Five of the Best 21st-Century Argentinian Novels

Thank you for putting together this reading list. You wanted to highlight some of the best Argentinian novels by contemporary writers. How did you settle on this selection of books?

These are five very well-known young writers. Well, younger than me. I would say this is an interesting sample of the writers of their generation in Argentina. I like recommending new Argentinian literature to others, because sometimes if you ask a writer to choose the best writers from our country, they will choose Borges or Cortázar—writers that many people already know. But it is important to look at new voices as well.

This is a very representative group of the best writers producing new literature. Although I chose many women, they write very differently.

Yes, these writers have a lot of range and there are some very exciting books here. Shall we look first at Selva Almada’s Not A River first? It was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize last year and was translated by Annie McDermott.

Selva Almada is, in many ways, the writer of the river. She often sets her stories on a river landscape. This has is rooted in a very interesting tradition in Argentinian literature or literature from the River Plate, whereby othe well-known writers have taken the river as a scenario to explore a certain narrative.

Not a River is a book written by a woman, but the main characters are men. In other words, Selva shows in this novel a very masculine world. I don’t want to spoil the story, but the focus is on three big, masculine men who treat the river as if they were its owners.

The plot centres on three men on a fishing trip in a spot where, years earlier, a terrible accident took place.

In the final segment of Not a River there is a part that really shocked me. It’s not like a film trailer, not that kind of shock, but the reader will certainly be impressed by the level of suspense. There’s a revelation of something that unfolds gradually as you read the book, but of course you never realise that there is something happening in the background as you progress with the story… It is a kind of epiphany.

Shall we talk next about Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream? It was translated by Megan McDowell. Perhaps you’d talk us through it?

This book marks a change in Samanta Schweblin’s writing. Previously she was main a writer of short stories; Fever Dream is her first novel and it led her to be very well-known, especially in the international sphere. Lots of people prefer to read novels to short stories—I mean, I love short stories, but I know that most readers prefer novels. So Fever Dream marked an important change for her. It’s in the margins of science fiction or fantastic literature. Something is happening, and you don’t know if it is real or not.

Right. It’s still short for a novel—maybe a novella—and it takes the form of a dialogue at a hospital bed. It’s very unsettling. Jia Tolentino said in her New Yorker review that she “was checking the locks in my apartment by page thirty. By the time I finished the book, I couldn’t bring myself to look out the windows.”

It’s in the neighbourhood of Roald Dahl. He is very different to Samanta Schweblin, but he too created stories that felt real, but were not part of the real world.

In Spanish, the book is called Distancia de rescate. Do you know what that means?

I don’t.

It’s that distance between yourself as a parent, and your son or daughter, whereby you are still within the limits of being able to save them from a dangerous situation if need be. The main character of the book is always thinking ‘my son, he is right there. If I had to, I could run and take him out of danger just in time. But if he walks a few metres further, I will not be within the rescue distance. I will not be able to reach him in time to save him.

I know they had to change the title for English-speaking people, but it’s a wonderful idea, this concept of the possibility of rescuing your loved one.

How would you describe Schweblin’s style?

I don’t know if it has a name. For example, in the case of García Márquez you could say his very clearly under ‘magical realism’… with Samanta Schweblin, you are always reading always with el corazón en la boca—your heart in your throat.

You are constantly feeling that something is about to happen. When you start to read one of her stories and she tells you that there is a hole in the ground, and that there is also a small child, you start wondering: oh God, no, what is going to happen?  There is something like always with Samanta Schweblin. She puts together the elements and you think: oh no, what is happening here? You have to read the whole story to understand it. I like her imagination and the freedom with which she comes up with her stories.

Thank you. Let’s talk about Dolores Reyes’ Eartheater? It has been described as a synthesis of mystery and magical realism. It was translated by Julia Sanches.

This book has many interesting things that we could talk about, and not just in terms of the style of writing, but also in relation to one of its main themes: femicide. In Argentina, a woman disappears or is murdered every single day, so femicide is a very big problem. This book is about a young girl who lives in poverty on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.  Here, people work in badly-paid jobs—day jobs, nothing permanent. It is hard to survive. She lives with his brother. Their mother had been killed.

Through parapsychology, the protagonist learns that if she eats the earth or soil where a woman was standing during her last minute of being alive, she can see where the body is buried. It is like a gift. She is clairvoyant.

“This is a very representative group of the best writers producing new literature”

The novel takes a very important issue that is relevant not just for Argentina but also for many parts of the world, namely violence against women. A kind of violence ignored or belittled by some current governments or presidents. Some even claim that it is the same to kill a man or a woman. It is not the same. Reyes takes a very important matter and looks at it in a very creative way.

In the novel, there are young characters, teenagers, who talk as teenagers talk. So it’s a book that many young people love for that reason. Sadly, it was banned in Argentina, or rather, people tried to ban it, but many writers came together to protest against that. So for me, it is a very important to book to read, and also The Adventures of China Iron which is our next book.

Yes, shall we talk about Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s The Adventures of China Iron? It was translated by Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintyre.

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara has a very poetic prose. I consider her prose to be one of the best among Argentinian writers, and that’s partly why I chose this book. Another reason as to why I selected it is that our current government also tried to ban it. The reason behind this is a little difficult to explain, but it’s important to say that the inspiration for the novel came from a very important text in Argentine literary tradition, Martín Fierro by José Hernández.

Martín Fierro is like an epic poem about a man, who works in the fields in the Pampas. He is running away from the police, who want to arrest him for something he didn’t do. He is a gaucho.

Ah yes, I know what a gaucho is. It’s like a cowboy.

As he needs to run from the law, he abandons his wife and children. Cabezón Cámara takes the wife figure in Martín Fierro and puts her together with another woman, a white woman who had been a ‘cautiva’, a woman kidnapped by the Indigenous people as revenge for the white men usurping their land. The figure of the ‘cautiva’ is, by the way, also a tradition in Argentinian literature.

In the novel, the white woman is actually the wife of a British man who had come to Argentina to occupy land and make a very big estancia, like an estate. Cabezón Cámara combines these two characters, the wife of Martin Fierro and this British woman, and she makes them run away together, discover love together.

Maybe the censors in Argentina thought that it is not a good story for the younge generations, that is, to be exposed to the idea that two women can be very happy running away together. I don’t know.  I can’t understand it.

The Adventures of China Iron is indeed a book of adventures, written in beautiful prose, with extraordinary characters. It’s an interesting lens through which to rethink our country’s literary tradition, and how it must change.

We have one final book to discuss, Confession by the essayist and novelist Martín Kohan. I think it tells the story of the life of one Argentinian woman, against the backdrop of the military junta. It has been translated into English by Daniel Hahn.

The story starts in the past, before the dictatorship. A girl from a town outside Buenos Aires is in love with a young man who she sees in church. She is from a very traditional family. She calls him Rafael.

At some point, you realise that Rafael is actually Jorge Rafael Videla, who will move on to be president, in fact, the dictatorial leader responsible for one of the worst genocides in our history. I’m not sure how this revelation will translate to readers outside of Argentina, but there is a point where you realise that this nice young man will become a genocidal leader, and that he will die in jail.

Kohan takes three interesting episodes in our history. So, we read about the period when the main character is young and you realise who the young man she’s in love with really is.  During the second part, there is a failed terrorist attack by a left-wing guerilla group. And then, third, we return to the woman from the first part of the novel who now is an old woman, the grandmother of the narrator. In the last part of the novel, they confess things to each other as they play a very popular card game. In fact, they are talking about the game, but they are also talking about history, and there is a very, very important revelation in this game that changes everything you thought about the young woman in the first section.

I love they way Martín Kohan writes. And even though this story is not real, it is based on real events. The people in Argentina had to live together with this kind of horrible historical characters — they lived amongst us in society until they were finally put in jail. In the book, there are no stereotypes. Nobody is good all the time, nobody is bad all the time.

At the beginning you said that these books were all very different. They have a real range in style. But do they have anything in common, something that speaks to the Argentinian character?

Yes. As the saying goes: say, paint your town and you are painting the world. They all bring to the fore local matters, but these matters are all universal too. They all take an important part of our history or tradition. We are a society that went through a horrendous dictatorship. We are a country where a woman gets killed every single day. I didn’t mention this, but also in Samanta Schweblin’s book she talks a lot about the agrochemicals they use in the cultivos, the crops, the fields. It’s very harmful for people, makes them sick, but it makes the vegetables grow efficiently. This is also part of our reality nowadays, and other people’s realities too: marginalised people being used as a laboratory on whom to test agrochemicals.

In addition, The Adventures of China Iron talks about the tension between the conquerors and the Indigenous people who lived here. This is also part of our reality.

I could have chosen many more books, because there is actually a lot of wonderful, interesting literature being written in my country at the moment. And it is more than ever important to read them, because at this time in history we are undergoing many serious problems, as artist and writers, we are being targeted and attacked.

Claudia Piñeiro is the International Author of the Day at The London Book Fair (11-13 March, Olympia London). Find out more about The London Book Fair here.