“The family”, by Sara Mesa. Anagram, 224 pgs. $3,450.
when the novel “One Love” was published in Argentina, about a year and a half ago, Sara Mesa was almost a stranger among us. Although this 46-year-old Spanish writer had already written several fiction books, this novel (Book of the Year for the newspaper El País, in 2020) was the first that had an impact on Argentine readers. In it, Mesa narrated the story of a young woman who decided to go live in a small town, where she tried with great difficulty to insert herself into the local community. The “love” of the title, not only ironically alluded to the violence of dealing with her neighbors, but also to a specific relationship, impossible and unsatisfactory, that reproduced the worst nightmares of bad romances.
His new book, the tenth of his production, is called “The family” and in it, Table repeats its main strength: achieving a lot with very little. A realistic plot, plain language, a story that seems to have been told a thousand times and yet drifts to unpredictable places. The title family is made up of a married couple and four children. Like every family, this is a kingdom or a state with its own rules. “Father”, as his sons call the chief of the tribe, has Gandhi as a model of life and a system of ideas halfway between progressivism and flat earthism. He is against consumption, television and games. He hates secrets, bad words, and self-determination. He controls, all the time. How does he grow up so isolated from the usual evolution of the world? Each son does as he can. Just as in life, there are many strategies to deal with choking. Thus, this novel could be read as the story of various adaptations to oppression, with happier endings than we could imagine at the beginning.
Entertaining and disturbing, “La familia” is a good opportunity to meet one of the most interesting authors of current literature in Spanish. After an apparent simplicity, the stories that Mesa imagines continue to generate unanswered questions, even after a long time has passed.
In search of the sky, by Nathalie Léger, Chai, 76 pgs. $2,050.
until chai translated his novel “About Barbara Loden”, Léger was an unknown author in Argentina. The impact of that reading was such that the publisher decided to repeat the experience. “In search of heaven” is an atypical text, between narration and poetry, where the personal experience of losing the couple is told. “Nouvelle” heartbreaking and intimate, her words are a mirror for any reader who has gone through a similar situation: the surprise of absence, grief and writing as the only way to talk about what no one wants to know.
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Source: Yenny and El Ateneo bookstores.
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