Today practically everything can be defined. It’s a good thing for there to be a little novel that can’t be defined.
- Iosi Havilio
Iosi Havilio was born in Buenos Aires in 1974. Open Door is his first novel. His second novel is Estocolmo (Stockholm, 2010), and he is currently working on a novel that follows on from Open Door. He has become a cult author in Argentina after Open Door was highly praised by the outspoken and influential writer Rodolfo Fogwill and by the most influential Argentine critic, Beatriz Sarlo.
And Other Stories 2011 Title
Open Door
Read more about Open Door in the book section.
More information
- Open Door was read in the And Other Stories Spanish-language Reading Group summer 2010, after being suggested in the previous reading cycle by Paula Porroni.
- Iosi Havilio’s intriguing interview in Latineos (in English).
Praise for Iosi Havilio
- ‘Look out for Open Door by the much-praised Iosi Havilio, one of the launch titles on the And Other Stories list.’ – Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
- ‘Iosi Havilio’s remarkable first novel brings news of an intriguing world’ Martin Schifino, The Independent
- ‘An ambiguous tale that verges on dark comedy … With skill and subtlety, the novel hints that a whole society might labour under an illusion of liberty.’ The Economist
- ‘Deliberately unshowy, so that plot twists can unfold in the quietest ways.’ Fatema Ahmed, Prospect
- ‘There is a lot of sex and violence in Open Door, but it is never gratuitous. … You have in your hands a masterpiece.’ – Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
- With minimalist beauty and exquisite strangeness, Iosi Havilio offers a mesmerising addition to the literature of solitude. - Chloe Aridjis
- ‘A moving and highly original novel. A good translation is one that convinces as a work in its own right. That is what we get here.’ Margaret Jull Costa, In Other Words (journal of the British Centre for Literary Translation)
- ‘Havilio handles the narrator’s listlessness with remarkable dexterity and maintains the reader’s attention throughout … a novel which will flourish under many re-readings’ Annabella Massey, Cadaverine
- ‘Open Door really surprised me, it doesn’t obey any of the laws of reading, it feels like it sprang out of nowhere.’ - Beatriz Sarlo, Perfil
- ‘Open Door is not a choral novel but a series of solitary songs sung in intimate keys. It contains a tale to mull over, a story not easy to forget.’ – El País
- ‘Living, some say, is much easier than thinking about life. This seems to be the almost unconscious guiding force that drives the heroine of Open Door, Iosi Havilio’s first book; a sober, restrained novel through which his mature craft shines.’– Susana Rosana, Clarín
- ‘His opera prima touches nerves in the literature and history of his country, themes such as absence, identity and the conflict between city and country; but the style is unusual, a virtuoso display of muted prose. [...] Havilio may well be an attentive reader of Camus: a barely lyrical phrase such as ‘I flop onto my back in the grass and the sky renders me speechless’ recalls The Outsider. [...] The internal variety, the technical command, the originality of the setting and the freshness of the voice are all worthy of mention.’ – Martin Schifino. Revista del Libro
