Reviewed by Sam Carter
In a famous 1943 ink drawing, the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García portrayed South America through the perspective that had been used to depict North America. He called it América invertida—“Inverted America”—and, true to its title, placed the equator at the bottom of the image and the southern continent at the top. The point is simple yet powerful: there is no reason for Latin Americans to look elsewhere for aesthetic inspiration. Compass needles might be pulled inexorably toward magnetic north, but Torres-García indicates art need not orient itself in the same way. Cartography’s conventions are revealed to be contingent and even detrimental; the status quo, in his work, proves to be imbalanced—and ripe for upheaval.
Reviewed by Sam Carter
Just as “Guiding the Ivy” sets the tone in opening The Scent of Buenos Aires, the career-spanning collection of Hebe Uhart’s short stories, so does its premise undergird the author’s entire life. Uhart, who died little more than a year ago, was both generous and open-hearted on and off the page, but life never trampled or confused this legendary figure of contemporary Argentine literature. Her stories instead exhibit a clarity that emerges from roots in the everyday rather than the extraordinary, and as a result they resemble plants that are perfectly adapted to pots. They are not merely decorative: they steadily, unobtrusively oxygenate the world around them…
Reviewed by Sam Carter
True and false selves, and the complex interrelationships between the two, are everywhere to be found in Julián Fuks’ Resistance, a reflective and reflexive work in which Winnicott’s name crops up repeatedly, a cryptic influence for readers to decipher. As he depicts the frustrating and frequently frustrated process of writing a book, Sebastián, the lightly fictionalized version of Fuks serving as the narrator, examines the life of his older, adopted brother, whose name is never revealed. Even as he resists the lure of a purely psychoanalytical perspective, Sebastián does analyze the ways his brother confronts inescapable issues of truths and fictions, of true selves and false selves, as he grows up in a family that both is and is not his…
Reviewed by Sam Carter
Because any attempt at exculpation ultimately evaporates when forced to face the facts, what remains in The Desert and Its Seed is an excavation, a brushing away instead of a brushing off that seeks to uncover what Jorge Baron Biza once called “the difference between the exterior appearance of a tragedy and its interior view...”
