new in books

Title: The Widow (Alfaguara)

Author: Jose Saramago

In 1947, José Saramago (1922-2010) was 24 years old, he was an administrative employee of the Civil Hospitals of Lisbon and he decided to write his first novel. The manuscript, entitled La viuda, arrived at the Minerva publishing house and there they posed two conditions to publish it: they would not pay royalties and they would change the title to Terra do sin. The inexperienced author accepted. The novel went unnoticed and remained forgotten and untranslated until this year, when the Alfaguara publishing house translated it for the first time into Spanish, a few months after the centenary of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. The prologue includes Saramago's own account of the journey of his first book. The story is about María Leonor, a young widow who is left in charge of two children and a farm. Tormented by loneliness and desire for her, her life is shaken from her when she becomes involved with two men.

Price: $790

Title: The Origin of Words (Estuary)

Author: Damián González Bertolino

The first few paragraphs are shocking. A baby hangs upside down from his mother's hand, who grabs him by her ankles and hits him on the back. The scene is raw and the narrator stops to explain it, as if chewing on the story and its words. “The first memory of my life is actually a graft. When I was a year and a half old I nearly died. The story of how it happened is one of the most important events in my family.” In this autobiographical novel, Damián González Bertolino (Punta del Este, 1980) travels to his roots: childhood, his parents, the neighborhood and words, those that come from afar and evoke sensations, stories and identity. The author published the novels The Fund (2013), The Labors of Love (2015) and Herod (2018). In 2009 he won the Narrators of the Banda Oriental award with The Incredible Springer.

Price: $590

Title: Imantada (Taurus)

Author: Aldo Mazzucchelli

“This is a book that bothers, that questions and challenges the reader. In a time of dangerous fanaticism and universally accepted stories, these pages are destined to generate controversy and debate, and that is reason enough to accept the invitation to approach them”, says the back cover of this book that is subtitled: Essays on the writing, the individual and the plague. Its author has a PhD in Literature from Stanford University, and has published books on Julio Herrera and Reissig, on Uruguayan football, and one on poetry. But in the last two years, Mazzucchelli has been known both for his interventions in interviews and for his writings in the magazine Extramuros, in which he questions what he considers a dominant discourse of science and academia around the pandemic and the way to combat Covid-19. Some of those writings appear in this book.

Price: $750

Title: Cronenberg by Cronenberg (The Silver Bowl)

Author: David Cronenberg (edited by Chris Rodley)

Compilation of interviews with the Canadian filmmaker who is a master of horror, sexual rawness and the heavy. The man is one of those who take risks (Videodrome, Love Pact, A Violent Story) and film impossible novels (Naked Lunch, Crash). Anecdotes of filming, the work with the actors and the rest of the technicians parade through these pages. Like his characters, David Cronenberg opens up to the world, explains his art and his attitude towards life, always with balanced philosophical reflections. "I'm not repulsed by sex," he says. “That is why I am clear that the intimate reality of a person from the pores outward is not clearly present in his art. I am a clinician, a surgeon who claims to examine the nature of the sexual. And I do it by inventing characters that I then dissect with a cinematographic scalpel”.

Price: $990

Title: Bad Breath (Fish on Ice)

Author: Jorge Fierro

The volume is made up of seven short stories and is the first book by Jorge Fierro (Maldonado, 1987). On the back cover, Eugenia Ladra points out that the title's bad breath is a warning. And indeed, in these stories the nauseating is an announcement that something unpleasant is about to happen. That signal can come with the pungent odor of the cattle that are shipped in the port and that permeates the clothes hanging on the roof, or it can come with the musty smell of the bedroom or with that of a dead whale or with the rest of the food that It was left in a Tupperware at the bottom of the fridge. There is a narrator who lives with his girlfriend, Lucia, and between them everything goes on in apparent simplicity, until the rancid smell envelops them. So in one story an unwanted person appears, in another someone from the past dies or a relationship ends. Bad breath is often not just in the mouth.

Price: $530

Title: The book for children to learn everything wrong (Topito)

Author: Podeti

His name is Esteban Podetti, but he is known only by his signature: Podeti. He is a graphic humorist, cartoonist and writer. His stories have appeared in magazines, newspapers and books such as Yo contra el mundo or El cartoonero. He has said that his humor is black, his drawing is sloppy and his characters are horrible. They are not good credentials to make a children's book, however, this year's is a lot of fun. With the same cheekiness as always, he appeals to the intelligence of children to decipher the absurd. For example, the protagonist, Fernando, the elephant, plays with a balloon that according to the text is red, but in the drawing it is painted green, or has a clock with letters instead of numbers. "Adults who claim that children learn everything well will surely get other more appropriate books for it," he warns on the back cover so that no one is deceived.

Price: $450

Classic: Tales of Flannery O'Connor

MachoMenos, Hogue's graphic humor