Austral: A Novel
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Julio is a disillusioned professor of literature, a perpetual wanderer who has spent years away from his home, teaching in the United States. He receives a posthumous summons from an old friend, the writer Aliza Abravanel, to uncover the mysteries within her final novel. Aliza had raced to finish her work as her mind deteriorated. In her manuscript is a series of interconnected accounts of loss, tales that set Julio hurtling on a journey to uncover their true meaning. Austral tracks Julio’s trip from Aliza’s home in an Argentine artists’ colony to a forgotten city in Guatemala, to the Peruvian Amazon, and through Nueva Germania, the antisemitic commune in Paraguay founded by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
A story of mourning and return—to one’s native country, to one’s darkest memories, to oneself—Carlos Fonseca’s Austral interrogates the obsessions and upheavals faced by survivors of a rapidly globalizing world. A treasure map of intertwined experiences, each cleaving its own path through time, the novel is a fascinating investigation into the disappearance of culture and memory and a charting of the furthest limits of what language can do. With this remarkable exploration of the traces we leave behind, those we erase, and how we seek to rebuild, Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.
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Carlos Fonseca was born in Costa Rica, grew up in Puerto Rico, and studied in the United States. He was selected by the Hay Festival as part of the Bogotá39 group (2017), by Granta magazine as one of its twenty-five best young Spanish-language writers (2021), and by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as one of the twenty most promising writers in the world for its “Young Shapers of the Future” (2022). His previous novels are Colonel Lágrimas and Natural History, both translated by Megan McDowell. His work has been translated into more than ten languages. He is a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Megan McDowell has translated many of the most important Latin American writers working today. Her translations have won the National Book Award, the English PEN award, the Premio Valle Inclán, and the O. Henry Prize, and have been nominated four times for the International Booker Prize. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Granta, among other publications. In 2020 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is from Richmond, Kentucky, and lives in Santiago, Chile.
