The Entre Ríos Trilogy: 2nd edition (Entre Rios, 1-3) - Softcover

Suez, Perla

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1945680598 ISBN 13: 9781945680595

Verlag: White Pine Press, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

As a trilogy, the novellas offer a powerful resistance against the socio-cultural invisibility of the Jewish immigrant populations, as well as a significant contribution to the literature of marginalization and exile. 

Suez’s minimalist narratives have profound traces in the other side of the tapestry of what, in the end, is still very much a powerful and significant presence of Jews in Argentina. Indeed, Suez’s three novellas are exercises in reading those backside traces. They are, in the best feminist tradition, stories told from women’s point of view in the attempt to bring forth the way in which social history, so often forged consciously and unthinkingly by men oblivious to women’s participation in it, impacts on women’s consciousness.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Perla Suez was born in Córdoba, Argentina. She began her literary career publishing novels and short stories for children, and was the founding director of CEDILIJ (Centro de Difusión e Investigación de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil), a center for children’s literature in Córdoba. Her novel Memorias de Vladimir (Alfaguara, 1992) was awarded the White Ravens Prize, and has been published in several subsequent editions, most recently in 2019 by the Editorial Comunicarte. In 2000, she made her debut in the realm of adult fiction with the publication of Letargo, which was a finalist for the prestigious 2001 Rómulo Gallegos Prize. In 2008, Trilogía de Entre Ríos was awarded the Primer Premio Internacional Grinzane Covour. In 2007, Suez won a Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel La pasajera (Editorial Norma, 2008), which was translated to English as Dreaming of the Delta. In 2013, she received the Argentine National Novel Prize for Humo rojo (Editorial Edhasa, 2012). In 2015, her novel El país del diablo received the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Literature Prize, and in 2020, the XX Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize for the best novel written in Spanish in Latin America and Spain. In 2019, White Pine Press published the translation of the novel as The Devil’s Country. Rhonda Dahl Buchanan is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Spanish and Director of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Louisville. Her many translations include: The Entre Ríos Trilogy (U of New Mexico P, 2006; 1st ed.) and Dreaming of the Delta (U Texas Tech P, 2014), four novels by Perla Suez. Her translation Quick Fix: Sudden Fiction by Ana María Shua (White Pine P, 2008) is a bilingual illustrated anthology of microfictions. She is the recipient of a 2006 NEA Literature Fellowship for the translation of Alberto Ruy-Sánchez’s novel The Secret Gardens of Mogador: Voices of the Earth (White Pine Press, 2009). In 2014, White Pine Press published her translation Poetics of Wonder: Passage to Mogador by Alberto Ruy-Sánchez. In 2019, White Pine Press published her translation of Perla Suez’s novel The Devil’s Country, and in 2020, her translation of Mempo Giardinelli’s novel Bruno Fólner’s Last Tango.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

A stir of distant voices rises dimly: two women argue in the middle of the street, and I can’t make out what they’re saying. I’m on the sidewalk, standing on one foot on the number three that I just drew with a piece of brick. It must be Friday, because I see Bobe at the very moment she covers her head with a handkerchief, and her eyes with her hands, to recite the prayer over the candles. Papa, who doesn’t believe in God, fixes the latch on the living room window, and Mama knits a light-blue blanket, while I watch how she wraps the yarn around the needle, her fingers moving on their own, and her eyes on us. The light is faint, and the raindrops tap against the metal awning over the patio. The rain’s getting into the house. There’s a leak in my room, and the water falls at the foot of my bed. I hear Bobe setting pots everywhere. Later, Bobe shows me how to embroider and emboss silk on a frame. The girl holds her breath when she thinks about her father, when she imagines him sinking once more into the wicker chair, his long legs intertwined, waiting for her mother to tell him, “Merke, dinner’s getting cold.” The girl sees her mother sitting at the table, sighing over her swollen belly. Her mother counts the knives and forks, and when Bobe asks why she counts them, she says she does not know. We eat after my grandmother closes the shop. Bobe doesn’t speak, and Papa tucks the napkin under his chin, dunks a piece of bread in the gefilte fish broth, and doesn’t say a word either. Mama looks at me as if through a frosted pane of glass. The house is immersed in silence, and the silence deepens whenever the wind stops beating the window, and the girl, with her nose pressed against the glass, hears the drumming of raindrops on the patio awning. When I walked in that morning, Bobe had everything cleaned up and the table set. “Lete’s water broke,” I heard Papa say, as he rubbed his hands on his legs, not knowing what to do. Papa was tall and thin, and had to bend over to pass through the doorway. He had sad eyes, and never knew what to do with his hands, if he didn’t have them in the pockets of his jacket. He hovered over Bobe until she said, “Stop following me, Merke.” For the first time, I ate breakfast without Bobe filling my bowl. She spoke to Papa in Yiddish in a long, anxious whisper, and then said to me in a nervous tone I’d never heard before, “I don’t want you to go near your mother’s room.” “She’ll just go in for a minute,” Papa said. “No, you won’t. Your mother shouldn’t get excited.” Then she added with a sigh, “The stork will come through the transom.” Papa whispered in my ear that I shouldn’t get Bobe more upset than she already was. I left the house and wandered aimlessly for an hour or more. I crossed the train tracks and went through the turnstile, when suddenly, a man appeared wearing a raincoat. I could see his face, and then I saw Leibe’s calf, and I watched the man who had bought it put the calf in his truck and drive off, kicking up a cloud of dust. I walked into the kitchen and overheard Bobe telling Papa that you need money to bring children into the world. And I heard Papa swear, “Kishen tukhes.” And he stood there like a shadow by the living room window, with a cigarette in his mouth. I can barely make out his face, with its three-day-old beard, and yet, I’m sure that Papa is Papa, and he’s standing there, motionless, on that dreary day, by the window, staring into the emptiness. It’s dark outside, and until it clears, I’ll be the girl who walks in the mist. I’m picking up some of Bobe’s habits. She doesn’t spend because she wants to be sure she has money, and that it’s in a safe place, somewhere only she knows. The day I went with her to Frenkel’s store, she haggled over the price of a saltshaker, and because she couldn’t get it for less, she left the store complaining about the bad service, telling me the saltshaker she’d picked out was the lousiest one she’d ever seen. Naturally, in her shop everything had a fixed price, and when someone, like Aunt Berta, asked for a discount, she’d say with a painful look on her face, “It’s not that I don’t want to, my dear, it’s that I can’t.” And Bobe would tell Aunt Berta the story of Mama’s wedding again, saying how sorry she was that Aunt Berta hadn’t attended the wedding, just to make her sigh. She’d describe in detail the lace dress Mama wore that night, and would only interrupt the conversation to offer Aunt Berta a cup of tea. Bobe would get her all wrapped up in her tale. At times, she’d be gracious, and tell her that God would reward her for caring for Mama the way she did, and Aunt Berta would listen to her, pleased. In Bobe’s story, Mama was a queen, and when she told Aunt Berta that Mama fell in love with Papa the very first time she laid eyes on him, Bobe seemed lost in an intense dream, and Aunt Berta would sigh. The truth is, things weren’t as Bobe wished, but it was a matter of saving face to say her daughter had married well, and she’d make things up so that Aunt Berta would stay and listen to her.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: White Pine Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1945680598
• ISBN 13: 9781945680595
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland