Austral

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Moving . . . An intellectual puzzle that reminds us that it is also possible to be passionate about ideas . . . Guided by its obsessive characters and their fixations, the book elegantly takes the reader for a tour of Latin America’s labyrinthine contemporary history . . . Deftly translated by Megan McDowell, the mastery, grace, and intelligence of Fonseca’s prose come forth, halfway between the baroque rhythms of Faulkner and the steady pulse of Borges.” Dictionaries are prominent, but rather than catalog the old meaning of words, they destabilize or explode their meanings and become strange incubators of the possibility for new definitions. We come across Chilean artist Álvaro Guevara’s Dictionnaire intuitif, composed in French, and an aural dictionary of the Nataibo language based on voice recordings of Juvenal Suárez, the indigenous man who is its last speaker. Such attempts to clarify or reinvent words, too, produce cultural detonations. A beautifully knotted novel which unfolds with every traced layer of its deeply affecting narrative along side a meditation on memory, mystery and vanishing. Sebaldian in its turns, Austral is a novel of profound questions." —Guy Gunaratne, author of Mister, Mister Cenup üç bölümden oluşuyor. Sırasıyla “Şahsi Bir Dil”, “Kaybın Lugatı” ve “Bellek Tiyatrosu”. Wittgenstein’ın dilin ve dolayısıyla bilincin hatta özbilincin de toplumsallığına vurgu yapan “şahsi bir dil tasavvur edilemeyeceği” önermesine atıfta bulunan ilk bölümde Julio’nun Humahuaca’ya yolculuğu, Aliza’nın ona miras bıraktığı son kitabından bölümlerle birlikte örülmüş. Otobiyografik öğelerin aşikar olduğu bu anlatının halkalarında Aliza’nın geçmişini, onu 30 sene evvel Güney Amerika’da bir “road trip”e sevk eden olaylar zincirinini okuruz. Roman ya da otobiyografik anlatının olay örgüsü kısaca şöyle: Specters of the Avant-Garde». Flash Art (en inglés). 6 de noviembre de 2015 . Consultado el 30 de agosto de 2017.

The writing is meticulous, precise, nuanced when necessary, always attentive to the novel's changes of pace - El Pais With Natural History, Carlos Fonseca, a writer of archives, masks, and ruins—that is, a writer with the capacity to create new ways of thinking, an ingenious and obstinate explorer of the abyss—has cemented himself as one of my favorites.” Una deslumbrante novela las huellas que dejamos, las huellas que borramos y las huellas que buscamos reconstruir. A dazzling novel about the traces we leave, the traces we erase and the traces we seek to rebuild, by one of the most innovative and powerful new voices in contemporary Latin American literature Austral by Carlos Fonseca will be published on 1st June 2023, in a translation by Megan McDowell. Costa Rican-born Fonseca’s work has been selected for Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Shapers of the Future. Austral is his first novel to be published in the UK. MacLehose Press is planning a major PR campaign on publication.The evocation dissolved with the question as she refilled his mug and he, observing the tattoo that stretched over her forearm, understood the size of his error. He could not be hearing his friend’s voice, not only because she had died ten days earlier, but also because what was at stake in the story they now returned to was precisely the loss of that voice. The Literature of Catastrophe: Nature, Disaster and Revolution in Latin America(Bloomsbury Press, 2020) A] wonderfully enigmatic novel . . . [ Natural History] reaches across continents and decades, touching on political movements and popular culture . . . With lush prose that owes a debt to translator Megan McDowell, Fonseca weaves the fictional threads of Giovanna’s life into a fabric of real history, grounding his story in events ranging from Sherman’s March to the Sea to the legal battle between sculptor Constantin Brâncuși and the American government that redefined ‘art’ at the turn of the 20th century . . . No detail in this book is superfluous.” Carlos Fonseca consolidates with Austral a profoundly literary project: a search for the traces left by that journey without return towards those we once were. He hands us, in turn, a beautiful account, free and joyful, of his unexpected findings.”

Coronel Lágrimas (Anagrama, 2015). Translated by Megan McDowell as Colonel Lágrimas (Restless Books, 2016)Hay Festival Announces Bogotá39-2017 Anthology's Latin American Authors». Publishing Perspectives (en inglés). 8 de mayo de 2017 . Consultado el 30 de agosto de 2017. Colonel Lágrimas is a clever book, slightly claustrophobic in its setting, but spanning the globe through its focus on the old man’s memories . . . It’s beautifully written, with more good work here by the excellent McDowell . . . [The tedium of the Colonel’s life,] in Fonseca’s hands, far from being something to grieve, becomes a celebration of a life less ordinary.” Esta ambiciosa y poliédrica novela construida como una suma de narraciones, de palabras e imágenes, es una fascinante indagación en el dolor de la pérdida, la desaparición de lenguas y recuerdos, la necesidad de la memoria y la escritura, los peligros de la globalización y los lugares recónditos de Latinoamérica que sobreviven a ella. Carlos Fonseca se confirma como una de las más potentes voces de la actual literatura latinoamericana con esta deslumbrante radiografía de las huellas que dejamos, las huellas que borramos y las huellas que buscamos reconstruir. If you’re familiar with any Anglo language philosophy from the earlier twentieth, you know that “private language” is a loaded term. It refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s argument that the meaning of words doesn’t depend on our subjective sense of them but on the use of words in “language games”. Broadly and roughly, you may think of yourself as having a soul, but the meaning of “soul” or your individuality is out in the world of affairs, not inside your head. Your sense of “where your self is” and what your self is, is being challenged by this kind of analysis. I was pleased that Wittgenstein makes a personal appearance later in the book in a manner typical of Austral: in a book within a book, in a reaching kind of metaphysical scrapbooking dictionary (a book)within Austral.