A fantastical story where the protagonist is caught between reality and the feverish inventions of his mind by a groundbreaking female novelist of Argentina’s metaphysical tradition.
Available for the first time in English, this classic of Latin American literature features a foreword by Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Alberto Paradella, a divorced lawyer, journalist, and writer who is thirty-two years old, wakes up one morning in Buenos Aires next to a blonde woman who insists her name is Alicia Martínez and wears a necklace identical to one he saw on another woman’s neck in Berlin. Originally written during Argentina's Dirty War, this story is set in Buenos Aires in the 1970s but shifts to Milan, Berlin, and Vienna. The narrator, a castaway of sorts, travels aimlessly between countries but also between past and present, waking life and dreams, truth and lies.
Isolated in his study, Alberto pretends to write a novel to escape from himself and those around him. As betrayals are exposed, his life begins to fall apart. His journey—physical and psychological—unfolds like a dream. Specific characters like the mysterious woman appear, but the boundaries between memory, fantasy, and reality blur. This “adventure of the philosophical imagination” as Bioy Casares describes the book in his foreword, leads us to question, like all great fiction: What is real?
Collected in
Women in Translation
Jessica Sequeira is a writer and literary translator. She is the author of the novel A Furious Oyster, the story collection Rhombus and Oval, the essay collection Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age and the hybrid work A Luminous History of the Palm. She has translated over twenty books by Latin American authors, and in 2019 was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán for her translation of Sara Gallardo’s Land of Smoke. She lives in Santiago, Chile and Cambridge, England.
VLADY KOCIANCICH (1941-2022) was a writer, literary critic, and translator. Alberto Manguel includes her in “that prestigious and select group of essential Argentine writers kept secret.” While Borges taught her to read, Bioy Casares taught her to write, yet her genealogy and approach to the fantastic are uniquely her own. Her influences range from H. G. Wells to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Julio Cortázar. She is the author of over a dozen books, including the novels The Eighth Wonder (1982), The Last Days of William Shakespeare (1984), and El templo de las mujeres (1996); the short story collections Coraje (1971), Cuando leas esta carta (1998), and La ronda de los jinetes muertos (1996, finalist for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 2007); and the essay collection La raza de los nerviosos (2006). Her translations into Spanish include Joseph Conrad’s The End of the Tether. She also taught at the Complutense University of Madrid, and regularly contributed to the newspapers La Nación and Clarín. She won awards including the City of Buenos Aires Short Story Prize, the Torrente Ballester Prize, two Konex Foundation and Fondo Nacional de las Artes Jorge Luis Borges Prizes, and the Esteban Echeverría Trajectory Prize.
