ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND FOREIGNERS
Most of the poems quoted throughout the novel are my own translations, which have now been translated into English by my translators. In other words, they are small fits of collective admiration toward their respective authors. My foreign compatriot the writer Juan Rodolfo Wilcock used to view our homeland as an immense ongoing translation. I wonder if this could be applied to all countries, including the imaginary ones.
I would like to thank Matías Chiappe, Vanina Colagiovanni, Sergio Drucaroff, Garth Greenwell, Paz Posse, José Ángel Rodrigo, Víctor Ugarte, David Unger, and Silvia Valls for their generous contributions. As well as Alexandra Carrasco, Fernando Iwasaki, Julieta Obedman, Ana Pellicer, Carolina Reoyo, Pilar Reyes, Eloy Tizón, the editorial teams at FSG and Granta, my translators Nick and Lorenza, my father, and my brother for their thorough readings. I’m thankful to my grandmother Dorita, for remembering the lost music of the word shammes. To the hibakusha double Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a stranger whom I would’ve been thrilled to meet. And to the painter Hans Thoma, for writing this variation of an ancient epitaph attributed to Martinus von Biberach:
I come from who knows where,
I don’t know who I am,
I’ll live who knows how long,
I’ll die I don’t know when,
I’m going who knows where,
I wonder why I’m happy.
—A.N.
ALSO BY ANDRÉS NEUMAN
Traveler of the Century
Talking to Ourselves
The Things We Don’t Do
How to Travel Without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrés Neuman was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1977 and grew up in Spain. He was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and was elected to the Bogotá39 list. Traveler of the Century (FSG, 2012) was the winner of the Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics’ Prize, Spain’s two most prestigious literary awards, and Talking to Ourselves (FSG, 2014) was long-listed for the Best Translated Book Award and short-listed for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Neuman has taught Latin American literature at the University of Granada. You can sign up for email updates here.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
Nick Caistor is a British translator of works in Spanish, French, and Portuguese. He lived in Argentina for a number of years, and was the BBC Latin America analyst. He has translated more than seventy works of fiction, including those of authors such as Isabel Allende, Roberto Arlt, Mario Benedetti, Julio Cortázar, María Dueñas, Fogwill, Juan Marsé, Eduardo Mendoza, Juan Carlos Onetti, and José Saramago. You can sign up for email updates here.
Lorenza Garcia was born and brought up in England. She spent her early twenties living and working in Iceland and Spain. In 1998 she graduated from Goldsmiths with a first-class honors degree in Spanish and Latin American studies. She moved to France in 2001, where she lived for seven years. Since 2006 she has translated and cotranslated more than thirty novels and works of nonfiction from the French, the Spanish, and the Icelandic. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
1. Memory Plates
2. Violet and the Carpets
3. The Size of the Island
4. Lorrie and the Scars
6. Mariela and the Interpretations
7. The Flower in the Rubble
8. Carmen and the Lesions
9. Pinedo and the Antipodes
10. Last Circle
11. And the Water
Acknowledgments and Foreigners
Also by Andrés Neuman
A Note About the Author and Translators
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2018 by Andrés Neuman
Translation copyright © 2020 by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia
All rights reserved
Originally published in Spanish in 2018 by Alfaguara, Spain, as Fractura
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2020
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71949-4
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This work has been published with a subsidy from the Ministry of Culture and Sport of Spain.