Winner of the 2020 Mauricio Achar Award
Does evil lurk in the shadows of the forest or within the human heart? Eduardo Sangarcia's tale of one woman's trial opens the door to deeper horrors.
Anna Thalberg is a villager shunned for her red hair and provocative beauty, so when she is dragged from her home and accused of witchcraft, her neighbors do not intervene. Only Klaus, her husband, and Father Friedrich, a priest experiencing a crisis of faith, set out to Wuerzburg to prove her innocence. There, locked in a prison tower, Anna faces isolation and torture while anxiety builds over strange happenings within the city walls. Can the two men convince the Church inquisitors to release Anna, or will she burn at the stake?
The Trial of Anna Thalberg is a tale of religious persecution, superstition, and suffering during the Protestant Reformation. While mapping the medieval fear of occultism and demons, it delves into enduring human concerns: the oppression of women, the inhumanity of institutions, and the question of God's existence. Frantic in pace and experimental in form, this is an unforgettable debut from Mexican author Eduardo Sangarcia.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"A novel that can be read with great emotion and great suspense, written with impressive formal virtuosity." - Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane Season
"A marvelous work that challenges the reader on multiple levels and communicates directly with our present." - Cristina Rivera Garza, author of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize-winning Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice
"In Elizabeth Bryer's translation of Sangarcia's original Spanish, Anna's ordeal is narrated like a fever dream, pitting the hideous realities of her incarceration against the paranoid fantasies of her accusers. Tortured to "extract a truth that was not true," she offers an innocently implacable resistance that infuriates the cleric who's been tasked with gaining her confession.In Elizabeth Bryer's translation of Sangarcia's original Spanish, Anna's ordeal is narrated like a fever dream, pitting the hideous realities of her incarceration against the paranoid fantasies of her accusers. Tortured to "extract a truth that was not true," she offers an innocently implacable resistance that infuriates the cleric who's been tasked with gaining her confession." - Alida Becker, The New York Times
"Misogyny and religious conviction are vicious bedfellows in Eduardo Sangarcia's horrifying, humbling . . . inferno of a historical novel, burning through the lies told about defiant women across the centuries." - Foreword Reviews, Starred Review
"Sangarcia pulls together an astute account of Anna's trial and sheds light on how witch hunts were rooted in the hatred and suspicion of women ('little girls like you only bring misfortunes and calamities'). The prose, lyrical and scarcely punctuated, matches the plot's frenzied pace. Fans of Fernanda Melchor's Hurricane Season will love this." - Publisher's Weekly
"As bleak as it is beautiful. Sangarcia has given us a story that is breathlessly told, formally innovative, and lays bare our all-too-common tendency towards cruelty, while never foregoing his own humanity. Welcome to a new, luminous voice in literature." - Elizabeth Gonzalez James, author of The Bullet Swallower
"Eduardo Sangarcia's writing blends a sophisticated feeling for history with penetrating intuition about human consciousness to conjure elegant nightmares. One of the most attractive voices of contemporary Mexican literature." - Julian Herbert, author of Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino
"A merciless chronicle of witchcraft trials that is more than a mere testimony of the times: it is also a trial of the violence that has historically been exercised against women. With a coven of torrential voices, Eduardo Sangarcia lays bare the unreasonableness of a past that also speaks of our present." - Juan Gomez Barcena, author of Not Even the Dead
"With an audacious style, a singular use of juxtaposed dialogue, and a structure reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Eduardo Sangarcia achieves a narrative feat that keeps us hooked until the very last line. Although we know what will happen, since he has advertised it from the beginning, we believe in the unexpected, hoping for the miracle to occur. In the end, he both pleases and surprises us, just the way great literature ought to do." - Yoss, author of A Planet for Rent
"With breathless rhythm and a raging as well as plaintive tone . . . the novel builds a magnificent celebration of the feminine." - Le monde
Sprache
Verlagsort
Produkt-Hinweis
Illustrationen
Black and white original illustrations
Maße
Höhe: 182 mm
Breite: 132 mm
Dicke: 20 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-63206-373-1 (9781632063731)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Eduardo Sangarcia is the author of the short story collection El desconocido del Meno, which was awarded the prestigious Premio Nacional de Cuento Joven Comala 2017, and of the novel The Trial of Anna Thalberg, winner of the Mauricio Achar Award 2020. Sangarcia lives in Guadalajara and is studying for a Ph.D. in Humanities with a specialization on Latin American literature of the Holocaust.
Elizabeth Bryer is a translator and writer from Australia. Her translations include Maria Jose Ferrada's How to Order the Universe and How to Turn into a Bird; Claudia Salazar Jimenez's Americas Prize-winning Blood of the Dawn; and Aleksandra Lun's The Palimpsests, for which she was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. Her debut novel, From Here On, Monsters, was co-winner of the 2020 Norma K. Hemming award.
