Stranger to the Moon

Reviews / Votes

"Rosero affirms unashamedly that literature can and should change social reality..." -- Antonio Ungar - BOMB Magazine "The translation of Good Offices (2011) is sublime. Moving from offbeat humor to soaring spritual ecstasy, it has both pathos and punch." -- Maya Jaggi - The Guardian "The Armies is a disturbing allegory of life during wartime, in which little appears to happen while at the same time entire lives and worlds collapse." -- (London) Times "Throughout, Rosero's prose, translated with lyricism by McLean, conveys the characters' horrifying human nature with aplomb (on the clothed: "they arrive sometimes like a fantastic whirlwind, whooping with excitement, and at other times with heads bowed, as if already repenting of the great error they wish to commit"). Disturbing and powerful, this one is hard to forget." -- Publishers Weekly "Recalling the work of Kafka and de Sade, a nightmarish fable explores timeless questions about violence and subjugation, power and freedom...Rosero packs great depth within a brief novel through brisk chapters that can change tone as the ambivalent narrator wavers among resentment, anger, and defeat. Though the world of this story is bleak-sometimes almost unbearably so-the narrator's soliloquies on agency in the midst of captivity and degradation are timeless, haunting, and extremely powerful. A profound work of dark and brutal truth." -- Kirkus (starred review) "This is a hallucinatory read, brief and bizarre, and yet the murky boundaries, pathological masochism, and fascistic pull toward brutality it depicts tap into a frighteningly familiar human need to destroy-one we've seen reflected in the political realities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries." -- Rhian Sasseen - The Paris Review "Disobedience is possible, though it's a cruel truth that the only record of it lies in the graveyard. A counterrevolutionary force seems to have coalesced and quashed any sign of resistance. The novella, from this angle, is an account of a reactionary coalition's long stay in power, one so protracted and deep that the oppressors are completely entangled with and dependent upon those they afflict." -- Matt Weir - The Review of Uncontemporary Fiction "Rosero takes the absurd kernel of a character living in a wardrobe and imagines a surrounding world to explain it, sketching boundaries with the rigorous inner logic of a dream. Counterintuitive as it might seem, in Rosero's hands the novella...proves, in this case, to be the ideal world-building vehicle. Sly manipulation of tense allows 87 pages to do the work of a book three times in length, yet efficiency is no end in itself." -- William Repass - Full Stop