Our Spanish-language reading group returns for summer/autumn 2022 with four exciting Latin American titles. Fernando Molano’s posthumously published Vista desde una acera is a love story, a story about AIDS, and a social history of Bogotá in the 20th century. Mexican author Karina Sosa Castañeda’s acclaimed first novel Caballo fantasma disjointedly narrates a young woman’s attempts to get closer to her late mother, two years after her suicide. Our final two titles both come from the independent Uruguayan press Criatura, who we are delighted to be spotlighting this year. Más allá de agosto by Lourdes Rodríguez Becerra depicts a turbulent reckoning with motherhood and ancestry. And finally, Irse yendo by Leonor Courtoisie explores the effects of precarity and gentrification in contemporary Montevideo.
How it works
- To read the whole book, please order a copy yourself from a shop or library if you can. If you have trouble finding a title, we may be able to lend you a copy. Email info@andotherstories.org to be put in touch with the organiser.
- Read the books, then add your thoughts in the comments below.
- Join us at a meet-up to discuss what we have read. You can be sure of a lively, well-informed discussion.
Where and when
Reading Period:
June 2022 – September 2022
Meet-ups:
James Bennett will be holding a meeting to discuss these books at 19:00 on Thursday 8 September at The Three Kings, 7 Clerkenwell Close, London, EC1R 0DY. There will also be an option to attend remotely.
Please get in touch with us at info@andotherstories.org if you would like to attend. There is no need to do this if you are already on our Spanish reading group mailing list.
Vista desde una acera
About the Book
Fernando and Adrián, a young gay couple in Bogotá in the 1980s, have to deal with societal and familial prejudice while struggling with their own AIDS diagnoses and declining health. This expansive novel takes in the family history of its protagonists, situating their lives within the broader social story of Colombia. Vista desde una acera was lost for years in the rare manuscripts collection of the Luis Ángel Arango Library in Bogotá. It was finally published in 2012, fourteen years after Molano’s death.
Translated extract by James Bennett.
Caballo fantasma
About the Book
In a room in Oaxaca, Ka, a young architect, reads the diaries she has accumulated over the past ten years. Her mother died six hundred days ago. All that Ka knows about her mother, Leonora, is that she had an illness which affected her nervous system, and she loved horses. Other than that, she has always been a ghost. As Ka adapts to the city, her new job, the streets, love, and the libraries, she delves into her mother’s life and her equine passion. Leonora is a blank space, a mystery that Ka tries to solve with writing that oscillates between memories, quotes, and literary references. This novel reflects on absence, lies, solitude, family and people’s capacity to tell stories that define their place in the world.
Translated extract by Ellen Jones
Más allá de agosto
About the Book
The narrator of Más allá de agosto is obsessed with what it means to be a good mother – even though she knows that there is no right answer. In her internal monologue, she doesn’t know where her own voice begins and those of her daughter, and ancestors, end. But she is certain about one thing: ‘I never know who I am when I write, but I know that something is looking for me.’ So she writes a story about what happens one August, which will be relevant to all following winters of her life.
Irse yendo
About the Book
In Irse yendo, a 30-year-old woman is faced with having nowhere to live after the death of her grandmother, the owner of the house she shares with her mother and brother. This is a novel about precarity and gentrification in Uruguay today. The story concentrates on one family, but also reflects a historical moment, the bubble of Montevideo’s hipster capitalism and the dark, literary decadence of that city.