Smoke

FINALIST FOR THE CERCADOR PRIZE! What happens to a country and its people after 35 years of terror? The author of Poso Wells and Family Album explores the aftermath of a dictatorship in this gothic family saga. "Gabriela Alemn has written a terrible and beautiful story about the delicate borders between what is known and what is invented, and about the places where intimate tragedy and the tragedies of history intersect. Her characters may appear to traverse a kind of voyage back to the origin, but in fact they are seeking their own path to survive in monstrous times."-Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World After 19 years, a woman named Gabriela returns to the Paraguayan capital of Asuncin to visit what's left of a family and a home that once provided her with refuge. Andrei, the family patriarch, now deceased, has left her his journal. Gabriela sequesters herself in the library to slowly read through it. The unanswered, and sometimes forbidden questions haunting that home filled with memories are made palpable: What secrets must be kept in order to survive? And for how long? Alemn situates the present in an eerie, dreamlike atmosphere saturated by a sense of foreboding. In alternating chapters, the past is revealed as an impossible puzzle, riddled with ellipses and gaps. As characters from the past begin to show up in the present, the novel comes to a close as Gabriela learns the family's hidden story, set against the backdrop of the country's troubled history.

About the Author :
Gabriela Alemn is the author of ten books, including the novels Poso Wells (City Lights, 2018) and the short story collection Family Album (City Lights, 2022). An author of critical essays on literature and film, she is a founding member of the publishing house El Fakir Editores, based in Ecuador. At Tulane University, she developed the Latin American Writers Series, a digital archive of contemporary Latin American Literature. She currently lives in Quito, Ecuador. Dick Cluster has been translating Spanish prose and poetry for twenty-five years, including five previous books for City Lights. He is both editor and translator of the anthology Kill the mpaya: The Best Latin American Baseball Fiction. His original writing includes a detective novel series and several nonfiction books, most recently The History of Havana, a social history of the Cuban capital. He lives in Oakland, California.

Review :
"Alemán offers an illuminating story of the military dictatorship in Paraguay. . . . and the complex role played by its civilians. Fans of A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende will find much to admire."—Publishers Weekly "Smoke is a truly remarkable piece of storytelling. In this compellingly meticulous narrative, Gabriela Alemán guides her characters to a suspenseful reckoning with their unreconciled histories in the South American backwater of Paraguay. In passages that alternate between the relentlessly vivid and claustrophobically dreamlike past and present, Alemán delivers a contemplation on human nature and historical memory that is as unsettling as it is unforgettable."—Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life "Alemán writes a uniquely Paraguayan magic realism that recasts the genre and echoes the country's tragic and tragicomic history. This is a beautifully written, haunting, and unsettling novel that lays bare the impossibility of disentangling personal and national stories."—Siân Rees, author of The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and Its Cargo of Female Convicts "Thrilling . . . with the Chaco War (1932-1935) between Bolivia and Paraguay as a backdrop, Gabriela Alemán weaves a rich and intense plot in which two generations fight against the violence of political power and nature."—Horacio Castellanos Moya, author of Senselessness "Smoke captures the essence of our continent: the tenacity and audacity of immigrants, their nostalgia for the world they left behind, the betrayals, humiliations, and entanglements that always arise between those who are newly arrived and those who were already there. In this novel, through prose that is precise and often painful, Gabriela Alemán constructs a fascinating mirror in which we must surely recognize ourselves."—Guadalupe Nettel, author of Still Born "The best Paraguayan novel since Roa Bastos' I the Supreme."—El País