Los eufemismos
Ana Negri
FICTION | 2020 | 168 pages
“When she would imagine the most terrible scenarios, she’d anticipate a profound and intense pain, a sad time period that little by little would crystalize into a fault that was almost tenderly assumed. If she tried to calm herself down and tell herself that she was exaggerating, she imagined a shouting match with her mother where she was reproached for using the emergency line without considering the shock it would cause her or what she would have to leave behind to tend to her whims. In no moment did she imagine that the fissure that had slowly been opening in front of her would manage to trace the gap that now divided her timeline into a before and an after.”
Clara, the novel’s protagonist, could divide her life into two parts: before the arrival of the euphemisms, she was a postgraduate student with a stable relationship and professional projects. One day, she receives a call and is told that her mother is “very nervous”—the first of the euphemisms—and from then on everything changes, perhaps in an irreversible way. What happens when a maternal figure falls apart? How can this be confronted with humor, irony, and wit? In four days, Clara will have to reckon with her emotional past, with her Argentine parents’ history of political persecution and exile, and with her life projects in order to make a decision that will allow her to confront her immediate future and decide what her place is in the world, if such a thing even exists. Ana Negri’s powerful language delves into the places we inhabit by chance and in the essential use of words.
RIGHTS: spanish (mexico) EDITORIAL ANTÍLOPE | spanish (chile) LOS LIBROS DE LA MUJER ROTA | spanish (spain, argentina, costa rica, uruguay) FIRMAMENTO EDITORIAL | english (world) CHARCO PRESS | french GLOBE
“Ana Negri roams through the mind of an escapist woman, daughter of a persecuted mother. Between the columns of tobacco smoke, the figures of reparation are formed, but the past is painful. A family story pierced with exile, which displaces and separates the bodies.”
“The characters oppose each other, generating empathy and comedy, but their contrasting points of view don’t make them lose their humanity or any internal contradictions. (...) Los eufemismos by Ana Negri is hard-hitting, reviving a necessary debate now that governments are offering bonuses to “repair” damages caused by State organisms during dictatorships without knowing what it’s like to live with a wound as large as constant prosecution, exile, or the disappearance of a loved one.”
BY ANA NEGRI:
Los eufemismos
NOVEL, 2020