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Author: Fernanda Trías

Translator: Heather Cleary

Publisher:

Publication Year (Original Text): 2020

Page Count: 220

Goodreads Rating: 3.66 with 3,532 ratings and 740 reviews

Notable Amazon Sales Ranking: #858 in��Horror Short Stories (??—not short stories, or horror? OK . . .)

Publisher Description: In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford—a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships: with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows—even if staying means being left behind.

An evocative elegy for a safe, clean world,��Pink Slime��is buoyed by humor and its narrator’s resiliency. This unforgettable novel explores the place where love, responsibility, and self-preservation converge, and the beauty and fragility of our most intimate relationships.

Previous Familiarity:��I was convinced—until five minutes ago—that I had met Trías at the Chautauqua Institution last summer as part of an event on climate change with Andri Snær Magnason. I did not. I met , whose book,����was translated from the Spanish and published by Charco. I mean, that’s sort of close-ish?

Translator: Heather Cleary! I met Heather when she was just getting started at an event we did for Macedonio Fernández’s��.��She’s done three Sergio Chejfec (R.I.P.) titles for us:��,��, and��.��(My god these three books are so good. Chejfec was special and deserves a rediscovery of sorts.) She’s incredibly gifted and always chooses interesting projects.

My Reading: Very anxious book that reads like a warning about future climate catastrophes and how these events will wreak havoc on social structures. I joked above about how this book isn’t��really��horror (at least not to me), but the “red fog” that rolls in and sets this whole climate disaster in motion flays the skin off people who encounter it, which is both gross and, yes, horrifying. Most interesting to me though is the “pink slime” of the title—a strange, affordable foodstuff that everyone survives on—is so so similar to the food served in the Institute in��Lanark. (In Lanark, the gross foodstuff is made from humans. Horrifying!)

Reflections on Style:��Pretty direct and evocative. “When the fog rolled in, the port turned into a swamp. Shadows fell across the plaza, filtering between the trees and leaving the long marks of their fingers on all they touched. Under each unbroken surface, mold cleaved silent through wood, rust bored into metal. Everything was rotting.” There are little zen-like, unattributed conversations (presumably between our narrator and her ex, Max) that add a bit of levity:

Once upon a time.

There was what?

Once upon a time there was a time.

That never was?

That never again.

The book is pretty bleak—a situation only reinforced by the audiobook narrator, Frankie Corzo—whose voice and cadence is��so��serious. Pink Slime is really interesting, but after this and��Woodworm, I’m dying for a book that I’d find more enjoyable and maybe a little silly—translations don’t have to be so medicinal!

Any Big Reviews?: In the��New York Times, where Lydia Millet (one of my favorite authors) says:

On either side of the caregiving woman stands a damaged and damaging male, one with power and one without. Yet inertia, too, is at the root of her paralysis — she cannot leave, she confesses, because she’s unable to imagine a life untethered to her anchors. Only the absence of these tragic boy-men may allow her to have some agency at last.

Will It Be Discussed in Five Years: I’m really curious as to how these sorts of books will fare if we have more and more environmental disasters. Will these be of interest as things fall apart, or are they best enjoyed as warnings of what��could��come to pass?

What Authors/Books Does the Publisher Compare This To: None, actually. But three of the blurbs are from authors you could group together with Trías: Mariana Enríquez, Guadalupe Nettel, and Jazmina Barrera.

Any Books You Would Recommend for Fans of��Pink Slime: by Agustina Bazterrica &��Sarah Moses, and����by Alasdair Gray.

Will it Win: My sense of things—from Winter in Sokcho��through��The Words that Remain—is that short, localized, slightly strange fiction does really well for the National Book Award. And this book has those qualities! Still haven’t read enough of these to make an informed prediction, but I’ll put this at 15% for the time being.

Your Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

by Rodrigo Hasbún, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (Bolivia, Simon & Schuster)

There is a lot to be said for subtlety, the quiet ability to tackle the heavy issues—family, history, politics—with a restraint that conveys deep emotion without being heavy handed. Affections, Rodrigo Hasbún’s first novel to be translated into English is a breathtaking example of this.

Affections, translated by Sophie Hughes, begins with the Ertl family, newly arrived in Bolivia from Germany after World War II. The father, Hans, an ex-cameraman for the Third Reich, is fixated on finding Bolivia’s lost city of Paitití. I suspected, of course, that the novel would follow the patriarch as he went on a quixotic journey into the jungle, a little madness and malaria, perhaps a lost treasure. However Hasbún is not that type of writer and Affections is not that type of book. Instead, a series of short vignettes, narrated mostly by Hans’ daughters, comprises most of the novel. Before you know it a decade has passed, the daughters are young women and Monika, the eldest, has become a Marxist guerrilla.

In many ways Affections is a book about what doesn’t happen, or what happens between the pages, hidden among lost chapters that the reader is asked to fill in. A quiet book that takes so many unexpected turns, so many amazing shifts it begs to be read more than once, not just for the wonderful language (and Hughes’s skillful translation) but to see if you have perhaps missed something.

I found this book so deft and cryptic, so unexpected and light. Affections is an exercise in restraint (the book and the translation). It deals with family and revolution without once hitting a cliché. In fact, this book is a book that refuses any simple answers. This seems a year of loud and maximalist books, which is great, but this quiet gem should be read and revisited and cherished for the story as well as the execution.