Not a River
Published on 23. January 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
99 pages
978-1-913867-45-4 (ISBN)
Description
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024
Three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier. As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise. The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided?Rippling across time like the river that runs through it, Selva Almada's latest novel is the finest expression yet of her compelling style and singular vision of rural Argentina.
One of the Best Books of 2020 in Clarin and La Nacion
Shortlisted for the Mario Vargas Llosa Novel Prize
Three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier. As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise. The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided?Rippling across time like the river that runs through it, Selva Almada's latest novel is the finest expression yet of her compelling style and singular vision of rural Argentina.
One of the Best Books of 2020 in Clarin and La Nacion
Shortlisted for the Mario Vargas Llosa Novel Prize
Reviews / Votes
"Austere yet deeply humane...exhilaratingly accomplished." -The Times Literary Supplement"In this potent novella from Argentine writer Almada (Brickmakers), the killing of a stingray sets off a series of fateful events along an unnamed South American river. [...] Like a dream, this otherworldly tale lingers in the reader's mind." -Publishers Weekly
"Gripped from start to finish." -Prospect Magazine
"This allusive novel deserves its place on the 2024 International Booker shortlist." -Irish Times
"Several moments evoke Ernest Hemingway." -New Statesman
"A virtuoso literary work. [...] Flashbacks and side scenes deepen the story which curls and twines like a thrusting tropical vine through the past, roping in sisters, wives, old lovers, boyhood adventures, and jealousies." -Annie Proulx , author of THE SHIPPING NEWS
"Told with the hallucinatory atmosphere of a dream, this astonishing, stark novel doesn't turn away from the hypnotic and disturbing effects of violence. Not a River plunges us straight into the depths of its silences, bracingly so-the longer the quiet goes, the more terrible the rupture." -Manuel Munoz , author of WHAT YOU SEE IN THE DARK
"Selva Almada constructs a lyric of roughness, of few words, a lyric in which the strong, calloused hands of her characters hardly need to be described to make themselves felt. They touch you. " -Gabriela Cabezon Camara , author of THE ADVENTURES OF CHINA IRON
"Whether we are on an island or not, water is displacement, and reading this novel gently carries us through characters and places. " -Agencia Paco Urondo
"A skillfully crafted novel...Almada skilfully weaves together a vibrant and lyrical narrative." -Morning Star
"Poignant storytelling about loss and resilience." -Kirkus
"Selva Almada's voice has made its own mark on contemporary Argentinean literature, to such an extent that situating her as a writer by referring to the Southern Gothic of authors such as Faulkner, O'Connor or McCullers are superfluous. With Not a River, she establishes her own way of looking at things in order to create literature. " -Pagina/12
"Almada is not a folkloric writer, but even so, she knows how to capture the idiosyncrasy of a region. Her characters reveal, in their parsimony, a dense inner life, plagued by existential concerns. Perhaps silence and the voices of nature take the place of possible answers. " -La Nacion
"This is a narrative of great depth in which the settings (the river, fishing, the island) emerge from a very powerful poetic narration that keeps quiet more than it says aloud, that omits more than it recounts, a dreamlike voice marked by an infinite and familiar wound anchored in a dialectic between dreams and an indestructible future. " -El periodico
"In some passages of the novel, Almada seems to whisper what she is recounting rather than saying it out loud: her asymptomatic, almost invisible writing, punctuates the breathing of the sentences to create brief, beautiful images. " -El Tiempo
"It is worth asking ourselves whether, as has often been said, Selva Almada's literature has reinvented the rural imaginary of a region of our country, or whether her task is rather to point out the contrasts and contradictions of the dominant culture, in order to indirectly confront it. " -Revista Otra Parte
"Powerful and elegantly done." -Tony's Reading List
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Praise for Selva Almada
"I always read Selva Almada with devotion but NOT A RIVER is something else. I had to stand up and read it out loud in my living room. It is that good." -Samanta Schweblin.
"A major Latin American literary force." -Shelf Awareness
"Almada is forceful in her depictions of sex, violence, and rage. I feel her prose in my body: a punch in the gut, the sharpness of glass." -Chicago Review of Books
"There is a tremendous carnality to Almada's writing, vividly captured in McDermott's translation" -LA Review of Books
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Not illustrated
Dimensions
Height: 193 mm
Width: 131 mm
Thickness: 12 mm
Weight
159 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-913867-45-4 (9781913867454)
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 Classification
Persons
Compared to Carson McCullers, William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, Selva Almada (Entre Rios, Argentina, 1973) is considered one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature and one of the most influential feminist intellectuals in the region. She has published several novels, a book of short stories, a book of journalistic fiction and a film diary (written on the set of Lucrecia Martel's film Zama ). She has been finalist for the Medife Prize, the Vargas Llosa Prize for Novels, the Rodolfo Walsh Award and of Tigre Juan Award. Her debut in English was The Wind that Lays Waste (Winner of the EIBF First Book Award 2019), followed by Dead Girls (2020), Brickmakers (2021), and Not a River (winner of the IILA Prize in Italy).
Annie McDermott is the translator of a dozen books from Spanish and Portuguese, by such writers as Mario Levrero, Ariana Harwicz, Brenda Lozano, Fernanda Trias and Lidia Jorge. She was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclan for her translation of Wars of the Interior by Joseph Zarate, and her translation of Brickmakers by Selva Almada was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. In 2024 her translation of Selva Almada's novel Not a River was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. She has previously lived in Mexico City and Sao Paulo, and is now based in Hastings in the UK.
Annie McDermott is the translator of a dozen books from Spanish and Portuguese, by such writers as Mario Levrero, Ariana Harwicz, Brenda Lozano, Fernanda Trias and Lidia Jorge. She was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclan for her translation of Wars of the Interior by Joseph Zarate, and her translation of Brickmakers by Selva Almada was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. In 2024 her translation of Selva Almada's novel Not a River was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. She has previously lived in Mexico City and Sao Paulo, and is now based in Hastings in the UK.