Austral

From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling novel about legacy, memory, and the desire to know and be known.The English writer Aliza Abravanel races to finish her final novel before her mind deteriorates. The last living speaker of a language is confronted with the disappearance of his culture. Through the construction of an esoteric theater of memory, a survivor of the Guatemalan genocide seeks to recover the memories buried in the trauma of war. Seeking the connecting thread between these three stories of loss is Julio, a disillusioned professor of literature who receives a posthumous summons from his old friend Aliza that will send him hurtling into a painful episode from his past.A novel of compassion and of return-to one's native country, to one's darkest memories, to oneself-Austral maps a journey from war-ravaged Guatemala to the high Peruvian Amazon, passing through Nueva Germania, the antisemitic commune founded in Paraguay by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. A treasure box of intertwined stories, it is a fascinating investigation into the pain of loss, the disappearance of language and memory, and the dangers of globalization. With this dazzling exploration of the traces we leave behind, those we erase, and those we seek to rebuild, Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.Includes black-and-white illustrations