“There is a mountain and a woman on the mountain, and the two speak. The woman shouldn’t write, but she does. Both of them—the mountain and the woman who inhabits it—speak in a world, a world that belongs to men. Harsh, lyrical, cruel, and with the rare sweetness of the voices most don’t listen to—and much less write about—El monte de las furias is a powerful and beautiful novel.”

“This ethical and aesthetic exploration of our relationship with all forms of life crosses time and matter to reach the crevices where body and territory come together. And in that space, the narrative voice pours out a loving manifesto of our passage through the world moving against an awful destiny. Fernanda Trías’s clairvoyant, shamanic, lyrical, and psychic literature returns. If mountains could speak, they would have the fury of her language.”

“El monte de las furias is one of the most unique and powerful texts I have read in recent years. A fantastic novel where the topic of the inner monster (a recurring theme in Trías’s work) intertwines with the question of territory—that is, the traumatic bonds that tie human geography, natural forces, and the subtleties of intimacy together. Trías, a fundamental author of Latin American literature, opens her writing to an innovative investigation that manages to establish astonishing links between very different fantastical literary traditions in Spanish: the Río de la Plata and the tropical gothic come together in a happy union.”

“El monte de las furias is an exceptional, difficult, disembodied, beautiful, primal, earthy, green, and very, very alive book, despite the fact that disappearances and time are or appear to be its greatest protagonists.”

“Fernanda Trías makes a strong landing with this novel—a harsh reflection on man and his darkest side—that is written with refined prose. (...) The author orchestrates a journey to the heart of violence and melancholy, trapping the reader in a dense, almost tactile atmosphere that appears to be made of fog and damp earth. The narrative folds like a spiral in which the boundaries between nature, memory, and decomposition are blurred, creating a text that is as harsh as it is lyrical. At the heart of the story, a woman lives isolated on a mountain that seems to devour everything it touches. Her routine is marked by caring for its boundaries and recording in her notebook of painful memories: a brutal mother and the frustrated desire to learn. Her life changes when corpses appear in her garden. Together with the caretaker, she decides to bury them in silence, but the bodies continue to arrive, turning her refuge into a space of accumulation of death. The mountain is presented as a living and pulsating character, an organism that swallows bodies and exhales time. (...) The use of language in this work is superb. Each word seems to be measured, loaded with history, as if it came from the depths of the mountain… The author does not seek to console; her prose, which has a disturbing rhythm, forces the reader to confront the rot and the beauty that are born from the same soil.”

“Displaying an undeniable lyrical power, Trias proposes a scenario as wide as a mountain without abandoning the closed atmosphere she executed perfectly in La azotea and Mugre rosa. Throughout her warden’s notebooks, the apparent spatial enormity becomes claustrophobic, just like the long and monotonous days become a fraction of a second in the narration of geological time on the mountain. Once again, Trías appears to tell us that spaces are, in reality, introspective territories, and that time is measured in memories.”

“Good writers are researchers who transform their notes, their findings, into their own material. Fernanda Trías is one of them. And she has created a story that counterpoints the unique feminine voice with the panoramic mountain view. She empathizes with non-human rhythms and perspectives to narrate how someone separates from their mother, through distance and lies and differences to re-enter another womb, Gaia’s.”

“The new novel by the Uruguayan writer, who won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize in 2021 for Mugre rosa, is a disturbing and atmospheric novel. In it, the themes of motherhood, violence, and our relationship with nature reappear, promising to unsettle the reader once again.”

“...a much more lyrical novel that is more elusive when it comes to definitions, in which the plot dissolves into powerful and rich metaphors and images, and into the sheer power of language. Constructed in the form of diaries, with a torrential first person—the woman, whose name we never learn who oscillates between sanity and delirium, flooded with rage as the owner of a dark past that is hinted at without ever being named—the novel unpacks within its pages, with enviable subtlety, a good handful of the author’s key themes. Among them are motherhood and its necessity, social inequality and extreme poverty as a result of radical capitalism, nature and our relationship with it, and the impossibility of language to express certain realities.”

“Rage erupts in El monte de las furias, a novel about reconnecting with nature in order to heal humanity.”

“The Uruguayan novelist is one of the most influential writers of her generation. (...) Her new novel emphasizes the lyricism that the writer always imprints on the natural spaces she recreates.”