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Text of the page (random words):
led the chronologic because yes here the translator has her own chapter would seem to imply as much other allusions are more cryptic is the mr cortázar who bequeaths to highway s family a green velvet armchair the same julio cortázar who in his short story the continuity of parks describes a man reading in an armchair covered in green velvet who strangely enough ends up menaced by a character from the book he is reading reader beware it seems that we are being told but beware of what of missing these references or of catching them and so of being caught off guard and possibly misled by a web of apparently arbitrary intertextuality does it help to know that alan pauls here a friend of highway s is the name of an argentine writer that emiliano monge here an altar boy is a mexican short story writer or that alvaro enrigue here a bus driver was luiselli s husband and of course what valeria luiselli herself or at least her name doing here incarnated in the person of a mediocre high school student 129 taking elocution lessons the more famous and easily recognizable names are often mexicanized hence we have highway s uncle marcelo sánchez proust presumably some relation to the french novelist marcel proust as well as another uncle miguel sánchez foucault who invokes the french philosopher michel foucault not to mention highway s cousin juan pablo sánchez sartre is this then an indication that throughout luiselli s aim is a mexicanization of a broader set of literary and cultural references inserted almost at random it would seem in the story she is telling one way to understand all this would be to say that these names add value after all that is highway s own approach in auctioning off his collection of teeth to attach a name and therefore a story to each item to give it provenance history and worth even if in the end what is being sold off is just another chunk of enamel these stories these stories of his teeth the teeth he seeks to pawn off on others drive the price up they are patter and perhaps like all patter they do not bear too much examination but in the moment they dignify and fuel the act of selling but is this not also then a critique of this mode of valorization of name dropping and discursive validation the story of my teeth we are told is a novel co written by factory workers i am not sure they would have cared much for these allusions except in so much as they constitute a set of jokes for which the butt is whoever thinks that references and allusions ensure legitimacy and interest in the end teeth are just teeth and a name infinitely transferable makes nobody special you can call a street disneyland all you want but it is still just a way to get from a to b a place to put a home july 31 2026 by jon categories latin america literature teaching tags ideology names rmst495 value leave a comment symphony in white dancing over the abyss there is a repeated image in adriana lisboa s symphony in white 2001 of a butterfly floating about a forbidden quarry once upon a time there was a butterfly that ripped the fresh mountain air and danced above a forbidden quarry where gray lizards warmed themselves in the sun in the routine path of its flight the butterfly could see to one side an abandoned farm and a house with plants growing on the roof to the other side a farm with animals in the pasture that looked like toys and a river that was a long golden thread 161 in several of the iterations of this image we are told that this multicolored butterfly open s its wings and hurl s itself into the abyss it could fly 175 it is as though this were a picture of frivolity in the face of danger of a creature that is slight and nimble enough to dance in the face of a gravity or gravitas that might cause other creatures to tumble to a tragic end it conveys a sense of innocence but also ignorance as to the dangers that lurk below this is a butterfly that flutters over a forbidden quarry and sees everything but imagines nothing 162 and indeed this book ultimately aims to take us beyond the idyllic rural landscape of neat fields and toylike animals of provincial brazil in which it is set to plunge us into the violence that structures and disrupts that landscape a violence of which the damned multicolored butterfly 91 will remain forever unaware the brazilian dictatorship which lasted from 1964 to 1985 is the backdrop for this multigenerational novel at one point we are told for instance that throughout brazil things were happening on the sly and at that very moment there were torturers engaged in the task of making political prisoners confess to anything or go mad 166 but the violence at the heart of this novel is more intimate more clearly gendered and the focus is less on society as a whole than on the fate of a family whose secrets are only revealed late on in the book the narration darts back and forth in time from what appears to be an idyllic childhood to what could be a disillusioned middle age that in fact offers a fresh start it is never too late the book suggests to seek a happiness without illusions but getting there requires making one s peace with a tragic interim the abyss around which the novel s plot turns it is not as though clarice and maria inês the sisters whose story this novel tells are not given hints from the start that beneath the rural tranquility in which they grow up there is not a dark undertow stories circulate among their little group of childhood friends about the abandoned farm visible from the forbidden quarry they say the owner went crazy because he caught his wife with another man he went to the kitchen got a big knife they say he was drunk maybe he was crazy he got the knife and he killed his wife 6 tall tales told by young kids perhaps but there is a sense that the landscape is haunted in the farm s ruined buildings among the streaked and peeling walls ghosts howled 93 the latent threat becomes all too real when as if out of nowhere but in fact out of everywhere their friend lina is raped and murdered this sudden trauma provokes some victim blaming whispers maybe she brought it on herself didn t you notice how she dressed 54 but is soon declared off limits to discussion clarice and maria inês s parents declared lina s death forbidden 54 it coincides in any case with clarice s somewhat sudden removal to rio de janeiro the big city where she is to go to school and perhaps to put her interrupted childhood behind her time passes both sisters marry clarice after a dalliance in the big city with a painter named tomás returns to the countryside and weds the son of a neighbouring landowner ilton xavier with whom she has had an epistolary courtship while she was away the marriage does not last however she realizes that she is merely fulfilling expectations and so in something like a crisis she gives everything up for a while leading a nomadic experience in boarding houses and surviving on the generosity of friends eventually she finds her way back to the countryside at first maria inês likewise follows convention marrying her second cousin and childhood friend joão miguel with whom she moves to rio effectively changing places with her sister they have a daughter eduarda but their marriage too grows stale albeit in the bourgeois comfort and sophistication of servants entertaining and frequent european travel maria inês puts up with all this until in the middle of one of her christmas parties she is told that her husband may be having an affair with yet another cousin s ex wife yet it is also suggested that he is equally or perhaps more interested in his tennis instructor or in a handsome young man in venice perhaps it is the notion that her rival is female rather than male that makes maria inês decide then to return after an absence of ten years home to the farm in what we take to be a break from married life that is almost as dramatic as clarice s many years earlier unexpectedly teenage eduarda declares that she is coming too and so the stage is set for the story that frames all this history maria inês s trip back to the countryside which entails a reckoning with the past and perhaps the possibility of a path towards a different future this will also involve almost as in the last act of a shakespeare play a whole series of revelations of re encounters and delayed recognitions and the climax of the plot though in fact it involves an event recounted in flashback takes place at the once forbidden quarry where the latent violence that undergirds the entire novel makes its appearance once more if this time redemptively settling accounts and allowing the butterflies who dance around the abyss to float free albeit with a sense of guilt that will linger for some years even freedom takes time july 30 2026 by jon categories latin america literature tags gender rmst495 violence leave a comment bad girls creatures in travesti heaven the girls whose lives are portrayed in camila sosa villada s bad girls 2019 may be seen as bad by outsiders looking on but this book is written from their perspective and although it admits that at times we had no idea how to be good or bad 145 overwhelmingly it shows that they have a code of ethics and empathy that puts the rest of society to shame the girls in question are travestis which a preliminary author s note seeks to differentiate from trans women although that is the term that would be the closest equivalent in english but in latin america the word travesti originally a slur conjures up an image of marginality and precarity inflected through class as much as sexuality and gender and often linked with street sex work in some ways it shares some of the semantic territory as the british term rent boy but with the addition of an association with performative femininity as the author s note puts it far below where the secret rivers of the world flow appeared a word that stank of death shit semen prostitution the night the cold bribery blood and jail of misery and neglect a word sharp as a knife grime encrusted and wounding a word that spoke not just of the creatures we were and are but also of our poverty of the acts that made us legendary of the courage with which we headed out to live among families and communities we didn t want to look like women we didn t want to hide our struggles in any way we didn t feel trapped in the wrong bodies we didn t know what we were doing but in the street they christened us with that old buried word highlighting our beauty which was like a home x xi the novel is dedicated to tracing that beauty and kindness and love even in the abject conditions in which travestis find themselves which to some extent they also embrace specifically it focuses on a loose group that haunt and ply their trade in a park in the provincial argentine city of córdoba they come to life at night and give life to the place even at the expense of their own poverty and suffering every night the travestis drag themselves out of a hell that no one would ever think to write about to bring spring back to the world 1 early on in the book this notion that the travestis can conjure and nurture new life from such unpropitious circumstances is literalized when one of them auntie encarna finds a three month old boy abandoned in the park 4 and proceeds informally and illicitly to adopt him one strand of the narrative then proceeds to follow the fate of this unlikely pair the child and his new mother whose breasts may be formed by backstreet injections of aircraft oil whose maternal instincts were theatrical but took control of her character so thoroughly that they felt authentic 11 all the other travestis regard encarna as their substitute mother who welcomes them into her high walled pink house the queerest boardinghouse in the world 5 why not also take in this baby who has known no other mother not that sosa villada is prone to romanticization this is not particularly the tale of whores with hearts of gold they hardly have the space or time for sentimentality as much as the travestis are in constant danger from their clients any trick may go wrong at any point from the police or simply from the scorn of would be respectable society they also fight and squabble among themselves sometimes viciously indeed at times the worst violence is that inflicted on each other or themselves whether it be out of bouts of competitiveness or displaced anger that would be better directed at institutions that they feel unable to change in fact it is striking that as much as the book stresses the humanity of these outcasts who are often treated as mere objects for quick and guilty sexual satisfaction though they also make themselves into an object into valuable flesh to live the only life that was available in that town 105 and even embrace their role as slave as an object 111 it is drawn too to their animality they are described as a pack a small pack wandering the margins of the world 54 they have animal wisdom 85 or sleep sweating like animals 96 more mysteriously still one of them locks herself in her room once a month as she turns into a she wolf while another originally maria the mute starts to grow feathers on her chest and by the end of the story has entirely transmuted into maria the bird flying down into the narrator s purse i let her settle in there 191 as the adopted boy grows up he takes to whittling figures of all the animals we d been bird women she wolves sad women brave women a whole mythology carved in figurines the boy created in his isolation 181 we are all basically beasts the novel seems to suggest and women are one animal among others in a world in which the line between species is blurry and can be crossed whether by accident thanks to forces beyond our control or through effort and determination so perhaps the point is that the fellow feeling and support that the travestis admittedly intermittently show each other comes from their recognition of our common status as creatures governed as much by instinct and desire hunger and the most basic of needs for shelter and ultimately love it is also notable that among the many pen portraits of clients and less often boyfriends one of the most sympathetic is a zookeeper my zoo guard gave me tenderness brought me hot coffee on cold winter nights and several times dropped me off at home in his car saying goodbye with a kiss on the mouth 134 he takes her on midnight jaunts through the zoo closed to the public where they have sex among the cages as she rub s up against him like a horny dog if it was up to me the guard tells her i d open up the cages and let it all go to hell 134 everyone and everything deserves its freedom the travestis perhaps lead the way in showing the life that can be lived on the wild side beyond the cages that most of us do not even realize that we are inhabiting power and its injustices however are all too obvious to a travesti hence their anger and resentment has a broad range and is sometimes indiscriminate we were...