Author(s): Sylvia Molloy; Jennifer Croft (Translator)

Novel | Translated fiction | Argentina | Charco Press

Almost every day, the narrator visits ML., a close friend who is now suffering from Alzheimer’s. Based on these encounters and ML.’s fragments of memory, she constructs a powerfully moving tale about the breakdown of a mind that progressively erases everything in a very peculiar way.

An attempt through writing to ‘make a relation endure despite the ruin, to hold up even if only a few words remain’. ‘How does someone who can’t remember say ‘I’?’ asks the narrator, considering this woman who shows her around the house as if she were visiting for the first time, or who is unable to say she feels dizzy, yet is perfectly capable of translating into English a message saying that she feels dizzy.

Passages from a shared past and present that are transformed into fiction when faced with a forgetting that can no longer refute them. A book that opposes disintegration with a precise and vital prose and the unique sensibility of one of Latin America’s greatest storytellers.

"Argentine novelist and critic Molloy examines the nature and significance of memory in her gleaming English-language fiction debut. . . . A graceful study of memory, identity, and relationships, this is one to cherish." -Publishers Weekly, starred review

"A masterclass in writing, with a brevity and clarity which is both rare and welcome, and firmly situates Molloy as an outstanding talent." -The Skinny

Author Biography:

Sylvia Molloy (Buenos Aires, 1938-2022) was a novelist, essayist, and a leading literary critic of Latin American literature. She was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities Emerita at New York University, where she taught Latin American and comparative literatures. In 2007, at New York University, she created the MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish, which was the first programme of its kind in the United States. She was the author of two novels: En comun olvido (Shared Oblivion, 2002) and En breve carcel (Soon Jail, 1981), and had written several books of short prose including: Varia imaginacion (Varied Imagination, 2003), Citas de lectura (Reading Dates, 2017), Vivir entre lenguas (Living Between Languages, 2016) and Dislocations, originally entitled Desarticulaciones (2010). Her critical work includes At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America (1991), and Hispanisms and Homosexualities (1998). She was a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Dislocations is her first book of fiction to appear in English.

Jennifer Croft won the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for _Homesick _and the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's _Flights. _She has also translated Federico Falco's A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula's August, Pedro Mairal's The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk's _The Books of Jacob. _She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa.