The Herralde Prize was launched in 1983 with the goal of promoting new works of Spanish literature. Over the years, including Daniel Sada, Martin Kohan, Juan Villoro, Alan Pauls, Enrique Vila-Matas, Roberto Bolano, Sergio Pitol, and Javier Marias. (An awful lot of dudes have won this . . . ) The winning book is then published by Anagrama and the author receives and 18,000 euro advance.

Ungar’s is the author of one other novel, which is pretty interesting, but this new book sounds much more complex, ambitious, and playful:

Three White Coffins has the appearance of a bizarre thriller in which the obese, solitary, antisocial protagonist is forced to take on the identity of the leader of the opposition party and undergo unbearable adventures in order to bring down the totalitarian regime of an unnamed Latin American country.

This plot is, however, an empty structure, a skeletal apparatus within which the novel grows—wildly and unpredictably gushing forth in the protagonist’s voice. Excessive, mentally unbalanced, hilarious, the narrator uses his words to question, ridicule, and destroy reality (and reconstruct it, from zero, anew).

Accompanying him on his adventures is an idealistic bodyguard, who is addicted to adrenaline and whose voice bursts in on occasion to narrate the few scenes of violence; and a shy nurse, who ends up being the narrator’s lover and savior. Ceaselessly pursued by the terrorist regime that controls the country and by operatives from their own side, and alone against the world, the characters are finally hunted down and defeated. The two men disappear. The woman manages to escape and leaves the country.

The adventure seems to have come to a definitive end when the woman, living in exile, receives the manuscript written by the protagonist that recounts their experiences (which the reader has just read). Sad and disenchanted, and about to give birth, she reads it, believing that the two men are dead. Her reading, however, becomes a devastating critique of the characters, an assault on the previous narrative’s assumptions, and a questioning of the narrative methods employed. This frantic revision of all she has experienced helps her find, without meaning to, the resolution of the novel, which is also the resolution of her own existence.

Three White Coffins is a polyphonic text, one that is open to multiple interpretations. It can be read as a fierce satire of Latin American politics, a refined reflection on individual identity and impersonation, an exploration of the limits of friendship, an essay about the fragility of the real, or a story of impossible love. Wrapped in a thriller that is easy to open and read and full of humor, this novel is without doubt a fascinating literary game.

E.J. mentioned this earlier, but now that we actually have a physical issue in hand, I thought I’d add a bit of information.

As noted in the earlier post, this issue of Zoetrope: All-Story is dedicated to contemporary Latin American writers. All of the writers included in this issue are under 40 (born post-One Hundred Years of Solitude) and the vast majority have never been published in English translation.

From the introduction by Daniel Alarcon and Diego Trelles Paz:

The view of Latin American letters, at least in the United States, has sorely needed an update for quite some time. Magical realism has been one of Latin America’s most profitable exports for many years, operating as the prevailing commercial literary mode long after outliving its usefulness. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solidtude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), two books we would describe—without exaggeration—as perfect, served as precursors to an unfortunate string of imitatons, novels that combined a little magic, a little folklore, and a few miraculous recipes in entirely predictable formulas, creating an exotic, unrealistic, and ultimately damaging vision of Latin America. Perhaps the most dispiriting consequence of this stylistic hegemony is that so many other worthy writers have received less attention than they deserve. Giants like Jorge Luis Borges and Mario Vargas Llosa are widely celebrated, though not widely read in English—to say nothing of Juan Carlos Onetti, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, Julio Cortazar, or Manuel Puig. In this context, the recent canonization of Roberto Bolano in the United States and around the world is a truly welcome development, which we hope will lead to greater interest in not-yet-famous and emerging Latin American writers.

To that end, they included a diverse list of authors from a range of countries, including: Carolina Sanin (Colombia), Ronaldo Menendez (Cuba), Ines Bortagaray (Uruguay), Rodrigo Hasbun (Bolivia), Alejandro Zambra (Chile), the late Aura Estrada (Mexico), Slavko Zupcic (Venezuela), and several others.

A quick word about the design: Zoetrope is always beautiful, but this time they outdid themselves. The paper so supple, and I really like the inclusion of the original Spanish version of the stories in the back on blue-tinted paper. Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro was the guest designer and interspersed throughout the issue are wonderful full-color sketches from his notebook.

You can order a copy (and find out more about this issue) by visiting the

And as pointed out in the comments section by there’s a over at