Affections

Reviews / Votes

This is one of those books that you can immediately see as a film... It's strangely moving. * Evening Standard * A Bolivian novelist explores the inner lives of a real exiled Nazi and his Marxist assassin daughter... intriguing * Financial Times * A finely atmospheric book... admirably translated... written with... elegance and understanding -- Allan Massie * The Scotsman * Beautifully translated by Sophie Hughes, Affections is a richly atmospheric and evocative portrait of fractured familial bonds that takes the reader into the darkness where the protagonists dwell * The National * A coming-of-age story with a hand grenade at its heart * National Geographic * Lyrical and starkly realistic * The Lady * A one-sitting tale of fragmented relationships with a broad scope, delivered with grace and power * Kirkus Reviews (starred review) * Hasbun's novel takes you through the textured and colourful world of the Ertl family in Bolivia during the '50s and '60s. This is a book that can be read in one sitting or savoured over time, but either way, it should be read. The stories of each member of the family are as engrossing as the next -- Emma Roberts * Refinery29 * Rough yet vivid, like a drypoint etching... in quick, pointillist chapters that span 1955 and 2000 and rotate among the perspectives of Monika, her sisters and her lovers, the book relates the implausible fortunes of the Ertl clan, whose experiences on the opposite fringes of revolutionary politics curl over each other, like a scroll * Wall Street Journal * Striking... Hasbun's anti-expository prose is very effective... Hasbun offers a suggestive rendering of a certain potent artistic drive that is often incompatible with fatherhood, notwithstanding Hans's talent for reinvention * New York Times Book Review * Hasbun has crafted an intriguing tale that ably bridges a pair of indelible historical moments. Lots of novels plumb the intersection of the personal and the political, but few have this kind of intellectual heft and emotional subtlety * World Literature in Review * A novel to savor for its richness and grace and its historical and political scope * Booklist * A fascinating novel of family and revolution * Largehearted Boy (blog) * It's taut, it's a little strange... but it says a lot * Bookbag * What makes this book such a first-class work is the complexity of the relationships * The Modern Novel * An elegantly put together family chronicle and beautifully translated... Fascinating and a pleasure to read * A Fiction Habit (blog) * [Rodrigo Hasbun] weaves a disparate narrative, that highlights different moments in the lives of all members of this family * Word by Word * He is not a good writer, thank goodness. He is a great one * Jonathan Safran Foer * A splendid short novel * El mundo * The conciseness of the prose... suggests much more than the story itself tells * Babelia * Rodrigo Hasbun's writing has a strange power * El Pais * Dark, deep, disturbing. No concessions, no sweeteners: here everything hurts. Through this ably crafted family saga, Hasbun manages to explore the permanent conflicts and contradictions of a whole nation. -- Andres Neuman In Affections, a family elegy is woven into an epitaph for the radical politics of South America and the result is an act of literary hypnosis you won't soon forget * Adam Haslett * Affections is charged by a bright kaleidoscope of perspectives, the voices of exiles, a post-war German family in Bolivia. The father's past, a centrifugal pulse, propels the outward direction of Hasbun's dark, stunning novel. Hasten has spun a tale of displacement, of political turmoil, in which the characters' motives are as complicated as the Bolivian jungle they explore. The reader's journey through this novel, like its characters', feels both actual and impossible. It's a fascinating book * Lynne Tillman *