it bears no resemblance to what the assumed truth is. What does he do with the information? I thought - only for an instant, then it was gone - that I needed to do something with what I'd learned. 4.5*
School Trip -- Did you know that Ecuador once almost beat the US for the world championship in basketball in 1967 and the MVP of the tournament was one of the Ecuadorian kids? Something important seemed about to happen and then Henry belched. 5*
Family Outing -- Armed missionaries seek to convert natives and die. Guns and bullets left out of all reports. I decided to forget about it, and, so as to bury the episode completely, I converted. I did if for the same reason that makes believers of us all, because in the end you believe what's good for you. 5*
Marriage -- Woman discovers dead husband was not who she thought. Closing one's eyes wasn't enough. All that was left was to assume a temporary blindness and go on living. 4*
Honeymoon -- Older women soothes older man who breaks down in movie theatre and takes him home. Lorena must have cut him for some pretty good reason, I was ready to bet. 3*
Costume Party -- Reporter spends years tracking down truth about El Santo. And the story? Who cares? 3.5*
Moving Day -- Woman repeats story over and over. Friend tells her she is going to ask her long-term partner to leave and all will be okay. She looked at me like she had no idea what I was talking about or, if she knew, she wasn't letting on. 2.5*
November 30, 2025
The short stories were interesting but felt a lil disconnected and not in the sense that they had to be connected to each other more so I didn’t really know what was going on in the story itself . I did have a fav short story it was, ‘school trip’. Tho my fav quote in the book is not in that short story it was in the first story and it is the quote that got me to read this book ,
“Once I read that the only way to be happy is to be satisfied with what you have. I work with this group of laid-back guys who only care of waves, that’s why they’re skeptical. I’m not. I’m not a skeptic, but I’m also not happy. I want, sometimes I don’t event know what I want .”
Also most books translated from Spanish I have a hard time following but this book was really easy to follow !
“Once I read that the only way to be happy is to be satisfied with what you have. I work with this group of laid-back guys who only care of waves, that’s why they’re skeptical. I’m not. I’m not a skeptic, but I’m also not happy. I want, sometimes I don’t event know what I want .”
Also most books translated from Spanish I have a hard time following but this book was really easy to follow !
August 2, 2023
It wasn't as atmospheric as I expected, and the characters weren't memorable. Maybe I should've read the original instead of the translated version.
I did enjoy the folklore elements in it, and each story is short enough to be read on a tube ride.
I did enjoy the folklore elements in it, and each story is short enough to be read on a tube ride.
February 15, 2023
Nice collection of stories, the strongest I found at the beginning, in particular the second and third stories, most of which hint at or let the reader in on some Ecuadorian history: the Baroness who ruled an island; el Santo, the Mexican wrestler and his films, some of which were filmed in Ecuador; the U12 Ecuadorian basketball team that almost won a world championship; John Wayne Bobbitt whose wife, Lorena, was from Ecuador; the missionary/miners story. A nice, well rounded collection of stories.
3.5 rounded up.
3.5 rounded up.
May 15, 2022
Ocho relatos breves que se caracterizan por su sencillez literaria, desarrollarse en el Ecuador (el geográfico, el histórico y el social) y por ofrecer historias con plots envolventes que logran capturar la atención rápidamente. Mis favoritos fueron “Bautizo”, “Verano” y “Luna de miel”. En líneas generales, creo que los hubiera disfrutado más si tuviera una mayor contextualización, pero igual se disfrutan.
3.5 estrellas.
3.5 estrellas.
December 10, 2024
A humorous collection of short stories that take place in South America by Ecuadorian author Gabriela Alemán. While I enjoyed Alemán's writing style and deadpan humor, I didn't find myself very connected to each of the stories, mostly due to the fact that they were too short for me to really connect with the characters. With this said, I want to check out more of Alemán's works in the future. My favorite stories from this collection include "Baptism" and "School Trip."
May 16, 2022
FAMILY ALBUM was like being the ninth ghost in a (dead and) seedy bar, hopping from stool to booth to pool table and asking the other eight haints to each tell me their best story, but specter-to-specter-like with little eye contact. In conclusion, a wonderful night on the right side of the tracks. Five yelp review.
March 25, 2025
True to the title, these are not so much stories as they are snapshots. Occasionally interesting snapshots, to be sure, rendered with dry realism and unflinching accuracy, but still snapshots nonetheless. They rarely develop beyond the initial premise.
Would be interested in reading her other stuff in Spanish.
Would be interested in reading her other stuff in Spanish.
February 22, 2025
Short stories are usually a bit hit and miss, and this was no exception. There were some great stories in here, and some that I'll probably forget soon. I'm glad I read it, though, it was definitely worth it for the first story alone.
June 1, 2025
I'm not a fan of short story collections in general, but I have been looking for a book by an author from Ecuador and a female author is hard to find. There are eight stories and the first six were quite good. I would read more by Alemàn if I see anything.
November 2, 2020
Good stories from a fine Ecuadorean writer.
June 18, 2022
Libro fundamental en la literatura ecuatoriana, porque plantea una ficcionalización de la realidad.
October 28, 2022
My review appears in the November/December 2022 issue of WORLD LITERATURE TODAY:
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...
July 10, 2023
Not about a family but a country. Good stories!
September 28, 2023
Family Album is a collection of short stories by Ecuadorian author Gabriela Aleman. This is a review of the English translation by Dick Cluster & Mary Ellen Fieweger.
There are 8 short stories in the collection, most of which are set in various parts of Ecuador. Some of the stories are the author's re-imaginings of public events linked to Ecuador in some manner. Overall, the collection reads pretty average and lackluster, but some stories do stand out a bit. Here is a synopsis of the short stories to serve as a handy reference, along with my ratings for the individual stories:
1) Baptism: Set in Galapagos, a story of an old man who wants to learn diving - 3/5
2) Summer vacation: A journalist investigates a WWII mystery set in Guayaquil - 3/5
3) School trip: Two Ecuadorian immigrants discuss an old basketball championship in a NY laundromat. I found this irreverent, quirky story to be the best of the lot - 4/5
4) Family outing: Author's retelling of the "self-styled saints' peaceable assault on the Huao", based on the event the Western press has dubbed the "Auca assault" - 3.5/5
5) Marriage: A widow comes to terms with new knowledge about her deceased husband. Set in Quito and Machala - 3/5
6) Honeymoon: A woman meets John Bobbitt. The only reason this story is in this collection is because Lorena Bobbitt was Ecuadorian - 1/5
7) Costume party: A journalist digs into El Santo's past and questions if he could actually have acted in all those films made in his name. - 4/5, mostly for the interesting premise despite an average story.
8) Moving day: A woman helps another move on. A rather unremarkable story that made very little impression on me - 1/5
Reading context: Reading around the world choice for Ecuador.
Read as: Translated work from Spanish to English.
Book format: Physical book, borrowed from Stanford libraries.
There are 8 short stories in the collection, most of which are set in various parts of Ecuador. Some of the stories are the author's re-imaginings of public events linked to Ecuador in some manner. Overall, the collection reads pretty average and lackluster, but some stories do stand out a bit. Here is a synopsis of the short stories to serve as a handy reference, along with my ratings for the individual stories:
1) Baptism: Set in Galapagos, a story of an old man who wants to learn diving - 3/5
2) Summer vacation: A journalist investigates a WWII mystery set in Guayaquil - 3/5
3) School trip: Two Ecuadorian immigrants discuss an old basketball championship in a NY laundromat. I found this irreverent, quirky story to be the best of the lot - 4/5
4) Family outing: Author's retelling of the "self-styled saints' peaceable assault on the Huao", based on the event the Western press has dubbed the "Auca assault" - 3.5/5
5) Marriage: A widow comes to terms with new knowledge about her deceased husband. Set in Quito and Machala - 3/5
6) Honeymoon: A woman meets John Bobbitt. The only reason this story is in this collection is because Lorena Bobbitt was Ecuadorian - 1/5
7) Costume party: A journalist digs into El Santo's past and questions if he could actually have acted in all those films made in his name. - 4/5, mostly for the interesting premise despite an average story.
8) Moving day: A woman helps another move on. A rather unremarkable story that made very little impression on me - 1/5
Reading context: Reading around the world choice for Ecuador.
Read as: Translated work from Spanish to English.
Book format: Physical book, borrowed from Stanford libraries.
May 8, 2025
Bautizo 3
Verano 2.5
Paseo de curso 3
Confirmación 3
Matrimonio 4
Luna de miel 4
Fiesta de disfraces 2
Mudanza 1
Verano 2.5
Paseo de curso 3
Confirmación 3
Matrimonio 4
Luna de miel 4
Fiesta de disfraces 2
Mudanza 1
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews