Chilco: A Novel

Chilco is the name of Pascale's home island. It is also the Mapudungun word for fuchsia: a word that evokes tropical lushness and the deep greenness of the forest. Pascale's partner, Marina, grew up in the vertical slums of Capital City, a place scarred by centuries of colonialism and now the ravages of feckless developers. Every day the couple fear a sinkhole will open up and take with it another poor neighborhood, another raft of refugees from the hinterlands: the indigenous, the poor, who are toiling for an all-consuming machine that is devouring the earth from beneath their feet. When they finally flee the collapsing city to live in Chilco, are they escaping centuries of colonial repression or merely stepping into a twisted new version of it? From her first days in this place Marina can't avoid the feeling that everything is decaying around her-there is a smell of putrefaction in the air that no one except her can detect; there are seismic rifts that the political cruelties of the times have opened up in her own relationship with Pascale; and she is haunted by insistent memories of her past. In this baroque, tropical jeremiad, the wounds of capitalism and empire inflict themselves on the person and on the land, but linger most devastatingly in language and memory. Indigenous Mapudungun and Quechua words, history, and cosmology form the chorus to this tropical fever dream of life, love, death, and friendship.

About the Author :
Daniela Catrileo is a writer, artist, activist, and professor of philosophy. She is a member of the Colectivo Mapuche Rangiñtulewfü and part of the editorial team for Yene, a digital magazine featuring art, writing, and critical thought from across Wallmapu and the Mapuche diaspora. She has published two collections of poetry: Río herido (2016) and Guerra florida (2018); two chapbooks: El territorio del viaje (2017, 2022) and Las aguas dejaron de unirse a otras aguas (2020); and a book of short stories: Piñen (2019). Jacob Edelstein is a translator from the South Bay of Los Angeles, California. He earned an MFA in literary translation from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and holds a certificate from the Taos Institute. His translation of Patrimonio by Santiago Arau was published last year, and his translations of Monserrat Sepúlveda's ¡Hasta mi mama! and Daniela Catrileo's Piñen are forthcoming in 2025.

Review :
"If the imposition of new ecologies was integral to the European colonization of the Americas, any process of resistance and decolonization must be ecological, too. It's in poetry and fiction that the imagination for such a thing could take root--and Catrileo understands this well. Chilco's imagistic and documentary structure, its radical mixture of poetry and fiction, is held together by the novel's emphasis on the ecology of the island . . . For her and her characters, it's not the future that flashes tantalizingly on the horizon, but the possibility of truly going home." --Caroline Tracey, The New Republic "Complex, lyrical and poetic . . . Catrileo accomplishes so much in fewer than 300 pages . . . Edelstein's translation handles this language play well . . . The prose alone makes it a must-read.." --Tanya Shirazi Galvez, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "Impressive . . . Catrileo keeps the novel afloat with razor-sharp observations on the city's exploitive colonial history and staggering decay. It's a rewarding story of chosen family." --Publishers Weekly "[E]ach chapter is a miniature mosaic . . . Chilco is a spellbinding fever-dream, swirling with socio-political conversations, mysteries, and self-reclamations . . . Daniela Catrileo and Jacob Edelstein may have just offered the literary canon an end-of-the-world, post-capitalism, post-empire survival manual it did not necessarily expect but so desperately needs." --Nicole Yurcaba, Southern Review of Books