By Guillermo Vega Fischer
Summer and vacations, with their relaxed time, allow us to read things that the rest of the year, full of activities and responsibilities, makes difficult for us. I propose three novels that I enjoyed reading in these last few days, books that I had been accumulating for some time among the others that I consult during the year to work, waiting to have the time to read them. They are creations by contemporary Argentine writers, wonderful novels, very different from each other, all of them awarded and praised.
Las niñas del naranjel, by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
Its protagonist, a soldier of the Spanish conquest in America, writes from our continent his memoirs to his aunt, a prioress of a convent in the Basque Country. However, this rough character was born as a girl in Spain. Fictionalization of Catalina de Erauso y Pérez de Galarraga, popularly known as the Monja Alférez. Born between 1589 and 1592, and who traveled through America in disguise and under the name of Alonso Díaz Ramírez de Guzmán, among others.
Portrait of Catalina de Erauso (circa 1626), attributed to Juan van der Hamen, Kutxa Foundation, San Sebastián, Spain.
Since its publication, the work has garnered numerous awards. Ciudat de Barcelona Award, 2024; Medifé Filba Foundation Award, 2024; Perfil Award for Best Work of Fiction, 2024, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award. The latter, awarded in Guadalajara, Mexico, recognizes the excellence of literary work by women in the Spanish language from Latin America and the Caribbean. The jury, made up of Ana García Bergua, Diana Sánchez and Emiliano Monge, described the work as "a living being that breathes, spills and rots to give new life, giving us back the certainty that we are also that: something alive that belongs to something bigger." Indeed, the Spanish baroque pen, reminiscent of that of the chroniclers, discovering, conquering and annihilating, merges with a mystical and exuberant poetry like the vegetation of the American jungle and with the Guarani of some little Indian girls.
The author, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, was born in San Isidro, province of Buenos Aires, in 1968. She was an insurance saleswoman, designer and cultural journalist. She studied Literature and was passionate about Greek. She defines herself as a socio-environmentalist and writer. In 2009 she published La virgen cabeza - another novel that I highly recommend, where mysticism grows here in a shantytown in Buenos Aires. She was followed by Le viste la cara a Dios, Romance de la Negra Rubia and Las aventuras de la China Iron. She was awarded the Konex Platinum Prize in the Novel category for the period 2014-2017.
El ojo de Goliat, by Diego Muzzio
I had read Las esferas invisibles several years ago, a set of three short stories that take place during the yellow fever epidemic of 1871 in Buenos Aires, and since then I have been captivated by the terror and suspense of the most refined prose that Muzzio composes. In 2023 he published his first full-length novel, El ojo de Goliat. Set in the first decades of the 20th century between Scotland and the south of our country, specifically in one of the most remote lighthouses in the world - especially from the perspective of a British person - on an islet, kilometers from Ushuaia. El ojo de Goliat narrates the encounter between a psychiatrist and a patient, a former soldier of the First World War, whose post-war work for the Northern Lighthouse company leads him to that distant southern lighthouse. Terror and mystery in magnificent settings where the border between sanity and madness, good and evil, is blurred. Meta-reading crossed by the poetics of Borges, Ocampo and Bioy Casares, as well as by the explicit appearances of writers such as Horacio Quiroga and William Hudson, El ojo de Goliat is a delight for lovers of our local literature. The novel won the fourth edition of the Medifé Filba Foundation Novel Prize, and the Konex 2024 Award, Diploma of Merit, Period 2021-2023.
Diego Muzzio was born in 1969. He studied Literature at the UBA and has a degree in Language, Literature and Foreign Civilization from the University of Le Mans, France. He published poetry and narrative books for adults, children and young people. Among his poetic works are: Sheol Sheol, Gabatha, Hieronymus Bosch, The Defensive System of the Dead and Swimming Under the Earth. As a narrator he published: Mockba, Two Hundred Kangaroos, The Invisible Spheres and The Eye of Goliath. Some of his books for children are: The Amazing Shadow of the Lemon Fish, Universal Gallery of Malefactors, The War of the Chefs, The Year of the Lonely Runner, The House of Whales and The Cold Giant, among others. She received the First Prize for Poetry from the FNA, and the First Hispanic-American Prize for Poetry Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
Las malas, by Camila Sosa Villada
In the face of the advance of transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny in the world and particularly in our country, the reading of Las malas becomes urgent. Camila Sosa Villada offers us her story from the beginning of her memories, being a little boy from Mina Clavero humiliated and mistreated for being different from what his environment, family and society, demanded of him to be, a boy. In the capital of the province, where she goes to study at the university and to escape from that hell, she meets a group of transvestites, prostitutes who work in Parque Sarmiento, who will be her new family. Juan Forn writes in the prologue that «Las malas is a rite of initiation, a fairy tale and a horror story, a group portrait, an explosive manifesto, a guided tour of the imagination of its author and a chronicle unlike any other. The two trans facets that most repel and terrify the well-meaning society converge in their DNA: transvestite fury and the party of being a transvestite. Window to a world unknown to many and fantasized by many others, passionate, heartbreaking, cruel yet tender, in which there is no lack of touches of Latin American surrealism and magical realism.
Since its publication in 2019, the novel became a best seller. My copy, published in 2023, corresponds to the 28th edition. It was translated into French, English, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese and Swedish, among other languages. In October 2020, she received the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz award - the same as Las niñas del naranjel. She also received the Grand Prix de l'Héroïne awarded by the French magazine Madame Figaro and the Narrative Prize in Spanish awarded by the Barcelona bookstore Finestres. And it will soon be adapted for the big screen, directed by Armando Bó.
Camila Sosa Villada, writer of Las malas; here playwright and actress of «Dramatic evocations about Tita Merello and Billie Holiday - Llórame un río».
Camila Sosa Villada Camila Sosa Villada [La Falda, 1982] is an Argentine transvestite writer, actress and playwright. She was a prostitute, domestic worker and street vendor; now, one of the most admired voices in Argentine literature. She published the collection of poems La novia de Sandro, the autobiographical essay El viaje inútil, and in 2019 her first two novels, Las malas and Tesis sobre una domesticación. In 2022 she published her first book of short stories, Soy una tonta por quererte. As an actress, she has worked in numerous plays, several of her own, on television and in film.
In 2013 she obtained the national identity document that certifies her female gender. Regarding this situation, she said: «31 years ago my parents had a son [...]. I was a child who experienced many sadnesses all at once. I didn't manage to learn to pee standing up and I had already become enemies forever with my father. [...] Today I am split between this past, with that man I was and that I am proud to have been [...]. Today I am this present and I am also all of that past, exactly half and half. What remains of my life, I will surely live as Camila. But in no way will I erase from my record that kid who spent his time alone during recess watching how the others had the banquet so served. [1]
Notes:
1. «Camila Sosa Villada has her new identity | Escena». La Voz del Interior. August 7, 2013.