Titles
Chicas muertas
Ladrilleros
Chicas muertas (Dead girls)
“Three girls from the countryside, murdered in the 1980s. Three unpunished murders, committed when feminicide as a term was still unknown.”
Three murder victims among hundreds, who neither suffice for the front page of the newspaper nor engage the attention of the Buenos Aires TV cameras. Three cases that are treated differently: They are announced on the radio, the newspaper shortly refers to them and someone remembers them in a conversation. Three crimes that happened in Argentina when the country celebrated the return to democracy. Three dead girls without culprits.
Having become an obsession over the years, these cases cause an unusual and unsuccessful investigation. The pure prose of Selva Almada shows the invisible in the dark. It is capable of letting the everyday forms of violence against girls and women transition into an intensive and lively plot. With this book, the author again pursues a totally new course in Latin American literature.
Spain: Literatura Mondadori, 2014
Ladrilleros (Brick makers), novel
Pájaro Tamai and Marciano Miranda, two 20-year-olds, are dying in a deserted amusement park, shortly after a knife fight. It was the culmination of an enmity that had existed since their childhood, having been bequeathed to them by their fathers.
Death is a part of Ladrilleros as are hallucinations: Marciano is visited by the ghost of his father, who was murdered when he was an adolescent and whose death he had sworn to revenge. Pájaro is also visited, as in a returning nightmare, by his abusive father who disappeared years earlier. All of this is narrated by an omniscient narrator but from the point of view of each character, a device causing narrator and character to blur. Flashbacks tell the story of the two families, a story of latent rancor. But still, love emerges between Pájaro and Ángel, the youngest of the Mirandas: a love that, inexorably, leads to death. A sort of homosexual Romeo and Juliet, Ladrilleros is set in a hostile environment, full of fight-prone, drunken men and lonely children who grow up any way they can; of passionate, violent, sexual loves.
Argentina: Mardulce, 2013; Spain: Lumen, 2014; France: Metalier; The Netherlands: Meulenhoff
