A fantastical story where the protagonist is caught between reality and the feverish inventions of his mind by a groundbreaking female novelist of Argentina’s metaphysical tradition.
Available for the first time in English, this classic of Latin American literature features a foreword by Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Alberto Paradella, a divorced lawyer, journalist, and writer who is thirty-two years old, wakes up one morning in Buenos Aires next to a blonde woman who insists her name is Alicia Martínez and wears a necklace identical to one he saw on another woman’s neck in Berlin. Originally written during Argentina's Dirty War, this story is set in Buenos Aires in the 1970s but shifts to Milan, Berlin, and Vienna. The narrator, a castaway of sorts, travels aimlessly between countries but also between past and present, waking life and dreams, truth and lies.
Isolated in his study, Alberto pretends to write a novel to escape from himself and those around him. As betrayals are exposed, his life begins to fall apart. His journey—physical and psychological—unfolds like a dream. Specific characters like the mysterious woman appear, but the boundaries between memory, fantasy, and reality blur. This “adventure of the philosophical imagination” as Bioy Casares describes the book in his foreword, leads us to question, like all great fiction: What is real?
Jessica Sequeira is a writer and literary translator. She is the author of the novel A Furious Oyster, the story collection Rhombus and Oval, the essay collection Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age and the hybrid work A Luminous History of the Palm. She has translated over twenty books by Latin American authors, and in 2019 was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán for her translation of Sara Gallardo’s Land of Smoke. She lives in Santiago, Chile and Cambridge, England.
