Haroldo Conti
Southeaster
‘Neither the old man nor Boga ever said more than was needed. And yet they understood each other perfectly.’
Over the course of a season, Boga and the old man work side by side on the sandbanks of the Paraná Delta, cutting reeds to sell to local basketweavers. But when the old man falls sick and dies, Boga abandons himself entirely to the river and the life of solitary drifting he has long yearned for.
Echoes of John Berger sound throughout the evocative prose of this great Argentinian writer. A twentieth-century classic, Southeaster is a central work in Haroldo Conti’s oeuvre.
Read an ExcerptMore Info
- Read more about Haroldo Conti in our authors section.
- Southeaster was first published in English translation by Jon Lindsay Miles’ Immigrant Press (in Spain) under the title South-East after he discovered the (Spanish-language) book on a library bookshelf. And Other Stories’ 2015 edition of his translation is the first edition published in the UK and North America.
- Jon Lindsay Miles writes about his experience translating Southeaster for Bookanista. You can read it here.
- If you had subscribed to And Other Stories before Southeaster went to the printers, you would have received the first edition of the book – in which all subscribers are thanked by name – before its official publication, as well us up to five other And Other Stories titles per year. Find out about how to subscribe.
Print status: Available
Author: Haroldo Conti
Translator: Jon Lindsay Miles
Original language: Spanish
Format: B-format paperback
Publication date: 6 August 2015
ISBN: 9781908276605
Ebook ISBN: 9781908276612
Availability: World
Number of pages: 256
Reviews
Melissa Harrison
Financial Times
‘Southeaster is a meandering, estuarine version of a road novel, a watery Hemingway-meets-Camus tale of a loner exposed to the elements and in wordless search for some kind of purpose… sensuous and meticulously observed… a luminous and troubling South American classic.’
Tim Winton
‘What a surprise and a treat. I was swept up in the great murky flow of it. Conti is a writer for whom place is character, not backdrop, and what a place, what a character. He’s a revelation.’
Professor John King, School of Comparative American Studies, University of Warwick
‘Readers in English can at last immerse themselves in the subtle, beautifully wrought journey of the voyager… Southeaster is one of the most original contributions to what Conti himself would term, in an interview in 1974, “a stylistically and imaginatively Argentine literature”.’
Sophie Hughes
Times Literary Supplement
‘With his plain but indefatigably inventive descriptions, Conti conveys how “the river always changes”… In long winding sentences full of alternately subordinating clauses, Conti slackens the narrative to match the river’s pace… but Conti also knows how to make time buckle, and the last fifty pages… are exhilarating.’
Jessica Sequeira
Boston Review
‘Southeaster is a particularly rich evocation of interiority… organising a chaos of memories, observations, thoughts, and feelings into meaningfulness.’
3am
‘Despite the obvious romance of the delta, of Conti’s strange, distorting setting, this is not a novel which romanticizes the lives of those who live in it. It leaves the reader with a savage beauty to contemplate, something contradictory, tense, and ultimately self-destructive in a way that seems to correspond with so much of Argentina’s recent history.’
