About this item
Highlights
- A 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE FINALISTBy the Colombian author of The Bitch, a 2020 National Book Award Finalist and PEN Awards Winner"An eight-year-old girl takes in a series of troubling eventsin this luminous and transfixing account of fractured family life fromColombian writer Quintana (TheBitch).
- National Book Awards (Translation) 2023 3rd Winner
- Author(s): Pilar Quintana
- 226 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres,
Description
About the Book
"Claudia seeks the attention of her melancholic mother, also named Claudia, who occupies her days reading gossip magazines and tending to the family's teeming collection of house plants in their Cali, Colombia, apartment. The mother is particularly obsessed with the deaths of famous women such as actor Natalie Wood, who died in 1981, and tells the narrator they took their own lives to escape from domineering men. The older Claudia married the narrator's father, Jorge, at 19 when he was 42, and though he's away working most of the time, the younger Claudia reveres him. The older Claudia then begins a secret love affair with her 30-year-old brother in law, which is exposed during a family trip to a seashore city, and Jorge threatens to kick Claudia out. Overhearing this, the narrator changes her view of Jorge, likening him to a monster. Later, the older Claudia's best friend, Gloria dies by suicide, and Claudia's comments on Gloria, who suffered from depression, make the narrator worried about her mother's safety and well-being. Visceral images propel the story ("Mama laughed so wide, you could see the roof of her mouth, hollow and grooved like an underfed torso"), as the narrator grows increasingly concerned about what's going to happen next."--Provided by publisher.Book Synopsis
A 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE FINALIST
By the Colombian author of The Bitch, a 2020 National Book Award Finalist and PEN Awards Winner
"An eight-year-old girl takes in a series of troubling eventsin this luminous and transfixing account of fractured family life from
Colombian writer Quintana (The
Bitch). Readers will be dazzled." -Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
Claudia is an impressionable eight-year-old girl, trying to understand the world through the eyes of the adults around her. But her hardworking father hardly speaks a word, while her unhappy mother spends her days reading celebrity lifestyle magazines, tending to her enormous collection of plants, and filling Claudia's head with stories about women who end their lives in tragic ways. Then an interloper arrives, disturbing the delicate balance of family life, and Claudia's world starts falling apart. In this strikingly vivid portrait of Cali, Colombia, Claudia's acute observations remind us that children are capable of discerning extremely complex realities even if they cannot fully understand them. In Abyss, Quintana leads us brilliantly into the lonely heart of the child we have all once been, driven by fear of abandonment.
Review Quotes
Praise for Pilar Quintana
"Pilar Quintana uncovers wounds we didn't know we had, shows us their beauty, and then throws a handful of salt into them." -YURI HERRERA, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World
"How can I sum up everything that fascinates me about Pilar Quintana. Her incredible lyricism. Her path against the unexpected. The tension--razor-sharp, poetic and uncompromising."--SARA MESA
"Pilar Quintana is pure literature." --LARA MORENO
"Quintana has an impressive ability to tell truly deep stories that outwardly appear quite simple. Precise and concrete, her characters so human it's impossible not to empathize with them."-- SARA JARAMILLO KLINKERT
Praise for Abyss
2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
"A bourgeois apartment becomes a lush green jungle in this vivid, restrained story of the generational burdens of motherhood, as told by Claudia, a resilient eight-year-old named after--who else?--her mother. The treacherous domestic terrain of Abyss offers the keen-eyed Claudia an early education in adult selfishness and betrayal, and Pilar Quintana's subtle, affecting evocation of that terrain--which loses nothing in Lisa Dillman's masterful English translation--is a triumph of perception and representation." --National Book Award Judges Citation
"An eight-year-old girl takes in a series of troubling events in this luminous and transfixing account of fractured family life from Colombian writer Quintana (The Bitch). Readers will be dazzled." --Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
"Claudia, the 8-year-old narrator of Pilar Quintana's Abyss,lives in an apartment so overgrown with plants she calls it "the jungle."
Outside, the city of Cali, Colombia, is "gloomy and desolate, like the inside
of a very old house." She's frequently left to her own devices, her mother too
engrossed in celebrity tabloids like Hola! and Vanidades, her father working
late at the family supermarket. Quintana's spare, atmospheric novel, succinctly
translated by Lisa Dillman, explores Claudia's high anxiety and the terrors of
the adult world." --Anderson Tepper, The New York Times"A terrifying vision of what it means to inherit our
parents' fears and disillusionments. Perhaps Pilar Quintana's greatest
achievement is to immerse us in Claudia's phantasmagorical jungle without us
really noticing, before swiftly unveiling a daughter's fantasy to a be a
mother's painful reality; to remind us that phantoms are all the more
frightening when they are real." --Times Literary Supplement"A vivid and compelling
exploration of family dynamics and the damage they can do, Abyss is a
tale to fall into and learn from." --New Internationalist"Chasms, both within the earth and between people, can be
hard to bridge, as Pilar Quintana (The Bitch) reinforces in Abyss,
her mesmerizing novel translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman. Abyss
is a riveting story of regret, opportunities squandered and the fear that
family misfortunes will persist through generations." --Michael Magras, Sh