Austral

by Carlos Fonseca, Megan McDowell (Translator)

A dazzling novel about the traces we leave, the traces we erase and the traces we seek to rebuild.

In this innovative novel three losses and three quests are pursued. English writer Aliza Abravanel tries, in a battle with aphasia, to finish her book. A last indigenous speaker is confronted with the fading of his culture and language while an anthropologist struggles to prevent it. And through the construction of an esoteric theatre of memory, a survivor of the Guatemalan genocide of the 1970s and '80s seeks to recover the memories lost after the traumas of war. And behind these three threads lies the narrator's own Julio, a disillusioned university professor, must try to understand and complete his friend Aliza's novel, and come to terms with a past he shared with her but has blanked for thirty years.

From the Guatemalan wilderness to the high Peruvian Amazon, passing through Nueva Germania, the anti-Semitic commune founded in Paraguay by Nietzsche's sister, Austral takes us on a long journey south, following a trail of ecological and cultural destruction to excavate contemporary xenophobia.

Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels, Spanish Literature, Latin American, Literature

204 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 27, 2022

About the author

Carlos Fonseca Suárez was born in San José, Costa Rica in 1987, and spent half of his childhood and adolescence in Puerto Rico. In 2016, he was named one of the twenty best Latin American writers born in the 1980s at the Guadalajara Book Fair, and in 2017 he was included in the Bogotá39 list of the best Latin American writers under forty. He is the author of the novels Colonel Lágrimas (Restless Books) and Natural History (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and in 2018, he won the National Prize for Literature in Costa Rica for his book of essays, La Lucidez del Miope. He teaches at Trinity College, Cambridge, and lives in London.

Reviews

[Katia N · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can a novel be elegiac without being mournful? Be haunting without being eerie? If it can it will be this novel. It has been at least a week since i’ve finished it but i still have these silent conversations in my head about it and hear the voices of its characters.

Reading it was like having this almost physical sensation of something precious and gentle irrevocably slipping through your hands. Something you cannot quite firmly grasp and get hold off. But you are tangibly aware of its existence and that you might be losing it. In fact i’ve read the novel twice back to back: once purely for this sensation and the second time to come up with better idea what was actually happening between its covers.

One thing I am totally sure of though: stylistically it is the most accomplished recent novel i’ve read for a long time.

I wanted initially to come up with a single metaphor for this work: a Russian doll of stories? A hall of mirrors? A treasure chest? A curiosity museum? All of them might say something. But also they singlehandedly fall short. So i try to take it slowly.

“Aliza had never liked endings. She thought they seemed artificial and false, unnecessary cuts in a flow that, like the colourful gorge they were now driving into, didn’t lead directly to any destination...”

Aliza is the one of the main characters. And this book is that: stories without end, stories within the stories; stories beginning another stories; stories reverberating with each other like an echo between mountain gorges. This way of structuring the narrative is not unknown, especially in Latin America’s literature. But here it is so refined and done with such an economy. The novel is barely two hundred pages. Some characters appear literally for a half of page but leave a lasting presence. Far into the novel, Fonseca keeps introducing new layers. Half way through, I was wondering how he would be able close all the doors he has opened within the space left. But he succeeded; and not only that, he managed to introduce one more major character and major theme in the last fifty pages.

And this is not all. I’ve read two previous novels by Fonseca. And he tends to bring different modes of writing into the whole. We are dealing with a manuscript, articles and a superb cryptic visual dictionary. Some pages from the dictionary were physically designed and presented in the book. It is very visually effective and adds additional poignancy to the story. It has reminded me something similar in Lost Children Archive in this respect. Also Fonseca seems to be fascinated with the idea of a museum either real or imaginary as a repository of objects that might have their own unique way of telling the story. This novel is not an exception: there is a museum containing audio recording of voices together with other physical and visual artefacts.

And even that is not all. The novel also designed like a hall of mirrors. We are given a lot of hints in this respect. One character’s life is a “photographic negative’ of another; one manuscript is “the mirror image” of another; the project of one artist is reflected in the work of another. While reading the book, after a while you are inevitably aware and subconsciously start to search for the next “reflection”, to wonder where it would lead you next. And you are helped (or mislead) again by the mentioning of a “russian novel” where there was a set of peculiar toys. If one look of them, one would not make anything out of them. That is until one got hold of a mirror to see their reflections. This is especially apt as if Fonseca tells you to search for those reflections to be able to make some sense of the whole. It is disorienting in a good sense.

The writing varies in pace, changes its registers. Sometimes it slows down zooming into an image or a thought; sometimes it flows rapidly and carries you alone, almost struggling for a breath, like here:

“They come in through the back right window, fly up to the vaulted ceiling of the palm roof, plunge down to the central table that is full to overflowing with architectural models, old magazines and photographic negatives, before passing along the sides of a room reminiscent of a forgotten laboratory, flanked as it is by two giant black blackboards on which are written, in impeccable handwriting, a dozen quotations that it would be good to read carefully right now, except that the sparrows, impatient and playful, return to their eager travels, soaring upwards and then flitting down to perch briefly on the floor covered in old newspapers, where coffee stains alternate with the droppings of those very birds that now fly back out through the window that saw them arrive, first flying over, in passing, a painting that hangs at the back of the room beside two identical black-and-white photographs of a village in ruins. Then, returning to its initial stillness, the space begins to take on a peculiar density that recalls the inside of a shipwreck, where time has been frozen for decades.”

If i would have minor complaint about the style, i would say the dialogue was not very convincing but it was rarely used.

Can you imagine this complexity working in a sleek and elegant novel of around 200 pages? But it does. In describing his style, Fonseca has quoted DeLillo who said that “writing is concentrated thinking”. The novel is packed but not overloaded with ideas from philosophy, art, history and anthropology.

There is a plot, almost a mystery one might say. But i will not try describe it. This is also the novel that keeps its secrets pretty well. It lures you in, poses you with the questions and dilemmas, but never fully reveals the answers. Often the logic of the story suggests certain leads only to negate them later. When reading for the first time, i was attempting to understand that logic or, more accurately, i tried to apply my logic to its characters. And it did not work. Often it seemed impossible to come up with suggested motivations for some the characters and a logical interpretation what happened alluded me.

But then i came across a character saying this:

“No matter how much it told, even when the story seemed to bare itself the most and approach a truth, something in it withdrew. This isn’t about baring the secret, but about doing justice.”

And I’ve understood then. The characters were not only “not baring” their secrets. On the contrary, they tended to “bury” them: they buried their secrets in each other texts, in the quotations from other writers or simply in the ground. But in this process they also revealed something about the human nature and “did justice” to something deep otherwise inexpressible with the words. This novel is not quite as hermetic like some of the work by Clarice Lispector. But it also strives to go beyond the language.

On the other hand, this situation has reminded me a thought in the book I’ve recently read The Long Form that it was ok not to know everything about the characters. Even the writer does not necessary know more about them compared to what he has written between the covers. Sometimes, such “blind spots” (the term coined by Xavier Cercas) are left by the author for the reader to enrich the work with her own meaning.

On the second reading, i’ve added one more realisation: this was a novel about quixotic struggles that bound to be defeated. A writer is fighting to complete her project while loosing ability to use language to aphasia. An anthropologist fights to preserve a disappearing language by trying to record its last speaker. That speaker struggles to reflect in his words the world that has already disappeared. A man creates a museum to preserve memory of the village sacked by genocide only to realise the majority of survivors want to move on from the tragedy. Another man who is sent on a journey is arriving at some destination only to find out that he is there for very different reasons. And like with the famous hidalgo, at first glance, many of those struggles seem unnecessary and eccentric, only later to be understood as being the most profound. Is defeat always equate to a failure? Or is it a struggle worth having in any case?

There is one specific “defeat” strikingly conveyed in this book which has affected me the most.

Imagine you are given a box with a thing inside. Let’s call it a beetle. But no-one can see your beetle apart from you. Everyone has got a similar box. But you are not allowed to see each other beetles. You can talk about them of course. But there is no way you can insure you talk about the same thing. That is apart from the case if you agree as a group what you mean by a word “beetle”. This is a thought experiment by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. So when we refer to that infamous beetle we refer “to the social act of imagining it, never to the beetle itself, which could very well not exist.”

He made this argument in order reject the possibility of existence of the “private language”. And one could say: who cares whether something so abstract as a private language is logically possible? But now - imagine it is not a beetle anymore. It is pain.

What does all of this story imply is that a human being can never fully express her pain, not through the language at least. One can’t share it with the others. Maybe that is the reason why being under emotional or physical stress often feels so alienating, lonely and misunderstood. But even more shockingly it also implies one cannot fully understand the pain of others either.

Somewhere in the novel Fonseca brings up painting The Fall of Icarus by Pieter Brueghel and the related poem Musee des Beaux Artsby WH Auden where Icarus falling to his death while “the world continued blindly on its way, indifferent to other people’s suffering.”

Rilke has made even a broader observation that haunted me since my youth: “Ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone; and many things must happen, many things must go right, a whole constellation of events must be fulfilled, for one human being to successfully advise or help another.”

But looking at this phrase now, it feels somehow more hopeful than a story about the beetle and the story of Icarus. In any attempt to understand the other, in any attempt to help, one faces this looming possibility of misunderstanding; the possibility of defeat. But does it imply we should give up trying, especially if “the whole constellation of favourable events” are still theoretically possible.

One character of this novel acknowledges his limitations in these struggle:

“he recognised himself in that you, ignorant and useless, incapable of crossing the border that separated his own pain from others...No matter how hard he tried, he would never be capable of shaking off that feeling of falsehood and hypocrisy.”

Sounds familiar? It certainly does to me.

Another character, Aliza, was braver but eventually she came to the conclusion that her photographs of the tragic events she witnessed would be useless.

“But somehow I felt that the world was already full of images, and the photos would not be enough to do justice to what I’d seen. I took the rolls and gave them to a distant cousin in the city and told myself that from that day on, I would only write, like someone searching for the caption of an impossible photograph.”

Generally, “the caption for an impossible photograph” is such a wonderful way of describing the writing process. But it is even more apt in this context. Later in her life, after experiencing war zones, Susan Sontag thought that the images might be useful to “haunt" us. However, she insisted that the captions and longer narratives are more important as they made people slow down and think.

So does language ever work in this situations? I came out with intuition from this novel that Fonseca believes it does. “language only worked if someone dared to cross that border (between his own suffering and someone else).” The possibility of defeat is very likely; however one should keep trying. There is no other option opened to us.

Moreover, after seeing his friend’s fierce struggle with making her final piece of literary art, Fonseca’s character comes up with one more hope:

"Literature was precisely what arose when language foundered.”

This magically echos Simone Weil’s voice who wrote in the one of her last essay:

“And it sometimes happens that a fragment of inexpresable truth is reflected in the words which although they cannot hold the truth that inspired them, have nevertheless so perfect a formal correspondence with it that every mind seeking that truth finds support in them. Whenever this happens a gleam of beauty illuminates the words.”

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I would not be able to appreciate this novel if not for the absolutely gorgeous translation by Megan McDowell who translated all Fonseca’s novels.

Reading list.

It has become a recent fashion, at least I’ve noticed that the writers of fiction provide a reference of the works of others they’ve consulted at the back of their novel. Fonseca’s work is erudite and highly intertextual. However, he does not come up such attached notes and justifiably so. It might be an additional enjoyment for the reader to register (sometimes even to search for the relevant references). But i could not resist the urge to compile a small list myself. I was not diligent enough so it is not an exhaustible list. However, it is appeared to be an outstanding selection:

Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations“Philosophical investigations”
Nabokov Invitation to a Beheading
Kafka "Nature theatre in Oklahoma"
Juan Rulfo Pedro Páramo
Borges Funes el Memorioso
W H Auden Musee des Beaux Arts
Bernhard Correction
Sylvia Molloy Dislocations
Eduard SuicideLeve Suicide

I would also add from myself:
Susan Sontag On the pain of others
Simone Weil Human. Personality
Ingeborg Bachmann Malina
Valeria Lusielli Lost Children Archive
and of course
Roberto Bolaño

[Argos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kosta Rikalı genç yazar ve akademisyen Carlos Fonseca “Cenup” isimli bu çok ilginç romanında konuşulan dillerin ve anıların nasıl kaybolduğunu, yazının ve sözlü belleğin öneminin siyasi ve ekonomik tercihlerle nasıl tehdit altında olduğunu imgelerle ve sözcüklerle mükemmel anlatıyor. Paraguay’da eşi Bernhardt Förster ile birlikte Yeni Almanya komününü kuran ünlü filozof F. Nietzsche ‘nin kızkardeşi Elisabeth Förster Nietzsche'nin çılgınca yolculukların ve fiyaskoyla sonuçlanan Aryan hayalinin öyküsünü okuyarak kitaba başlıyorsunuz. Kolonide bulduğu somut temelin üzerine antropoloji kuramını inşa etmiş antropolog Karl-Heinz von Mühlfeld’in anlatılarıyla, Elisabeth Förster Nietzsche'nin 1893'te Avrupa'ya dönüp ağabeyini hasta bulduğunda nasıl kar­maşık bir manipülasyon, çarpıtma ve yayım eylemine giriştiğini, sonunda sahte bir “Nazi Nietzsche” efsanesi oluşturduğunu okuyoruz.

Sonradan aklını yitiren antropolog Karl-Heinz von Mühlfeld’in anlattıklarını dinleyen Yitzhak Abravanel bu duyduklarını kızına, yazar Alicia Abravanel’e aktarır. Onun izini süren Julio ise romanımızın kahramanıdır. Orta Amerika labirentlerinde, Guatemala, San Salvador, Nikaragua’da geçen olaylarla Abravanel’in bulunduğu yerlerde yaşanılanlarla roman olgunlaşır.

Hikaye Julio üzerinden anlatılıyor. Kosta Rika’da Üniversite’de görevli olan Julio’ya birgün Arjantin’in kuzeyinde bir mektup gelir, mektubu gönderen Olivia’dır. Jose Ricardo Escobar ile birlikte bu eski Aryan komünün yerine yıllar sonra yeni bir sanatçı komünü kuran Olivia Walesi’den gelmektedir mektup. Gençlik arkadaşı yazar Abranaval’in öldüğünü bildiren bir mektuptur. Alicia Abravanel, babası Yitzhak Abravanel’in “Günlükler 1968-1972”inden faydalanarak bir proje olarak dört roman yazar, ancak ekolojik dörtlemesinin son romanı “Katmanlar”ın yazılış sürecinde hastalanır. Olivia gönderdiği mektupta Alicia’nın son romanının tamamlanması ve editörlüğünü üstlenmesini Julio’dan istediğini bildirmektedir. Julio en son otuz yıl önce görmüştür Abravanel’i. Şimdi 1980’li yıllardayız, Julio güneyin çöllerinde kay­bolmuş bu kadın yazarın izini sürer. Humahuaca'ya gelir.

Julio, otuz küsur yıl önce Alicia ile birlikte çıktığı yolculuğu yarıda bırakmış olmanın suç­luluğundan kurtulmak isteği ile doludur. Aliza'nın rehberinin oğlundan yazara ait iki elyazmasına ulaşır. Bunlar “Şahsi Bir Dil” ile “Kaybın Lügatı”dır ve sembollerle, şifrelerle yazılmıştır. Üç bölümden oluşan “Cenup”un ilk iki bölümüne de adını verir bu belgeler. Kitabın üçüncü bölümünün adı “Bellek Tiyatrosu”dur. Juan de Paz Raymundo tarafından yaratılan bir projedir. Köyün hafızasını adeta bir müzeymiş gibi yeniden oluşturmayı amaçlayan bu projede askeri diktatörlükte şiddet ve çatışmalar görüp yakılıp yıkılan bir köy ele alınmaktadır. Tanıklıklar yeralmaktadır bu tiyatroda. Ve tanıklıklarda Aliza’dan bahsedilmektedir.

Roman tipik bir postmodern roman örneği; metinlerarası göndermeler, alıntılar, alegoriler ve metaforlar, zamanda geri dönüşler vd. Okunması romanın katmanlı oluşu nedeniyle biraz zorlayıcı, ancak gerek konu gerek kurgu o kadar iyi ki başlayınca arkası geliyor. Çok beğendim bu romanı, acaba kurmaca mı-anı mı diye düşünüp sonunda hangisi olursa olsun gerçekçi bir öykü olduğuna karar verdim.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the trip back to Humahuaca, Julio remembered a simple phrase that Sarapura had offered as a kind of conjecture: "Only someone who knows he is condemned can clearly see the path to salvation." Absorbed as he was in the tale of the dictionary's making, he'd let the comment pass. Now, sitting in the taxi as it made its way through the downpour, he re-evaluated the words. Sarapura was right. The phrase made him think of Kafka, imagining parables of impossible salvation while all around him, still silent, the future Nazi forces grew. He thought of Proust, asthmatic in bed while he breathed life into his sentences. He thought of Nietzsche himself, signing his diatribes from the margins of madness. He thought, finally, of Aliza, for whom fate and illness had decided that only right at the end would she find the lens through which to understand her family history. He particularly remembered the final pages of A Private Language, in which Aliza, perhaps aware that her own voice was fading, decided to lean on other voices. Quotations arranged collage-like among the pages, as if they were ruins hinting at the outlines of a still unrecognisable mosaic.

Austral is Megan McDowell's translation of the Spanish-language novel of the same name by Dr. Carlos Fonseca, Assistant Professor in Postcolonial Latin American Literature and Culture at Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity. The acadamic credentials are relevant as this is an unashamedly erudite work, but at the same time a fascinating novel.

It opens with Julio Gamboa, Costa Rican by origin and a professor at a university in the US, looking at a postcard sent to him from Humahuaca, Argentina, which he first instinctively see as a desert, then a salt plain, before reminding himself of what he already knows - this is a photograph of dust gathered on glass, the 1920 work Elevage de poussière by Man Ray with Marcel Duchamp: https://davidcampany.com/dust-breedin...



Gamboa has been sent the postcard, and summoned to Humahuaca, by Olivia Walesi, a young American land artist, who informed him of the death of his once dear friend, the author Aliza Abravanel, an Englishwoman, who changed her name to Alicia and wrote her works in Spanish, her novels switching from works inspired by the beat writers, such as Kerouac and Bukowski, to more abstract works inspired by Onetti, Woolf, Faulkner, Lowry and Bernhard. Her crowning work was to be a Tetralogy - The Human Void - featuring each of the elements, The Invisible Border (fire), Marine Currents (water), Comparative Metrology (air) and she was intending to complete the set with Strata (Earth). However, her writing instead morphed into another project - two related works, A Private Language telling the story of her father, and the collage-like Dictionary of Loss, both of which are part reproduced in Austral. Her literary bequeath is to pass these works to Gambao to edit and prepare for publication, including deciding if they are fiction or memoir.

And the story told of her father Yitzhak, goes back to the (real-life) Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche and the Nueva Germania she established with her husband in Paraguay; to Karl-Heinz von Mühlfeld (fictional I think), an anthropologist in search of the legacy of this community, and author of "The Impurity of Pureness” in Yitzhak Abravanel’s translation; and Juvenal Suarez (a name given to him by Christian missionaries), last survivor of the Nataibo tribe and last speaker of their language.

von Mühlfeld's had built his career around a theory that all culture was the product of miscegenation and contagion only to be challenged how this could be consistent with a dying language. He revised his theory to add In the passing from one culture to another, something always remains, even if no-one alive can recognise it but the obsessive pursuit of this thinking led him to Bernhardian insanity. Yitzhak Abravanel’s take on the tapes made by Karl-Heinz von Mühlfeld of Juvenal Suarez, which he listens to in the Swiss asylum where von Mühlfeld is incarcerated:

the theatre of a voice doing battle with history.
the silences of a language doing battle with oblivion

And the trail Gamboa follows also leads him to Amajchel, Guatemala, scene of genocidal violence against Maya civilians in the Guatemalan civil war, and where one local artist has built a Theatre of Memory to aid the healing process in the styie of Guilio Camillo.

But Gamboa realises that the ultimate destination of his journey is in his own past.

A wonderful meditation on language and memory, and surely a strong contender for the 2024 International Booker.

Looking out over that mountain range where the strata blended together, Julio thought back to those pages and the long chain of inheritance sketched there: Karl-Heinz von Mühlfeld, heir to the madness of Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche; Juvenal Suarez, heir to von Mühlfeld’s obsessions; Yitzhak Abravanel, heir to the solitude of Juvenal Suarez, and Aliza Abravanel, inheritor of her father's passions. Standing and looking out at the desert, smoking a cigarette beside the two commemorative stones that acted as grave markers, the final link in that story became evident: the end was him, Julio Gamboa, heir to that private language in which Aliza sighed her final wish.

Some blog reviews:

https://roughghosts.com/2023/05/26/in...

https://therumpus.net/2023/07/04/carl...

https://www.ronslate.com/on-austral-a...

https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.co...

[Eylül Görmüş · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Tarihle çarpışan bir sesin tiyatrosu, unutuluşuyla savaşan bir dilin sessizlikleri."

Kafamı fena halde karıştırdın Carlos Fonseca, darmadağın ettin beni.

Önce şunu söyleyeyim: çok ama çok kuvvetli bir metin bu. Özellikle Bellek Tiyatrosu başlıklı son bölümünü hipnotize olmuş gibi okudum; renkler, görüntüler gözümün önünden geçti, türlü sesler, fısıltılar, bilmediğim dillerde kelimeler işittim, kalp atışlarımın hızlandığını fark ettim; durmak, kitaptan çıkmak istedim, çıkamadım; tarif ettiği fiziksel mekana hapsolmuş gibiydim, hareket edemiyor, uzaklaşamıyor gibi. Bunları yazarak yapabilmenin muazzam bir kudret olduğunu kabul etmem lazım. Epeydir bir kitabı bitirdiğim anda en baştan tekrar okumak istememiştim. Tamamını olmasa da bazı bölümleri dönüp tekrar okudum neticede.

Çok katmanlı bir metin Cenup. Ancak çok derken - bence biraz fazla çok sahiden. Birbirinin üzerine binen, iç içe geçen, sarmal gibi birbirine dolanan bir sürü hikaye anlatıyor. Nietzsche'nin kız kardeşinin Paraguay'da kurduğu Yeni Almanya isimli antisemit köyün öyküsünden başlıyor, günümüze uzanıyor. Bunu yaparken de anlatısını bellek, dil ve şiddet ekseninde kuruyor ki hepsi birbirinden zengim konular malum. Juan Rulfo'dan Marguerite Duras'ya, Brueghel'den Wittgenstein'a, Elias Canetti'den Malcom Lowry'ye ve Thomas Bernhard'a uzanan çok sayıda yazar, sanatçı ve felsefeciye de atıflarda bulunuyor roman; referansların tamamını anladım mı, hakkını verebildim mi açıkçası emin değilim. Okurundan ciddi bir entelektüel beklentisi olduğunu söylemek lazım yazarın.

Çok iyi yazılmış (ve kusursuz çevrilmiş, çünkü Roza Hakmen...), onca karmaşıklığına rağmen okuru kolundan tutup içine çeken bir kitap bu neticede. Fakat yazar, kurduğu görkemli labirentten o labirente yakışır biçimde çıkamamış sanki. Hikaye farklı bağlansaydı (yahut belki de hiçbir yere bağlanmasaydı, çünkü bu metne bu da yakışırdı) kusursuz bir kitap bu diyebilirdim.

Yine de çok, çok sevdim. Ve biliyorum ki bana yaptığı şeyi uzunca bir süre hatırlayacağım. Demlendikçe yeri belirginleşecek o kitaplardan biri bu. Tanıştığımıza memnun oldum Carlos Fonseca.

[Işıl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeolojik katmanlara sahip bir hikayeyle dönmüş Fonseca. Bu katmanları bir arkeolog olarak tek tek ayırıp önünüze seriyor. “Cenup” Julio adlı karakterin fiziksel ve zihinsel adımlarını takip ediyor. Julio, kısa süre önce ölen arkadaşı Aliza Abravanel’den gelen bir mektup üzerine, arkadaşının elementlere adanmış dörtleme kitaplarından sonuncusunu tamamlamak ve düzenlemek için yola koyulur. Bu son kitap da toprak elementine adanmıştır.
Bu yolculukta sesin gasp edilişi, parçalanışı, yüzyılların ölçeğinde insanın kayboluşu, hatırlamak ve hatırlanmanın zamana direnişi, Güney Amerika’nın baş döndüren büyüklüğü ve tarihi içinde Şilili ressam Alvaro Guevara, Nancy Hort’un Latin Amerika çöllerindeki muazzam yeryüzü sanat eserleri, 19. yy’da Nietzsche’nin kız kardeşinin de desteğiyle Paraguay’da kurulan aryan Nueva Germania komünü gerçeklikle kurgunun en hülyalı ama en dingin birleşiminde var oluyorlar.
Haklarında ne söylesem değerini azaltacak gibi hissettiğim birkaç anlamı birden sırtına yükleyen cümleler diziyor Forseca.
Sonra Juan Rulfo, Marguerite Duras, Edouard Leve alıntılarıyla açılıyor her bir bölüm ve ben mest oluyorum. Bu yılın en güzel romanı oldu benim için. İyi ki Fonseca.

[Çağlar Sayar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Juan de Paz birkaç saat önce ,"Yunanların iki ırmağı vardı ." demişti . " biri unutmak için , öbürü hatirlamak için. Lethe ve Mnemosyne."

Bellek , dil , kimlik vs konular üzerine doyurucu bir kitap okudum. İçerisinde ki referanslar artı bir etki yaratıyor . Genel anlamda beğendim diyebilirim .

[Meltem Sağlam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gerçekten çok etkileyici bir hikaye ve kurgu. Yaşanmış bir olayın peşinden giden, yitip giden kelimelerin, anıların ve huzurun izini süren ve yok olmasını önlemenin bir yolunu bulmaya çalışan bir muhafız.

‘… bulmaca misali sunulan öykünün son noktasını …’ (sf; 177) keşfetmek için kahramanın peşinde bir dedektif gibi olaylar zincirinin doğrusal akışı tespit etmeye çalıştım.

Yeni Almanya, medeniyetin yok ettiği kültürler, unutulan diller ve neden olduğu yıkım ve acılar, ‘unutulan hatıraları yeniden canlandıran algılar’ metnin temel temalarını oluşturuyor.

Uzun ve devrik cümleler nedeniyle çoğu zaman geri dönüşler yorucu olmasına rağmen, bu keyifli ve zihin açıcı metinden aldığım keyif bozulmadı. Sadece, farklı bir son bekliyordum.

Yazarın okuduğum ilk eseri idi. Çok başarılı buldum. Diğer eserlerini de okuyacağım.

[Erkan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yazara ve yeteneğine (çabasına ve entelektuel bilgi birikimine) saygı duymakla birlikte okurken hiç keyif alamadığım çok zorlandigim bir okuma oldu. Kitaba konsantre olmakta çok zorlandım bana anlatım fazlasıyla dağınık ve yorucu geldi..

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carlos Fonseca is a writer who delights in spinning complex webs that blend historical and fictional characters and events to explore ideas and themes. Austral is concerned with questions of memory and forgetting, loss, language and legacy. Julio is a professor living in the US whose wife has just left him when a letter arrives informing him that a woman he once knew has left a posthumous request that he edit her final manuscript. This leads him into a story that carries him, directly or indirectly, to Paraguay, Argentina and Guatemala—and back 30 years to the truth behind a decision he made that he has never fully acknowledged. I have read and loved all of Fonseca's novels and this, his third, is perhaps his strongest, most focused and most rewarding to date.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2023/05/26/in...

[Sahiden35]

Yazar Aliza Abravanel beyin hasarı sonucu afazi geçiriyor ve hikayenin devamını bütünlemesi için otuz sene önce onu yarı yolda bırakan Julio'ya bir mektup bırakıyor. Aliza edebiyat profesörü Julio'yu vasi olarak tayin ediyor ve böylece adamın geçmişiyle hesaplaşması için ona bıraktığı el yazmasını okuyarak güneye doğru uzun bir yolculuk yapmasını sağlıyor. Kitap çok katmanlı ve iz sürmek beni bir hayli yordu.
Cenup unutulan dillerin ve kökenlerin romanı.

[Ruben · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5

An intelligent Russian doll of a novel with stories-within-stories and lives that mirror each other across generations and continents. It's about memory, language and the fight against oblivion. And all of that in just 200 pages.

The storyline that keeps it all together features retired American-Argentinian academic Julio, who receives a strange letter informing him that his girlfriend from decades ago - and now a famous author - has died and left him the assignment: he is to finalise her last unfinished novel/memoir. He is to travel to Humahuaca in the Andes and that is where his quest deep into the past takes off.

More than plot-based, this is a novel of ideas however. Some of them went over my head (and the last 50 pages made me go from 5 to 4 stars), but overall it was a thought-provoking reading experience, with lots of fascinating stories.

[Alessandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5.

[Gunter Silva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hay muchísimos momentos maravillosos en este libro, momentos en los que la escritura detuvo mi lectura, en los que tuve que hacer una pausa y hacerme infinidad de preguntas: sobre la memoria, el trauma, la identidad que construimos, la violencia; sobre si ‘una huella de venado en la nieve también es lenguaje”. Fonseca, con Austral, ha escrito un clásico contemporáneo.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admire what the author was trying to do but the novel turned into a monstrous slog. It is really a philosophy book, poorly dressed as a novel void of character development or dialogue. I enjoy thinking about memory, nostalgia, loss, and the effects of colonialism but I was expecting a novel.

[yediyediyedi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Julio Humahuaca'ya dönüş yolunda Sarapura'nın sonuç çıkarırcasına söylediği basit bir cümleyi hatırladı: "Sadece mahkûm olduğunu bilen kişi kurtuluşa giden yolu açıkça görebilir."

[emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Between them, the tape recorder—an object that anyone from his generation would have associated with music and sports—conjuring the voice of that man I would later see in photographs, the sole custodian of a language only he understood but the dignity of which he carried on, convinced that the true motor of history was a secret lost between languages.'

Undeniably brilliant and elegant writing. Yet, for some reason (I can't quite explain well at the moment), it didn't leave a lasting impression on me. Feels as if I'm starting to quite quickly forget it as soon as I finished reading it. Pretty ironic, as 'memory' is a rather dominant 'theme' in the novel (often constructed with a sense/kind of volatility; and my experience of the text, which I am realising as I am writing this, uncannily mirrors that behaviour/pattern). I'm almost 100% sure that many other readers will have a better and more memorable reading experience with it. To put it simply, I just didn't 'vibe' deeply enough with it, but enjoyed the 'ride' anyway. Perhaps, just wrong/bad timing.

'Between 1922 and 1924 he composed a series titled Fleurs imaginaires, twenty-five paintings depicting imaginary flowers he claimed to have glimpsed in his hallucinogenic experiences. That delirious project had impressed Acosta from the first time he heard of it—When he reached the Araucanía he was surprised to see that very little of the native fauna remained. The original landscape had been replaced by the monotony of eucalyptus and pine forests after multinational corporations had come to the country. An arrival that would have profound consequences, he soon understood, since those single-wood forests were partly responsible for many of the ecological disasters that had battered the region for years. It had caught the young photographer’s attention when he heard how those forest plantations were aggravating factors in the fires that threatened to raze the south of his country. He remembered the paintings of incinerated trees that Guevara had painted during his stay in the south. Since then, he’d been working on a series of thirty-six imaginary flowers based on that premise.'

I hope this book reaches the hands of readers who will appreciate it better, at a quicker pace, and more effortlessly than I did. I still think it is a tremendously well-written book; it's just so obvious even from the opening lines. But ultimately, I, personally just am not able to fully appreciate it the way I think it deserves to be (or at least the way I had wanted/expected to?).

'“Laugh all you want, but books saved me,” he said, as though guessing Julio’s thoughts.'

'Our gaze would like to linger there, to really take in the complex reality of the disaster Brueghel’s painting narrates with such restraint, except that the sparrows again invade the hall, and our eyes, always easy prey for distraction, again turn to follow them in their adventures, convinced that as the birds wheel around they are tracing a secret language in the air. And thus Julio lets himself be carried along by the aerial somersaults of those birds that are now flying over the hall again, stirring up the stagnant time, clutching small flowers as offerings, as if this were about bringing new air to a house where the fragile silence is sporadically interrupted by brief murmurs that bring to mind old, idle conversations.'

'—marking the rhythms of a litany in which the very precision and clarity of memory risked making it inscrutable, opaque, and anonymous. Impossible to exhaust experience. Absolute memory is very much like forgetting, thought Julio, while he noticed how the light was gently fading, insinuating the arrival of evening.'

[Marcello S · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nel passaggio da una cultura all’altra c’è sempre un residuo, anche se non resta nessuno a ricordarlo.

Julio, professore universitario che vive tra le nevi del Michigan, riceve una cartolina che gli prospetta un viaggio a Humahuaca, nel nord desertico dell’Argentina, per curare l’ultimo manoscritto lasciato da una vecchia amica scrittrice. Si troverà ad avere a che fare con le ricerche antropologiche di Karl-Heinz von Mühlfeld, a sua volta legate al tentativo di fondare alla fine dell’Ottocento una colonia ariana in Paraguay. Romanzo matrioska complesso da ricostruire e interpretare. L’incipit è ottimo e forse ha creato aspettative in parte disattese. Un po’ esasperato/ripetitivo nell’uso di termini come fantasmi, oblio, disastro e pazzia: troppo caricati e di maniera per sembrare davvero credibili. L’idea di far rivivere la memoria collettiva di un villaggio come se si trattasse di un museo – Un temporaneo riparo dalla rovina – mi ha fatto vagamente pensare a Cronorifugio. Più agile, ma alla fine meno efficace di Museo animale.

[69/100]

[Nuryta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una obra que en inicio sonaba interesante, algo sobre la perdida de una cultura asociada a la perdida de la capacidad de lenguaje, desarrollada en diferentes lugares de Centro y Suramérica, con personajes nativos que en parte luchan y en parte se resignan a la muerte de sus raíces y tradiciones por la presión de la modernidad.

Por otro lado, describe la incursión en algún lugar de Paraguay, de una colonia alemana que procura infructuosamente el resurgimiento de la raza aria. También una escritora europea que renuncia a sus raíces, intenta unirse a la lucha de los nativos latinoamericanos y pasados los años debido a una afasia va perdiendo su capacidad de lenguaje por lo que trata de plasmar sus últimas ideas en una especie de diccionario.

Esta última obra, la deja como legado a un viejo amigo, al que no ve desde hace 30 años. Es este quien cuenta la historia y trata de atar los cabos de todos los personajes y eventos para al final, incluyendo reflexiones filosóficas, medita sobre la importancia de la memoria y del lenguaje, tanto personal como de la cultura de los pueblos.

Es una novela complicada, con pasajes interesantes, pero que deja temas en el aire que yo en particular, no he logrado cerrar, lo que me lleva a una frase del libro sobre el último escrito de Alicia, uno de los personajes “Una obra con clave privada: la noción de un texto que todos podrían leer, pero solo una persona entender.”

[Melissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was devoid of emotion and very dry encyclopedic type of story. I struggled and was bored but pressed on hoping to figure out what the fuss was about. It was a jumbled mess and I don’t recommend.

[Ilcicers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Questo libro è una perla.

[Fany · Rating 1 out of 5]

Un bulo.

Como decía alguien por aquí, toda esta gente escribe igual, pero es que además piensan igual y se indignan igual, y es como si los lectores entusiasmados con todo este humo nunca hubieran leído nada publicado antes de 2010. En este caso, estamos ante la historia de un tipo que va en busca de un manuscrito y lo termina leyendo y lo comenta y mira el paisaje mientras lo lee y se pone muy solemne y se pregunta por el olvido, y claro, a cuenta de nada, en la mitad de todo esto, las referencias bolañescas de rigor, los antisemitas, los guerrilleros, los desiertos, los pandilleros (porque algunas cosas suceden en Centroamérica). El catálogo de la National Geographic de la literatura latinoamericana. Se supone que pasa algo, pero no, en realidad no pasa nada. Estamos ante el loquito con el tablero de corcho y los miles de hilos que señalan al azar fotos, citas célebres, lugares exóticos. “Demasiada postura y poca bravura” escribe Fonseca por ahí, y es como si describiera su propia obra y la de toda una generación dedicada a la estafa editorial. Son unos tipos que hacen sus doctorados en humanidades y sus maestrías en escritura creativa en Nueva York, Madrid o Londres, para luego redactar un libro de trescientas páginas obedeciendo la agenda prevista por los editores del norte, pero sin hacerse ni una sola pregunta literaria sobre el colonialismo o el exterminio político, el tópico de rigor. Fonseca no tiene una visión, solo frases hechas. Habla de la antropología y la construcción de la memoria como en El secreto hablan de física cuántica, sin tener una mínima idea. Entonces, todas las proclamas y reivindicaciones terminan teniendo el efecto contrario: el indígena reducido a su “mirada profunda”, la guerra a un divertimento de europeas aburridas, el dolor a un catálogo de testimonios pintorescos. Es paradójico que una novela que intenta hablar sobre la desaparición del lenguaje sea tan inerte y carente de chispa.

[Jacqueline Nyathi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really beautiful book that I would put on the “Literature for Philosophy and English Majors” shelf, because even after reading it, I’m not sure I got all of the references. Perhaps not even half. The ideas feel fragmentary, and revelations come only very slowly, so you’re carried along in a dream-like state right to the end of the book, where, to be honest, I’m not sure if I found answers to the questions that had been posed. In short, this is a literary fugue.

But, it is beautiful! A university professor goes in pursuit of answers to a mystery involving a manuscript left by an estranged and recently deceased friend. There is a subplot (although important to the story) about New Germany, a settlement founded by anti-Semites in Paraguay, with a concurrent thread on Indigenous South Americans. The main themes of the book are memory, trauma, delusion, and disappearing cultures.

Where the book excelled for me: a section referencing Guilio Camillo’s Theatre of Memory, where traumatised villagers try to reconstruct memories of their village and their past after a terrible event. This got me thinking quite deeply about the democide in my own country, and about how healing could happen—a way to access the past separately from trauma. I also loved the books within the book, particularly (mild spoiler) the included graphics.

So: recommended. This is a quick but quite demanding read, with a formally inventive structure. Recommended for people who like their books to challenge them. I plan to read it again soon.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC.

[GG · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Quando la lingua mi abbandonerà, resteranno le citazioni"

Mentre leggi Fonseca non ti interessa capire tutto, perché parti dal presupposto che la riscrittura comporta l'oblio, il vuoto, l'assenza di parola e di ricordo: riscrivere non è solo scrivere diversamente quella che a sua volta è inevitabilmente una riscrittura, ma anche scrivere daccapo ogni volta, e con ciò costruire un mondo.

Come i suoi personaggi, Fonseca ha alcune ossessioni - e una di queste è l'ossessione stessa. Per molti dei bianchi che si susseguono in Austral, l'ossessione è quella della memoria intesa come catalogazione e conservazione museale. A questa ossessione tragica si oppone la fragorosa risata dell'ultimo dei Nataibo: lui che, espropriato di una comunità, rifiuta con la sua afasia politica che la sua lingua finisca registrata nell'ennesimo spazio di conquista dei bianchi.
Ritorna così, in un loop narrativo, uno dei meccanismi messi all'opera da Fonseca già in Museo animale: la ripetuta metamorfosi della tragedia in farsa, al punto da non poterle distinguere.

3 stelle e mezza perché in Austral la stratificazione narrativa mi è risultata un tantino farraginosa, mentre in Museo animale era più fluida. La sensazione è quella di una forte continuità - se non gemellarità - fra i due romanzi, quasi potessero stare uno nell'altro, pur raccontando storie con personaggi diversi, eppure ciascuno potrebbe dirsi l'alter ego di ogni altro.
Se insieme costituissero un'unica opera, la me giocherellona la intitolerebbe Museo austral.

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Austral follows Julio who one day receives a letter from an old friend named Aliza who has very recently passed away. She wants him to finish off her tetralogy of novels based on the four elements and ending with Earth. Julio takes the opportunity to travel around Latin America in search of the life that Aliza left behind, whilst reading the notes that she collated in a diary form for the construction of her final novel.

Around the 50% in mark I finally started to really enjoy this book and I found that Aliza’s diary parts started to come together and make a lot more sense, and even felt quite exciting. I enjoyed the novel’s comment on pictures versus language and how the landscape influences one’s person more than we’d like to believe. Julio’s parts of the story flicked back and forth between being super interesting and just okay, but ultimately I loved the atmosphere and feel of the book more than what happened in it.

Feeling like this might pop up on the international Booker somewhere. It would be a good addition to the longlist but I don’t think it’s strong shortlist material. But I would definitely read this as a beautiful travel novel and one which evokes mystery even if it doesn’t wrap things up as nearly as you’d like them to be.

[endrju · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for this kind of unabashedly, even crudely intellectual novel. And this one's holding up no punches with at least four levels of narrative-within-narrative staring from one Bernhard Forster and his wife (and Nietzsche's sister) Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche and their Nova Germania colony to the anthropologist-gone-crazy Karl-Heinz von Muhfeld studying Forsters and the colonial effect on Indigenous people and their environment to Yitzhak Abravanel who records Muhfeld to Yitzhak's daughter Aliza Abravanel who writes about her father and Muhfeld to Julio Gamboa who narrates all of this. Throw in famous artists (Smithson, Holt), linguists (Saussure, Benveniste) and philosophers (Wittgenstein), as well as issues concerning art, memory and politics for good measure, and I'm foaming at my mouth. The only thing that bothered me is that the novel was simply not long enough. I'd have loved to read more of Aliza Abravanel's, she who wrote a novel with two hundred pages long digression about clouds at the very beginning.

[Nahibya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un libro bien escrito, con frases hermosas sobre el olvido, la cultura, el lenguaje, la infancia y otros temas. Un libro que no fue molesto de leer, pero que no logró apasionarme en su totalidad.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A novel with many ideas that lead in several directions, but I’m not sure they coalesced for me in any satisfactory way.

Due to the death of a friend (who he has not seen in 30 years), a man is called down to an Argentinian artist’s commune to edit her final manuscript. From here, he is led on a path across different cultures and time periods, all connected by language, loss, and community.

The tone is serious, the prose is philosophical (though I found some translated sentences a bit clunky), but for me, the stakes weren’t there. I didn’t believe in the depth and intensity of the friendship that was the catalyst for this journey, therefore the resulting revelations and discoveries did not hold the weight the author intended.

Additionally, the start of many of our main character’s philosophical musings on the themes or revelatory insights into his dead friend seemed to me forced and far fetched. I didn’t necessarily buy into the way these connections were being made.

There are some great nuggets of wisdom and food for thought in here. I found the last section, Theatre of Memory, particularly affecting and the strongest of the many interrelated stories.

In the end, the individual ideas and themes of Austral were more impressive to me than the whole of the narrative.

[Jesús Reyes · Rating 3 out of 5]

La siempre seductora premisa bolañesca de salir en busca de un escritor perdido en la última frontera da lugar a especulaciones interesantes sobre temas como el lenguaje y la memoria, la recuperación del pasado y "la incandescencia del recuerdo". Los territorios por los que transcurre la novela (los cerros coloridos del desierto argentino de Humahuaca: la colonia utópica nazi en la Nueva Germania del Paraguay; las tierras asoladas de Amajchel, en Guatemala) bien merecen el viaje, y son coherentes con la idea del libro de que la importancia del paisaje se sobreponga a la condición humana, pues superan en interés a sus personajes. No obstante, la especularidad de las historias y los manuscritos y la insistente vocación aforística de la prosa ("narrar es saber encontrar el final del relato", "la literatura era precisamente eso que surgía cuando el lenguaje naufragaba", "La memoria absoluta se parece mucho al olvido") resultan, a este lector, un tanto pretenciosas.

[James B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. Julio has left his South American roots behind for a life as professor in America. When his wife goes to France on an extended visit, Julio is brought back down south as an old friend, acclaimed writer Aliza Abravenal, requests that Julio edit her last book after her demise. Julio finds a novel that starts with an antisemitic commune founded in Paraguay by Elizabeth Foster-Nietzsche, but he also finds that Aliza has started a dictionary of loss. Aliza finds that, after a stroke has left her mute, no one understands language better than someone who has lost it. And that is just a few of the storylines that seem to branch in so many directions, sometimes playfully, sometimes painfully. This short book always dazzles with the richness of its thoughts.

[Tommy Morris · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very interesting and complex novel, but incredibly frustrating - always ‘insisting upon itself’, signalling towards a philosophical depth which isn’t quite there (or isn’t worth trying to dig up). Always explaining itself, always fatiguing the reader with murky and contradictory metaphors. Filled with trite and elementary academic references.