Liliana Colanzi, Our Dead World, Dalkey Archive Press, Trans. by Jessica Sequiera, 2017.
A young woman suffers a mental breakdown because of her repressive and religious mother. A group of children is fascinated by the sudden death of a friend. A drug trafficking couple visits Paris at the same time as a psychopathic cannibal. A mysterious wave travels through a university campus, driving students to suicide. A photographer witnesses a family’s surface composure shatter during a portrait session. A worker on Mars sees ghostly animals in the desert and longs for an impossible return to Earth. A plastic surgeon botches an operation and hides on a sugar cane plantation where indigenous slavery is practiced.
Horror and the fantastic mark the unstable realism of Our Dead World, in which altered states of consciousness, marginalized peoples, animal bodies, and tensions between tradition and modernity are recurring themes. Liliana Colanzi’s stories explore those moments when the civilized voice of the ego gives way to the buzzing of the subconscious, and repressed indigenous history destabilizes the colonial legacy still present in contemporary Latin America.
The real and the unreal merge in this latest collection by a young Bolivian writer.
A young girl discovers that a schoolmate has died of an asthma attack. “The funeral is at seven,” her mother says, instructing Elsa, the family’s nanny/maid, to have the girl ready by then. “Elsa, I asked as she braided my hair, where do the dead go? The dead never go, she answered me, her mouth full of bobby pins.” At the funeral, the girl and her classmates gather before the coffin. Then, suddenly, “the hall, people, coffin, flowers, our own astonished bodies, everything levitated in a single iridescent shaft of light.” So ends “Alfredito,” the second story in Colanzi’s (Permanent Vacation, 2010) latest book. It’s a telling moment in what is anything but a conventional collection of stories. In “Cannibal,” a man waits for his drug-trafficking girlfriend in a Paris bar. In “Story with Bird,” a disgraced surgeon hides out on a country estate run by slave labor. In story after story, the everyday ends up merging, one way or another—by sloping gently or by veering suddenly—with the otherworldly or the absurd or the untethered or some combination of these. There is no way to predict what is coming. As soon as you’ve found a foothold in Colanzi’s world, her rules of engagement will suddenly shift. “Our Dead World” ends in a line of verse; neither that story nor “Story with Bird” ends with a period, never mind a complete sentence. “Family Portrait” shifts rapidly between various points of view. Colanzi is an original talent with an utterly unique vision. Still, this slim collection doesn’t entirely satisfy. Colanzi might strip the rug out from beneath your feet, but then she seems to falter. So what, you might wonder. What comes next? Maybe her next book will satisfy more fully.
An unpredictable, formally inventive collection of stories still leaves something wanting. - Kirkus Reviews
The eight short-yet-powerful stories that make up this collection reveal an intriguing new voice in translated fiction, in general, and speculative fiction, in particular. Each piece is unnerving in its own unique way, whether it deals with a lonely colony on Mars, a a psychopathic cannibal in Paris, or a girl pushed into a nervous breakdown by her fanatical mother. And while some of these stories skirt the boundaries of “speculative fiction,” they all hold up a warped mirror to reality, inviting us to question how we perceive that very reality every day.
One main theme running through Our Dead World is the collision between the natural/ordinary and the unnatural/bizarre/unexplained. A colonist on Mars sees deer running past, a group of children experience the shock of a friend’s death, a young boy may or may not have been taken by aliens with the coming of a meteorite, a girl senses a strange “wave” that drives people to commit suicide. Colanzi’s narrative voice is perfectly poised and unapologetically mischievous, refusing to let the reader guess what twists and turns may lie ahead.
Of these eight stories, my favorites have to be “Meteorite” and “Our Dead World.” The former opens with a brilliant paragraph reminiscent of the start of Wells’s The War of the Worlds:
The meteoroid traced the same orbit in the solar system for fifteen million years until the movement of a comet pushed it toward Earth. Even so, it took another twenty thousand more years before it collided with the planet, during which time the world passed through an ice age, mountains shifted and the waves gave landmasses a new shape. Innumerable life forms died out forever, while others battled ferociously, adapted and repopulated Earth. When the object at last entered the atmosphere, the pressure of the shock reduced it to an explosion of blazing fragments that were consumed before they hit the ground. The essence of the meteorite survived the violent disintegration; the igneous ball, a meter and a half in diameter, fell on the outskirts of San Borja. Its spectacular descent from the heavens was witnessed by a couple at home, arguing at five-thirty in the morning.” (39)
The narrative lens zooms us in toward this arguing couple along the same trajectory as the meteorite, as if we readers are the meteorite, falling to Earth an an incredible speed toward a specific point. Once it “collides” with the Earth, though, the narrative speed slows down drastically, as we jump into the mind of one man (Ruddy) whose insomnia and hyperactivity, caused by diet pills, are making him irritable and paranoid. Soon we learn about the young boy who had only recently begun working at Ruddy’s farm and was seriously injured. The boy’s earlier comments about fire coming out of the sky and his own “gifts” take on a whole new meaning once the meteorite hits and the boy disappears.
In “Our Dead World,” a woman fleeing from painful memories on Earth begins seeing visions while helping set up a colony on Mars. After one colonist commits suicide, she starts to understand just how alone she and her colleagues really are. Woven in with her thoughts about the mission are the woman’s memories of her pregnancy and painful breakup back home. Hope and despair intertwine in this piece and leave the reader with more questions than answers. - Rachel Cordasco
On her Twitter feed Liliana Colanzi describes herself as a paranormal investigator. If when reading that you think of someone wearing a grey jumpsuit who tears around New York in pursuit of supernatural ghouls well then sorry you are in for a disappointment. Liliana Colanzi’s stories are much more subtle and have far more substance than that.
The first story in the collection “The Eye” sets the tone. The main character is a teenage girl who must endure the attention of her overly religious mother. Try as she might her mother’s presence hovers over her life. She conforms with the expectations forced upon her. Meanwhile her university professor tells her to learn to disobey. Her rebellion comes in the form of an act of defilement with a fellow student who had previously rejected her.
Something moves beneath the surface of each of these stories. Something which is not quite tangible but which for the protagonist, deeply disturbing. An unknown, unseen, force which transcends both time and space and moves the story toward its inevitable conclusion.
In “Cannibal” a couple trafficking drugs arrive in Paris the same time that a cannibal is loose in the city. The young woman, Vanessa, goes missing and the unnamed narrator is left worrying about her fate. Based on past experiences he imagines what Vanessa is up to and her inevitable fate. In the process, he reveals a secret from his own past. Meanwhile reports on the news continually run stories of the cannibal on the loose in Paris.
Undoubtedly these stories are South American in character. Native culture interacts with the cosmopolitan 21st century and is denigrated without its influence being clearly acknowledged.
“The Wave” relates the story of a young woman from Bolivia who’s studying in Cornell University. Her mother phones with the news that her father, now ill, has fallen and injured himself. The woman begins her journey back to Santa Cruz the city to which she said she’d never return. The Wave in question is a rather disturbing force which moves relentlessly through the World leaving malevolence in its wake.
“From my porch I could see the Wave embracing the city with its long pale arms. The whiteness refracted all visions, amplifying the voices of the dead and the tracks of deer migrating toward the false safety of the forest.”
Any Cop?: The unknown, the mysterious, the other is present in each of the stories in this collection. This collection is hard to categorise, not quite magical realism it transcends both realism and fantasy. Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi has an utterly unique voice, and one which is destined for further success. - bookmunch.wordpress.com/
It’s time for my first Latin American choice of this Spanish Lit Month: a collection of short stories by the young Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi, published by Dalkey Archive in a smart translation by Jessica Sequeira. These stories inhabit a place where the line between the real and the supernatural stretches thin; they’re animated by the existential tension that this implies.
In ‘Meterorite’, ranch owner Ruddy has trouble sleeping, a side-effect of his weight loss pills. He has plenty to occupy his mind, too – not least paying off the mother of the peasant boy he took on, who was then kicked in the head by a cow that Ruddy had shot. The boy’s mother said he could “speak with higher beings”; in the days before his injury, the boy had declared that “a fire would appear in the sky to take him away”. Superstitious nonsense, thinks Ruddy – yet, on the night of this story, he believes that he sees the kitchen door move by itself; and there is the meteoroid, burning up in the sky after travelling here for thousands of years. Ruddy is so worked up that it hardly matters to him whether there’s some supernatural agency at work – nor does it matter to the story, which builds up like a storm, then breaks with dread and fury.
Colanzi’s stories tiptoe back and forth across the line between real and supernatural, merrily smudging it at times. ‘Alfredito’ revolves around the death of the narrator’s schoolfriend. The whole concept of Alfredito being dead feels profoundly wrong to her:
And now I had to get used to the monstrous idea of Alfredito’s dead body, prepared to occupy its place in the cemetery, where it would begin its slow journey to putrefaction. Alfredito, I realized, was no longer the boy running in the countryside with arms outstretched, but was now something else. Would his parents be afraid of his body? Would they be able to touch it, to kiss it?
“The dead never leave,” says the narrator’s nana; and, throughout the story, Alfredito’s death is never presented as completely final, because the narrator won’t countenance it. We are introduced to a whole cast of friends and family, enough for a novel, in the space of a few pages. This narrative density gives the tale a heightened energy that carries the reader along, and might even allow an impossible door to open…
In ‘Cannibal’, a couple arrive in Paris to the news that a notorious cannibal is also present in the city, somewhere. The pair are here for an illicit liaison; but first one of them, Vanessa, has some drugs to take to a party. The entire story is told from the viewpoint of Vanessa’s lover, who stays in the hotel, thoughts churning around in his mind. His fears over what might happen to Vanessa fold back into his anxieties about their relationship, and he becomes effectively a cannibal of his own thoughts. This story won the Aura Estrada Prize in 2015, and it’s not hard to see why.
The title story of Our Dead World seems to me to tie the collection together. Its protagonist, Mirka, has taken a lifetime contract with the Martian Lottery, working on the colony for the next round of inhabitants. She has left behind her partner Tommy, but their old life won’t let go of her so easily. Neither will Earth itself: she keeps hallucinating the presence of deer and other animals on Mars. In this story, you have the mingling of real and supernatural; prose woven into a dense tapestry (dialogue between Mirka and Tommy is embedded within the Mars-set text); and a concern with human emotions (the title ‘Our Dead World’ could refer as easily to Mirka’s relationship with Tommy as to Earth or Mars).
I’ve enjoyed reading Colanzi’s stories in this collection, and I hope there will be more to come in English translation. -
For a time, while living in New York in my twenties, Carl Jung’s Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies was consistent livre de chevet. The symbolic value that Jung assigned UFO’s in his relatively straightforward historical record of mysterious things seen in the sky held a complicated double significance for me. Weekends as a child spent camping at Table Rock Lake in Missouri, a place marked by urban legend as a notorious hotbed of UFO activity, primed me to take pleasure in fantasizing about the terrible sublimity of the potential of intelligent alien life. It was a heady combination of beauty and fear, contemplated while trembling inside a flashlight-illuminated tent.
EYE: “Loss of the eye or loss of sight can lead to something healing or creative, to the opening of clairvoyance, to the ‘third eye’ of ‘inner sight,’ transpersonal awareness,” writes Bruce Marshall in The Human Body: The Eye, Window to the World. But in Lilana Colanzi’s story “The Eye,” in which a young woman emotionally abused by her religious mother a la Carrie forces herself to vomit an eyeball into a toilet, the new vision the eye portends seems anything but a gift. “She used her fingers to spit up a bitter liquid that burned her throat, but relief was some time in coming. From the toilet bowl, emerging in the middle of a bubble of vomit, she saw it appear. The Eye. It was missing an eyelid, but in the dark blue iris the girl recognizes the gaze – mocking? threatening? – of her mother. The Eye – was it possible? – smiled.” She thinks The Eye is an omen for something, or a signal. Perhaps for the end of the world. Later on she almost has a sexual encounter with a boy in a movie theater that is instead interrupted by a spiritual awakening. She has opened herself up to the enemy and finally understands her purpose, which is mixed up with a homegrown eschatology: “The Eye had disappeared, and in her bones the girl could feel the crackle of the first balls of fire setting off towards Earth. She had begun.”
A second and more immediate meaning for an almost devotional reading of the book came from my having recently returned from military service, which included two deployments to Iraq. Jung argues that what the historical phenomenon of UFO sightings portend is an act of cosmic synchronicity. People see saucers, or flying golden discs, or “chariots of the gods” when there’s some kind of vast, incomprehensible harmony between inner and outer states. A sign of synchronicity. Simultaneously, Jung wrote, they also symbolize the collective advancement through a liminal state and into a new world. He took the modern infatuation with UFOs as a symptom of our moving together into the Age of Aquarius (his words, not mine). And so for a year or so Jung’s little book on UFOs sat on my nightstand, the odd and optimistic symbol of my own passage into what I hoped would be a brand new world of civilian identity. A personal jubilee in which a radical rebalancing of force and energy would be achieved.
METEORITE: Colanzi’s story “Meteorite” is about a flabby, diet-pill addicted rancher who is confronted by the strange energies of both alien life and his peasant workers. A comet portends the strange events — which include spectral invaders and death —- at the beginning, as it did for the three wise men, Julius Caesar, the Norman invasion, and Montezuma. “The meteoroid traced the same orbit in the solar system for fifteen million years until the movement of a comet pushed it towards Earth. Even so, it took another twenty thousand more years before it collided with this planet, during which time the world passed through an ice age, mountains shifted and the waves gave landmasses a new shape. Innumerable life forms died out forever, while others battled ferociously, adapted, and repopulated Earth. When the object at least entered the atmosphere, the pressure of the shock reduced it to an explosion of flaming fragments that were consumed before they hit the ground.” And then a boy dies after a cow kicks him. Or aliens abduct him.
Lilana Colanzi’s collection of short stories, Our Dead World, lucidly translated from Spanish by Jessica Sequiera, sunk me deeply back into the more primal fears of my younger self, half awake and dreaming in the fire light, where UFOs weren’t odd gestures of a grand symbolic unity, but simply mysterious invaders from the unknown. The oldest dynamic of any invasion played out simultaneously in registers both majestic banal: the one where the mystery that the invaders bring renders you mysterious to yourself.
WAVE: The Rig Veda relates the mystery of waves to the question of a prime mover:The wave is emblematic of movement itself. In “The Wave,” the annual wave of suicides on campus corresponds with a young writer’s return home overseas. On the way home, a cab driver tells her an amazing story that both reaffirms and recontextualizes her metaphysical ache: “There, beneath the golden light, was the house of my childhood. The clouds peeling away in tatters. The long journey. The old Dream. The Wave suspended over the horizon, at the beginning and ending of all things, waiting. My worn-out heart, shivering, trembling with love.”
There was neither non-existence nor existence
Then; there was neither the realm of space nor
The sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where?
In whose protection? Was there water, bottomless deep?
Colanzi’s work moves in the opposite direction of Jung’s in every way, both stylistically and in meaning. Instead of incorporating fringe events — maybe called miracles in other contexts — into a unified theory of the symbolic nature of human consciousness, Colanzi’s work disintegrates our faith in the existence of a coherent reality itself. Colanzi works in horror, and that’s exactly what horror is supposed to do. It acts as a rejoinder to the Apollonian faith in our role as curators of a universe that naturally replicates a cogent order. Horror shows us this order infiltrated and broken down, the cosmic balance out of sync, and the total inability of the intellect to pierce the decay of meaning. In this sense, horror is a metaphysical humility.
CASKET: Not just a casket, but a child’s casket. Penny Colman tells us that before boxes were used to bury the dead, bodies were just wrapped in cloth or animal skins. Sometimes nothing at all. The casket is supposed to be something more permanent, a cross between a vessel and an abode. Built for mysterious movement inside of a cold permanence. “Alfredito” is the strongest story in this collection. Children learn about death not through the passing of an adult, who is a stranger anyways, but through the death of one of their own. A school friend. Anyone who had a friend die as a child understands the way that the presence and absence of the departed blend to create a third energy. The funeral scene in “Alfredito” is a triumph of mystical rhetoric that crescendos in a Catholic satori: “At that moment, the neon cross above us twinkled with the intensity of a diamond. The hall, people, coffins, flowers, our own astonished bodies, everything levitated in a single iridescent shaft of light. It was like our lives departed from us a moment to rise in shining vision, which left us inundated and overflowing.”
So Colanzi’s stories work within a genre that resists intellectual systemization, but her powers aren’t bound up within the genre alone. Many writers use the clichés of their genre like training wheels, making up for a lack of individual talent by leaning heavily on commonly recurring characteristics: the cowboy slinks away to another plateau after saving the day, the child accepts the supernatural threat long before the adults, human political constructs are mirrored in those of extraterrestrial cultures. Half of genre fiction writes itself. So maybe in Colanzi’s case it’s more accurate to say that she’s a writer of literature who works in a horror idiom. And though she has all the markings of being able to fit snugly within au courant political categories (she’s a young Bolivian woman currently living in the United States who writes from that perspective) her power as an artist derives from something deeper than either her identity or medium. Or maybe it’s better to say that both are subsumed by her talent and transformed. Her real genius doesn’t derive from either of these things, but more from the Keatsian negative capability to unweave the anodyne and assemble its spent threads in a disturbing pile, perhaps still half-recognizable from childhood. - Scott Beauchamp
As I said the other week , I have been adding a few new titles from my own money to the tbr pile , this is a new writer from Bolivia , I was attracted by the fact there has been so little lit from the country , Liliana Colanzi is writer , journalist and editor . She currently lives in New York this is her third collection of stories and the first to be tranalstated into English by her
She ran to the bathroom, hoisted her foot on the toilet bowl and lifted up her skirt . She took the razor and without breathing made a crosswise cut on her thigh where some old scars were fading , she gave herself three ,four ,five quick slaps on the face until the bathroom mirror returned an image of burning cheeks . Then she tucked her hair behind her ears a, cleaned the blood from her thigh with a piece of toilet paper, flushed it away and went back to bed , where she stayed reading Maira Dimma’s The marvelous Secret of the souls in Purgatory until she fell asleep.
A girl marks herself in the opening story of the collection
Now this is a strange collection of short stories , mostly all have a hint of sci-fi in there nature , I was reminded in part of Early Murakami and other writers . It has a mix of real and surreal worlds touching. A wave in one story comes across a university coming across making the students kill them selves, this is stories about stories . A man on Mars see ghostly animals in the desert of Mars as memories of his home on earth surface . , a family gather for that yearly photo and sparks fly . A dead youngster is being buried and a daughter and her religious mother discuss what happens after you die . A couple on the run in Paris run into a killer as they arrive in the city , but are they to be dinner .
The day we arrived in Paris the police confirm the cannibal is hiding in the city. He lands on a commercial flight and the airport cameras show him passing through security controls, barely disguised in a copper coloured wig. He wears a Mickey mouse T-Shirt and has a distinct beauty and fragility that makes him look like an adolescent rock star than a butcher. It’s May and raining and from the seventh floor of the hotel the streets of Paris look like an Ocean off moving heads with colourful umbrellas floating here and there.
A couple in Paris the same time as a potential killer .
This is a short collection of eight stories that mix real life and magical realism.But also a future that could be where creatures have gone and come back in ghostly views , echos of Amazion Indian powers and magic. I felt this is a nice short taster of what could be a new voice from her country , has already won a major prize for Spanish female writers under 35 .This is a writer trying out styles a mix of everyone from Classic JG Ballard with the sense of abandon worlds and Murakami earlier works , where explained things happen this crops up in Colanzis work like in Early Murakami books . Also a nod to Borges this is a collection from upcoming new writer .A collection you can read in an evening . - winstonsdad
In 1940, Maria Simma, then aged twenty-five, awoke to an apparition. A man was pacing at the foot of her bed. She attempted to speak to him but he remained silent. She tried to seize him but found herself grasping air. With admirable equanimity, she returned to bed; the man disappeared.
The next day, Maria visited her parish priest, who identified the visitor as a soul from Purgatory and instructed her to ask of any future spirit, “What do you need of me?” That night, the same man returned and Maria, in another remarkable display of sangfroid, attended to the plan. In response to her question, the man informed her how to reduce his time in purgatory (three holy Masses for his intentions) and departed. Maria went on to serve other purgatorial petitioners in a similar way.
Early in Liliana Colanzi’s new short story collection, Our Dead World, a young woman reads Maria Simma’s The Marvelous Secret of the Souls in Purgatory. It’s a propitious reference. Throughout this book Colanzi masterfully explores liminal states – not just the intersection of this world and the next but the boundaries of the earthly, animal, human, cosmic, and spiritual.
The story Alfredito slips disconcertingly between these domains. It begins with an image of brutal violence as the narrator observes her neighbour killing a pig, “battering the creature with blows of his hammer”. She then discovers that her schoolfriend, the Alfredito of the title, has died and wonders “Where could Alfredito be? In Heaven or Hell, or maybe his spirit was wandering through the world?” but soon matter-of-factly describes his “body … beginning to decompose and feed the worms”. The story then pivots when another friend reveals that “(l)ast night Alfredito appeared to me” and relates how she questioned the ghost. He, unlike Maria Simma’s interlocutor, declared “I’m coming back” and the story culminates in a scene of mystery, hope, and expectation.
Such intimations of the numinous recur throughout these stories but are destabilised by the circumstances of their reception. Colanzi’s characters are often under intense psychic pressure and mentally disintegrating in response to societal, familial, or historical pressures. “The Eye”, which opens the collection, focuses on a young woman who lives with a religious and authoritarian mother, amid “dolls – gifts from her mother that she didn’t dare throw out”. This woman suffers the ignominy of her mother’s close surveillance, not least the sniffing of fingers and underwear, and descends into self-harm. Her university offers no sanctuary, intensifying the pressure by reinforcing female subjugation; a male professor callously dismisses her diligence with advice that she should “learn how to disobey” and mercilessly gives her a “mediocre mark”. Graffiti in a bathroom stall read like a condensed social-media feed and push her further beyond the edge of reason:
She becomes increasingly delusional and pursues a final act of debasement with a male classmate who had earlier betrayed her. This happens in a cinema where “on the screen a woman howled, dragged beneath a madly advancing mechanical reaper, her guts flying to one side”, and she has a vision of the “gears of a great destruction … set in motion”, “the end of days”, a perverse revelation.
Domestic oppression pervades this collection. In “Family Portrait”, an extended family gathers for a formal photograph, observed by a photographer and his assistant. When the assistant suggests “(l)ife must not be so bad if you have family”, the photographer responds contemptuously. This is a study of deepening misery across three generations – a severe and disciplinarian grandmother, her damaged and violent son and her alienated and repressed grandson. The grandmother has been rendered insensate by a fall, for which her son might bear some guilt. Colanzi interrupts the third-person narrative with the son’s piercing internal monologue. She dispenses with commas and full-stops to convey the urgency of thought:
no one knows what it was like living without a husband and without a peso the only thing we had was discipline and without her I wouldn’t be who I am … love is tough that was always her motto and now I know she’s right
When the third-person narrative returns, the gathering descends rapidly towards violence. The photographer’s assistant bolts from the scene.
That internal monologue is one of many formal techniques that Colanzi employs in pursuit of emotional intensity. From her wide repertoire of devices, her use of Beckett-like parataxis is particularly effective in turning the psychological screw. The story “Our Dead World” intertwines a first-person narrative of exile on Mars with paratactic remembrances of the tragic circumstances that preceded the journey, while the complex and brilliant “The Wave” – much of which is a fable told within a story within the story – uses the same technique to achieve a resonant ending:
There, beneath the golden light was the house of my childhood. The clouds peeling away in tatters. The long journey. The old Dream. The Wave suspended on the horizon, at the beginning and end of all things, waiting. My worn-out heart, shivering, trembling with love.
The final fiction in this work, “Story with Bird”, is the culmination of both this technical virtuosity and many of Colanzi’s themes. This polyvocal piece interweaves the story of a Bolivian plastic surgeon, in hiding after a botched job on the wife of the Argentine consul, with an indictment of the exploitation of the Ayoreo people, indigenous to forests of Paraguay and Bolivia.
While existential threats abound for characters in this collection, for the Ayoreo devastation is potentially imminent and absolute. The Ayoreo are nomadic hunter-gathers, whose way of life is dependent on the forest. Cattle farming, deforestation, violation of their territory, missionary contact and other incursions make their situation precarious. The book’s epigraph, and by extension its title, draws on an Ayoreo song:
This is the trunk of all stories, it tells of our dead worldThis evokes a state of being explored by Jonathan Lear in his in his book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Harvard University Press, 2008). Lear relates the situation of the Crow Nation of North America, in the period following their settlement. The Crow were previously “a vibrant tribe of nomadic hunters” with a culture entirely based on warfare in protection of territory. The starting point of Lear’s investigation is a quotation from chief Plenty Coups, a leader during the period of transition:
I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse-stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell into the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.
Lear explores what it means for a worldview to be eradicated, so much so that its absence represents an end to experience (“After this nothing happened”). While this form of cultural catastrophe is almost impossible to imagine, it increasingly represents the undertone to global developments. In the case of the Ayoreo, it is an immediate and tragic reality: for some it has already happened; for the few uncontacted people, it is impending.
In “Story with Bird”, Colanzi uses direct testimonies of Ayoreo people to devastating effect. These brief, recounted narratives, collected by the anthropologist Lucase Bessire, are deeply moving. They describe both the violence of the Ayoreo experience and the world-shattering effect of their persecution:
I don’t know what to say. We ate honey. We killed fish. We were dirty. I don’t know my story. I don’t know what to say. My thoughts and my memories are gone. They won’t come to me anymore. I don’t know my own story. It is done.
The struggle to survive, perceive, and express is profound. Colanzi builds the story to a fitting conclusion by allowing narrative itself to disintegrate. Here she appears to draw on Frank Kermode’s proposition, in The Sense of an Ending (Oxford University Press, 1967), that “the clock’s ‘tick-tock’” is “a model of what we call a plot”. He also proposed:
The Bible is a familiar model of history. It begins at the beginning (‘In the beginning…’) and ends with a vision of the end (‘Even so, come, Lord Jesus’); the first book is Genesis, the last Apocalypse.
Colanzi, who bravely begins this book with a degraded form of revelation (in “The Eye”), ends it with a return to storytelling’s essence. In the final pages of “Story with Bird” the doctor descends into delirium. The text becomes a haze of decadent images, then bleeds into one last heart-wrenching Ayoreo testimony before finally reducing to a variant of Kermode’s foundational form:
Tick tack tick tack tick tack tick tack tick tack tick tack …In this short book, Colanzi offers an extraordinary density of ideas, transmitted in shape-shifting and affecting prose. The translator, Jessica Sequiera, deserves immense credit for her deft rendering of this complex work. - Alan Crilly
Liliana Colanzi, a promising young writer from Bolivia, delves into her country’s complex histories, indigenous and colonial, in Our Dead World. The stories in this elegantly translated volume proffer a profoundly existential vision — a richly layered and varied darkness. Colanzi grapples with a number of powerful themes: mental illness, tradition and modernity, exploitation, and armageddon. Her tales are deeply rooted in the oral traditions of Bolivia — alluding to its myths, legends, and superstitions — but they are also situated in the socio-political context of contemporary global society. The focus is on life on the margins: racial, ethnic, and linguistic tensions. But Colanzi is not just out to update old legends or to limn Bolivian national consciousness. At their best, her stories offer a seamless blend of folklore, magic realism, and speculative fiction that transcends the limitations of nationality, probing the depths of a universal, painfully human, consciousness.
As befits its title, Our Dead World is about the ghosts of the past and the unborn future, asking such questions as “how did we get here?” and “where are we going?” These interrogatives often prompt enigmatic and bleak answers. In “Alfredito,” a story about a group of children dealing with the sudden death of their friend, a child asks her grandmother, “where do the dead go?” Her grandmother replies, “the dead never leave.” History, the past, the world of the dead, are continuously part of the present, existing in some liminal space. But such a sentiment negates salvation, too.
Given this perspective, the volume is understandably saturated with a sense of dread, dripping with apocalyptic sentiments. In the title story, a worker on Mars is under intense pressure: she longs to return to Earth, but is forced to accept her fate of dying in the lifeless Martian environment, the “miles of ochre-colored dunes where nothing was alive, a silent desert that breathed down your neck, eager to kill you.” She was selected for the “Martian Lottery” because she lived near a Chernobyl-like nuclear disaster on Earth; exposure to radiation made her suitable for conditions on Mars. When she receives a message her former lover is having a child with another woman, the woman begins to unravel. Her only way to rebel against what she calls “the Great Senselessness of our condition” is to engage in a fruitless, carnal act.
While there is no overt reference to climate change or environmental catastrophes, the circumstances of our inhabiting a dead planet like Mars, together with the nuclear accident, resonates with current ecological concerns. Our colonization of a dead planet (we can’t take care of the one we have) smacks of imperialism, “the conquest of other worlds.” “Story with Bird” is the collection’s most direct critique of brutal expansionism. The story is an indictment of the exploitation of the indigenous Ayoreo people, told from multiple perspectives that include first person accounts from an anthropological source. The yarn (and the collection) ends with an ominous ticking clock, possibly counting down to doomsday. The absence of a period at the end of the sentence is a sign of continuation, but just what the future consists of is unclear:
Tick tack tick tack tick tack tick tack tick tack tick tack
The scope of the stories in Our Dead World moves with ease into a fusion of the phantasmagorical and the psychological. “Meteorite” centers on Ruddy, a farmer. He becomes fearful of an exploited, underaged worker who claims to “speak with space people” and warns that they are coming. An accident on the farm, caused by Ruddy, nearly kills the boy. At the same time, Ruddy happens to see a meteorite fall from the sky. “The meteoroid,” Colanzi writes, “traced the same orbit in the solar system for fifteen million years until the movement of a comet pushed it toward Earth.” The coincidence of the meteorite (which could contain ‘space people’ for all Ruddy knows) and the accident seems to case a spell on the man, who develops an irrational fear of the unknown.
In the surreal “The Wave” a young woman returns to Bolivia from America when she learns that her father is dying. She is also fleeing “the wave,” a physical manifestation of (her?) psychosis as well of a fate manifested through suicides on campus. This death instinct has followed her family forever. A cab driver tells her about a woman he met on the road who was seeking healing in the desert. After eating the flesh of a cactus in order to stay alive, she is given a revelation about interstellar and cosmic beings. She finds an eerie peace once she learns about the imminent destruction of the Earth.
Colanzi delivers some risky, but important, messages in these enigmatic stories. She is trying to tell us something indispensable about who we are as a species — and to probe our complicated (and increasingly troubled) relationship to the earth’s environment and to each other. She believes that there are valuable lessons to be found in myths and the nooks and crannies of history, in what happens in the remotest of places. Ironically, the people who live in those marginal places are often at the greatest risk of imminent destruction, at the forefront of fragility. The collection’s title comes from an Ayoreo song: “This is the trunk of all stories, it tells about our dead world.” If the dead never move on, as “Alfredito” would have it, then there is no other world than a world that teems with extinction, vulnerable life surrounded by the never quite absent. - Lucas Spiro
Introducing the Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi, You Glow in the Dark glimmers with an unearthly light and a nearly radioactive power
The seven stories of You Glow in the Dark unfold in a Latin America wrecked and poisoned by human greed, and yet Colanzi’s writing—at once sleek and dense, otherworldly and intensely specific—casts an eerily bright spell over the wreckage. Some stories seem to be set in a near future; all are superbly executed and yet hard to pin down; they often leave the reader wondering: was that realistic or fantastic? Colanzi draws power from Andean cyberpunk just as much as from classic horror writers, and this daring is matched by her energizing simultaneous use of multiplicity and fragmentation—the book's stylistic trademarks. Freely mixing worlds, she uses the Bolivian altiplano as the backdrop for an urban dystopia and blends Aymara with Spanish. Colanzi never gets bogged down; she can be brutal and direct or light-handed and subtle. Her materials are dark, but always there’s the lift of her vivid sense of humor. You Glow in the Dark seizes the reader's attention (from the title on) and holds it: this is a book that announces the arrival of a major new talent
Bolivian writer Colanzi’s latest collection, which earned her the Ribera del Duero International Short Story Prize.
Tinged with futuristic flourishes and set largely in the Bolivian Altiplano, these stories examine the aftermath of terrible trespasses, mostly only whispered about. The opening story, “The Cave,” emerges in fragments—a prehistoric mother, a time traveler, and a pair of star-crossed lovers are just a few who run across the title locale—showing the fleeting transience of people across the arc of time. Most notably, a pair of stories break down the mechanics and the radioactive consequences of colonialism. In the future, “Atomito” is the name of the heroic mascot of an industrial nuclear plant in South America that’s not only poisoning people but also corrupting a society looking for blame. Conversely, the sharp title story that ends the collection shows the raw consequences of a real 1987 event known as the Goiânia accident, in which hundreds were poisoned with radioactivity. Because short stories are fleeting, they’re sometimes lacking in characterization, but Colanzi is gifted at focusing on people during their most intense moments while simultaneously indulging her interest in time and its capacity to bury dark deeds. “The Debt” finds a young woman on the verge of giving birth grappling with her heritage, and “The Narrow Way” shows forbidden fruit’s effect on an isolated faith. Meanwhile, “Chaco” wanders into straight-up horror with the story of a young man possessed by the Indigenous Mataco man he murdered. The longer stories are richer but the shorter entries don’t lose a step. In fact, the most bitter story, “The Greenest Eyes,” concerns a girl who, in a Grimm-like fairy tale, longs for “the mint-colored eyes of her dreams,” only to lose paradise in the process.
The “alien gaze” is a keen instrument for dissecting the human condition, and Colanzi employs it to great effect here. - Kirkus
The events that led to the Goiânia accident belong to a deeply Latin American story, where beauty clashes with state negligence and tragedy with chance. Liliana Colanzi, the Bolivian author of You Glow in the Dark (published in February 2024), retells it through several formally complex devices in the title story. Historical details are intertwined with the language of science fiction and magical realism, giving texture to the incidents through a kaleidoscopic piece where each character involved in the disaster is treated with sensitivity and grace. The reader sees the catastrophe through the eyes of children (one of whom describes the capsule as “finer than sand and made of fire”); a government agent working on the case and their official documents; the scrap collector who, dazzled by the light the radioactive piece gives off, attempts to make the “shimmering, unusual ring” for his wife; the family members who, enamored with the strange object, try to open it as if a genie would emerge from it; and the only exception, a woman named Gabriela, who, “Like a dog that sniffs a storm on the air, like a bird that hears a shot on the far side of the forest… was picking up the danger signals.” The result is a beautiful, experimental reconstruction of the events, where the archival history of the nuclear tragedy and scientific developments are contrasted with a local cosmology that grapples with the capsule as magic.
The rest of the stories in You Glow in the Dark are written with a similar courage for mixing literary genres and voices. Colanzi’s prose skillfully intersects science fiction with the new weird and with the indigenous cosmologies of the region. The short stories are often experimental and polyphonic, full of eloquent references that range from Sebaldian images (they seem to be internet-generated, often pixelated) to visual poetry to more obscure cultural references. A Latin American reader might perhaps pick up the influence of the postapocalyptic cult classic Plop by Rafael Pinedo (whose novel appears to be extracted from pre-history, much like the first short story in this collection, “The Cave”) or Sara Gallardo’s Eisejuaz (a book that Colanzi herself has published in her imprint Dum Dum, in which Gallardo manages to evoke an indigenous voice through her prose in a fascinating, seamless way).
In “The Cave,” Colanzi takes an almost posthumanist approach and, instead of focusing her narrative on an event or a set of figures, creates a cave as her main character. Mixing indigenous traditions from across Latin America, it begins with a woman, who seems to come from pre-conquest Mexico (there are references to Oaxaca and Zapoteco) giving birth to twins. “Something terrible had just happened to her, something the old women discussed in whispers around the fire: she had given birth to double children.” In an action that could be rooted in Guaraní beliefs, she immediately slaughters them, and perhaps curses the cave with the cadavers of her own children. Subsequently, the inhabitants of the cave overlap with each other, each more doomed than the next, while the main thread of the narration seems to be the passage of time. The cave holds within it the trajectories of star-crossed lovers, the history of bat excrement and the discovery of its scientific novelty, and even a nonbinary time traveler named Onyx Müller who fails at his attempt to visit Woodstock in 1969. Here, Colanzi utilizes the politically charged “lenguaje inclusivo” in Spanish, a feminist usage of the letter “e” in the usually masculine generic plural and a gender-neutral pronoun which Chris Andrews translates as “they.” Characters are not exclusively human, and this creates a rich and textured story that could have been a novel on its own. The story is quickly paced, which makes for an intense reading experience, as timelines merge into each other beautifully.
The stories of You Glow in the Dark take place in a pan-Latin American landscape that ranges from Mexico and Brazil to Colanzi’s native Bolivia. One of its many qualities lies also in the fact that, while working with a genre such as science fiction, which feels dominated by an American sensibility, Colanzi successfully creates a language and landscape that feel native to the region. Chris Andrews, a veteran translator who has worked with the likes of Roberto Bolaño and César Aira, successfully conveys a language that is, at the same time, vivid and surreal, poetic, local, and infused with technicalities. Strange, evocative, and somewhat ominous sentences emerge from this juxtaposition; Colanzi speaks about nuclear disasters as producing an “opalescent mist of spores,” describes a plain that was “covered with iridescent mushrooms puffing little clouds of spores up into the air,” or, in one of the longer stories, “Atomito,” creates a character whose “migraine [that had been] building since her mother died blows out like a mushroom cloud, unleashing a psychic storm.”
When it comes to aesthetics, You Glow in the Dark manages to mix local customs and traditions with elements of kitsch that sprang up when modernity and the internet arrived in Latin America. In no story is this clearer than in “Atomito,” about a young group of friends living in a highly surveilled part of a town that lies next to a nuclear plant. Here, Aymara-language slang and expressions overlap with memorable bits of camp, which range from the strange attachment to anime in the region—gesturing toward a youth subculture called otaku—to the screaming voices of evangelical pastors in the background and the occasional appearance of a chicken shop called “Pollos Bin Laden” (this might sound like an exaggerated joke, but it is not: there is a Lebanese food shop called “Bin Laden” in Panama City, and a guitar shop in the center of Mexico City called “Holocausto”). This is combined with visual cues, some taken from 2008 internet culture (for instance, a gamer-style sign that reads “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: YONI HAS UNLOCKED THE NEXT STAGE”) and some that are common on the streets of Latin America (such as a handwritten, scratchy notice that reads “ELECTRICAL APPLIANCES REPAIRED”).
It is within this world that we meet the charming Kurmi Pérez, whose mother has died unexpectedly and who houses her friends during a heavily regulated curfew. Following her mother’s death, Kurmi contracts a constant splitting headache and spends her days knitting. She befriends Orki, a former DJ, and Yoni, who works for Pollos Bin Laden as a delivery man. There is also Percéfone, a young woman whose brother was hit by a stray bullet in the protests against the nuclear plant. The generation in “Atomito” exists in this alternative space, where the dystopian overlaps with the plain ugly and the traces of an indigenous past, and it is within that chaos that they attempt to exist, to eat, to drink, and to party. Not unlike in our present, they are driven to hedonism and cynicism intermittently, being forced to reckon with horror on a daily basis.
The story progresses from chronicles of bleakness, partying, and anguish until, one morning, Orki disappears. His friends look for him, worried, and hear news about ecoterrorists trying to strike the nuclear plant. Finally, videos of Orki appear to have gone viral online, where he resembles a drunk man wandering through the alleys of a market, dancing nonstop. People seem to laugh at this gesture (“‘He’s drunk,’ says a chola. ‘Hey, where’s the party,’ yells another, and tosses him a corn cob”) but soon he has followers who join his joyful procession, reminiscent of the dancing plague of 1518 in Strasbourg. Orki’s friends think he’s bewitched and try to track him down, but Orki is dancing with an old flame of his, “the desire passing between them creat[ing] a magnetic field strong enough to revive the hidden, buried city.” With echoes of a scene in Daniel Saldaña París’s El baile y el incendio (translation forthcoming), the lost Bolivian youth of this story find a revelation, if not a form of rebellion, in the act of partying.
The rest of the short stories of You Glow in the Dark possess, as well, this formally powerful combination of genres and cosmologies, while holding a tender sensitivity at their core, often relayed through the eyes of girls and young women. In “The Debt,” a young woman accompanies her aunt to repay a debt in the Amazon, and both the landscape and family secrets unravel throughout the narration. In “The Greenest Eyes,” a girl who turns ten longs for green eyes (like her father’s, who descends from an Italian family) and ends up in a tattoo parlor where a man known as “The Boss” promises to grant girls wishes in exchange for money. In “The Narrow Way,” which was recently published in The New Yorker, two sisters try to negotiate the strictly religious community they belong to and their own curiosity about a broader life.
You Glow in the Dark is a book that manages to be sophisticated in its politics, savvy in its experimentation with genre, and inherently Latin American in its landscape and voice. It is a masterfully written, singular collection, reflecting an originality and formal exploration that one doesn’t encounter very often. - Julia Kornberg
A YOUNG ICE AGE woman trips into a cave while hunting a rabbit. She’s pregnant—from ritualistic group sex—but she doesn’t care by whom. She only cares about not being pregnant anymore: “What she cared about was being a smart hunter and a fast runner, and everyone knew that females with a burden were slower and sure to get left behind.” She takes her knife and slices a trapped rabbit’s neck. But she has barely a moment to rest. A “damp salamander” slivers down her thigh: the birth has begun. Twins. “Something terrible had just happened to her.” She uses her knife to cut their umbilical cords and draws them to her breasts, and they suck. “A coyote sang in the distance: night was coming at a gallop.” She knows she doesn’t have much time—though we readers don’t yet know exactly what for. She takes the “almost translucid” babies into the back of the cave and, “moved by curiosity or playfulness,” imprints their bloody feet on the wall: “The symmetry of the prints on the rock gave her a sense of achievement.” That’s enough. She slices their necks as she had the rabbit’s. “Before the darkness covered them, they let out a soft mewing.” Unburdened by her “lump,” she steps into the snow. The section ends. I sense she is free.
This opening sequence in Liliana Colanzi’s 2022 story collection You Glow in the Dark (in Chris Andrews’s English translation, published last month by New Directions) might be describing the creation of the first work of art. The story “The Cave” unfolds from there in numbered sections, each with different protagonists—or even no human characters at all. In the story’s second section, a 22-year-old tamale-stand worker named Xóchitl Salazar stumbles into the cave, disoriented by a late-night storm. Xóchitl discovers a “prehistoric fresco” painted over the ages. She rushes to tell her boyfriend once the rain clears the next morning, but she doesn’t get the chance: “Her boyfriend, sick with jealousy, was waiting behind the door with a baseball bat.” The story continues back and forth through millennia in the seven sections that follow, telling the tales of many beings—plant, fungus, animal, and none of the above. Unlike more traditional works of short fiction that focus on singular subjects, Colanzi’s stories investigate the ways that ecological, geological, and social realities form subjects, as well as the choices they can and cannot make.
“The Cave” indicates, though hardly contains, the range of this book’s seven stories. In You Glow in the Dark, places, molecules, and species sprawl and mutate. Centuries-long retrospection, cyberpunk grit, first-person dream narrative, and religious fantasia fit together, simultaneously fabulist and real, vivified by Colanzi’s mysteriously lucid prose. While “speculative fiction” might be the easy term for this, “speculation” for Colanzi equally means a passage following a guy accidentally time-traveling to the Jurassic Period as one about spores of moss. Characters pray to nuclear martyrs; they distrust authority, spurned as they are by Orwellian dictatorships; they refuse colonial assertions, hiding pre-Columbian symbols in Catholic convention. By creating alternative realities from a place of fantasy, Colanzi’s stories reckon with the fact that reality contains realities. There is not a “world” but many worlds, coexisting, enduring through time.
Writing on Colanzi, as well as authors such as Ximena Miranda and Catalina Infante, for the journal Chasqui last year, Gabriel Saldías Rossel, Carolina A. Navarrete González, and Claire Mercier argue that these “borderline” and “posthuman” stories “emphasize the barely circumstantial role of the human being in a cosmic ecosystem that burdens and subordinates them. Under these conditions, human participation depends, in a large way, not on what one can do, but, rather, on one’s capacity to know, read, adapt, and transform oneself.” But in these clear-eyed, surprising stories, human systems also subordinate: corporations, colonization, poverty, violent cops, language itself. Still, people play music and paint and have children. In Colanzi’s oeuvre, which in English translation also includes the collection Our Dead World (Dalkey Archive, 2017), the Bolivian Altiplano and the Martian desert are alive with multifarious, even irreconcilable, metaphysics. Fiction becomes a place to engage—though not integrate—these coexistences.
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In an interview with Latin American Literature Today, Colanzi said,
[Argentinian poet] María Negroni sees the Latin American fantastic as a derivation of the gothic. In the gothic tradition (and in much of the Latin American fantastic), the “other” is presented as a threat, as what produces fear and friction, unlike in the English fantasy genre where the strange element is incorporated as if it were natural, and a talking animal or dragon can form part of a world rather than exist as anomalies.
Anglophone fantasy and speculative fiction often normalize, and thus defang, the tension between reality and unreality. These post-gothic traditions, to which Colanzi’s writing belongs, heighten the underlying eeriness of everyday life, thereby denaturalizing the parts we might take for granted or consider normal. This literature asks if realism was ever depicting anything like lived reality. In You Glow in the Dark, modes of knowing and reporting vibrate against one another: folk Catholicism, science and medicine, the false memory of dictatorship, legal discourse, journalism, macumba, hard sci-fi, Aymara language, repressed desires, dreamscapes, Indigenous cosmovisions, and so on. For Colanzi, a single perspective, a single way of writing, or even a single metaphysics never dominates.
Indeed, Indigeneity is baked into the European gothic: motifs that Bram Stoker used in Dracula (1897) can be traced to the bat-man of precolonial Latin American cultures, for example. As Carmen A. Serrano argues in Gothic Imagination in Latin American Fiction and Film (University of New Mexico Press, 2019), the original gothic wave in Latin America never merely mimicked European authors but reconfigured the genre for a variety of social and political contexts.
Today, commentators herald a “Latin American boom,” a “Latin American new Gothic,” or a “new female Gothic,” citing writers like Colanzi, as well as Fernanda Melchor, Samanta Schweblin, and Cristina Rivera Garza, among others. Though, literary scholar Ilse Logie writes, “[t]he flexible, hybrid configuration of this ‘Latin American new Gothic,’ which is both locally anchored and global, has sociocultural roots but also serves marketing purposes,” like any lump term. The popularity in the Anglosphere of this “Latin American new Gothic” coincides with English-original publishing categorized variously as “climate fiction” (also called “cli-fi”) or “New Weird” over the past 10-plus years, as well as horror- or sci-fi-inflected “literary” novels from mainstream and indie authors—not to mention TV series like Lovecraft Country (2020). Centering a genre-blending approach to literature, Colanzi teaches classes at Cornell titled “Cyborgs, Animals, and Monsters” and “Latin American Horror.” In a video from the university, she argues: “The distance between the harmless appearance of an object or a place and its secret and sometimes threatening reality is a feature of speculative fiction and one that has become increasingly relevant to talk about the present.” We live in unprecedented times, with, all this writing attests, a great deal of precedent.
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You Glow in the Dark does not demand our attention because it suits some literary trend. It demands our engagement because it gives language to a world increasingly shaped by forces and entities—viruses, supply chains, algorithms, air travel, nation-states, severe weather—out of whack with what we as humans can name and easily sense. The third section of “The Cave” begins with a “silvery flame the size of a ring, sprung from nothing,” floating in the cave. The flame grows into a chrysalis, spinning and turning the cave into “a capsule of vibrating light.” A toad bites it, then burps, spraying luminescent particles that bats devour. They develop a mutation that improves their insect-capturing abilities. These voracious bats free the villagers of bug-borne plagues, and their society prospers, becoming the “center of a small and flourishing empire” whose ceramics and textiles reach “the farthest-flung communities,” and whose villagers record their origin stories with their new writing system. However, neighbors envy this empire and attack the town when its people are distracted by reveries celebrating the Thunder God. The attackers win. The bats thrive for centuries until a Dominican friar, napping by the entrance to the cave, wakes himself with a sneeze. His snot launches a disease that wipes out the bats. Of course, the friar has no idea. Stationed in the Americas to prosecute some Zapoteco Indians “for heresy,” he was busy dreaming of taking a walk in his monastery back home. The bats’ carcasses fall to the cave floor, “delicate as pine needles.” July rains wash them away.
In these few hundred words, entire empires rise and fall, colonization begins, and a species evolves and goes extinct. The narration doesn’t privilege one timescale over another. The friar’s dream lasts nearly as long as a sentence that spans centuries and civilizations: “All that survived of that fleeting civilization were the textiles, kept alive by the slave women and absorbed into the conquering culture.” By this funny equilibrium of prose, how we make sense of agency and duration is recalibrated. In Colanzi’s writing, reality is grander and weirder than we imagined.
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In the book’s final story, “You Glow in the Dark,” Colanzi fictionalizes a multiperspectival account of the radiological disaster in Goiânia, Brazil. This real-life contamination accident took place in September 1987, when scrap-metal scavengers inadvertently took a radiotherapy source from an abandoned private hospital. The story, however, doesn’t give us that historical background up front.
Colanzi’s story starts when an as yet unidentified crisis has come to a head—or, more precisely, with someone remembering it. A hotel receptionist, up till then concerned with flirting with handsome guests, recalls suddenly being sent to the Olympic Stadium with her whole town after many citizens had been plagued by odd ailments. At the stadium, the townspeople are inspected for contamination, but from what kind of contaminants, we aren’t told. Some suspect material is detected on her father. He later dies—allegedly from his drinking, but the narrator believes the death relates to what they found on him that day. The receptionist is untainted, but her house is destroyed; when she leaves for a new life in São Paolo, employers rescind their job offers the moment they find out she’s arriving from the disaster site.
The next section leaves this protagonist behind. We instead follow, in third person, Devair, a scrapyard operator. In abandoned hospital equipment, he finds a glowing rod. He plans to use part of it to make a ring for his wife, Gabriela, who is pretty annoyed by the whole experience. The light gives her headaches and keeps her up at night.
Enter an unnamed radiological expert. They are in town for a “government project” when they receive a call: a mystery illness is going around. The expert heads to the hospital. To their horror, upon arriving, they have to stop a young fireman from tossing the radiotherapy source into the river—“FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!” On the streets, townspeople smoke their cigarettes and joke around, oblivious to the toxicity already among them.
The story continues to leap through time, some sections even doing away with a central protagonist. In one section, Colanzi lists the contents of the waste barrels the government buried: the diary of the receptionist’s cousin Gislene, listing “her lovers from 1982 to 1987”; a concrete poem on a napkin; a satin dress. In later sections, in a more hospitable future, the event has become myth: in one segment, a man prays to a nuclear martyr for the return of his pig; in another, an uncanny mural of the long-ago disaster is painted over to make way for a beauty salon.
The stories of this radiation crisis carry other stories too: secret abortions, absent fathers, adolescent rock bands. Each section is like the numbered waste barrels, which can only be filled in by fiction, unknowable and buried as they are (except one, #789, which is empty—“the workers made a mistake”). The very act of crafting stories is the cesium core to “You Glow in the Dark,” and to this book. - Drew Zeiba
Radioactivity haunts Liliana Colanzi’s short stories. In You Glow in the Dark, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, real-world poisons seep into her characters and their communities, and violence simmers in the air. Despite people’s attempts to reach for better, the world’s sharp edges tend to find them.
Colanzi’s landscapes draw from corrupt, dark governments and real-life pollution events. The title story draws from an accident in the town of Goiânia, Brazil. In 1987, a radiotherapy unit was stolen from a long abandoned hospital by two men hoping to get money for the equipment. The material went from scrapyard to scrapyard, which was dangerous enough in its way—but it became disastrous when one man punctured the capsule, revealing a beautiful blue glow emitting from the substance inside.
The substance inside and the open capsule were now out in the world, and contamination continued until one woman finally made the connection between the glow and all of them getting sick, and went to the hospital with the capsule in hand. In the end, four people died and almost 250 were contaminated. The clean-up involved tearing down homes and incinerating everything in them.
But the psychological impact wrapped around the entire region. The incident caused widespread fear, as thousands worried they were infected or contagious. The region’s exports were banned, and people found it impossible to truly leave it behind.
Colanzi’s stories reflect that malaise. In her tales, violence is something in the air or soil, something ready to take us over or occupy our lives at any moment. Her world brims with tension, a true thing born of historical occupation and violence. In “Atomito,” a town wastes under the impact of the nuclear power plant that the company promised would bring them only jobs and prosperity. Protestors are met with police brutality and surveillance, and the youth of the town struggle to find joy in the collective despair of their community.
But it isn’t just the tension of violence—the stories highlight an intrinsic kind of foolishness that follows humans wherever they go. Why would that man puncture the capsule? What sense of wonder led him to give the glowing material to others? Why do humans do anything, but to taste small wonders, to push at the limits of what we know?
Colanzi’s characters are either curious, burnt out from the impact of someone else’s curiosity, or trapped within the confines of someone’s attempt to keep them within certain bounds. A group of youths use tech or dreams to see over the strict rules and walls of their closed community. Young women deal with unexpected pregnancies and the shame that comes with it after their experimenting.
“C-c-curiosity is the D-d-d-devil’s l-l-ure,” says the protagonist’s mother in “Chaco,” warning him against questioning his grandfather’s strange mutterings. But when the young boy can’t stop wondering what an Indigenous Mataco man on the street is dreaming of, he ends up possessed by the man’s spirit, by a spirit charged with simmering violence ready to be unleashed.
In You Glow in the Dark, characters make deals with the Devil, puncture the capsule to dig out the blue glow inside. Their curiosity for the unknown, for what they don’t yet have, outweighs anything their often-bleak communities have to offer them. Protagonists are lured by the same human folly that led people to try and take new worlds, to think they could control nuclear power in the first place.
Colanzi’s form is mirrored in that same atmosphere of curiosity. The magical realism of her stories makes the reader want to dig deeper to figure out what’s going on, even as they’re tempted to cringe away from the small, ruthless body horrors that dot her short book.
In this context, the most interesting story might be the first, “The Cave.” This tale’s protagonist is not a person but a cave that sees centuries of births and rebirths. A young hunter gives birth unexpectedly in the cold; an old man comes to let his body decompose; a European friar sneezes and his germs kill a centuries-old species of mutated bat. In the face of human folly, the cave stays what it is, a witness to comings and goings, lives and deaths.
In a book so focused on the tendency for humans to ruin and destroy, it serves as a reminder that maybe all but our most lasting damage are impermanent in the long run—a bleakly hopeful idea to propel readers through Colanzi’s more chaotic tales of destruction to follow. The collection strikes an overall tense tone with small notes of this sort of existential optimism, as people continue to reach and fail in a world of nuclear power and toxins, and yet the world persists. - Leah Rachel von Essen
On September 13, 1987, two men entered the abandoned, partially demolished Goiânia Radiotherapy Institute (GRI) in northeastern Brazil. They were looking for metallic junk, as little corroded as possible, the heavier the better because scrap buyers pay by the pound. What they found in the ruined premises of the GRI would unleash “one of the most serious radiological accidents to have occurred to date,” as later classified by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The incident inspired You Glow in the Dark, winner of the 2022 Ribera del Duero Short Story Prize, and the eponymous short story by Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi, in a captivating translation by Chris Andrews (Roberto Bolaño, Cesar Aira).
You Glow in the Dark (New Directions, 2024) is Colanzi’s fourth collection of short stories and the second to be published in English after Jessica Sequira’s excellent translation of Our Dead World (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017). In each book, Colanzi experiments with and expands upon the boundaries of her writing. Here it’s voices—from different contexts and realities, with a wide range of ambition, frustration, and defiance—that populate the pages and spaces of this book. “It is indeed one of the aspects that interests me the most about writing,” said Colanzi when presenting the book on the Hablemos Escritoras podcast, “being able, as if in a kind of Ouija board, to summon other voices, different points of view different from my own.”
In the title story, Colanzi uses seven narrators to tell the story of the Goiânia accident: a girl retells the demolition of her house and the pain that accompanies the loss of dignity; the death of a young girl by radiation becomes controversial when she is openly left to decay; a scientist portrays the fatal ignorance that enabled and accelerated the nuclear disaster. “The thing is . . .” says a female character, “living in Goiânia years after the GRI was converted into a huge convention center . . . we were just coming out of a dictatorship: we had been trained to forget.” It is as if Colanzi is rebelling against the loss of collective memory of tragedy, against the unbearable fact that things go back to normal faster than they should (and even faster if they happen in Latin American contexts), leaving only a few invisible traces from those that survived it.
The interest in the urban, when disturbed by the nuclear, continues in “Atomito.” (For us Latin Americans, diminutives are not exclusive to signs of affection,) In contrast to Atomito—the caricature of a child who serves as the benevolent mascot of the Power Plant, appearing in television ads, stuffed animals, or painted on street walls—the characters in the story are teenagers whose lives have been negatively affected by its omnipresence.
“There are days when the police go into a neighbor’s house, and they can hear shouts and the noise of things smashing. There are days when they drink so much they forget to eat. There are days when they’re hungry but there’s no money or food. There are days when the city wakes wrapped in a fog so thick it’s impossible to make out the shapes of things.”
Although they are not active members of any resistance, their status as inhabitants of El Alto is enough to make them targets of the police and the media, who invariably label them as insurrectionary mobs threatening the law and order of society. This subtle social commentary is enough to read this story in a broader context, not necessarily limited to its genre. It is only after a big explosion in the Plant that one of the characters falls under a spell that forces him to dance all around the city, as in a trance, luring more dancers to crowd the streets in the most cyberpunk uprising the reader could imagine.
“The Cave,” perhaps the strongest piece of the collection, moves beyond pure human subjectivity to explore different creatures and species, including beings of the air, beings of the surface, and creatures of darkness. Its narrative—structured from micro-fragments that accumulate until they form a whole piece—functions as a portal or threshold from which the reader engages in an investigation of temporality that surpasses human experience. Various processes unfold throughout deep time: everything that occurred before the human species inhabited the earth and all that will come after it vanishes.
Unlike what happened in Goiânia, here the temporal jump is bolder and follows no apparent order. Sometimes it even seems that the cave doesn’t maintain a fixed place in space. A pregnant hunting woman urgently seeking to survive—even at the cost of her offspring—appears at the beginning of the story. She is then replaced by another in present-day Oaxaca that will later become a victim of femicide. The narration then goes back to the night that a Dominican friar and a vibrant chrysalis coincide inside the cave, only to mark the beginning of the end of a population of mutant bats. As one character puts it:
“This whole world collapsed with the sudden disappearance of the bats. As in Pickup Sticks, the removal of a single piece brought the whole edifice tumbling down. Quiet times followed, at least for eyes incapable of seeing the bustle of microscopic life. Until a pack of coyotes began to frequent the cave, and the cycle started over: it was like the previous time around but not—it never is—quite the same. The life cycle that turns on shit, on guano, on bountiful excrement: the unwitting gift of one living thing to another, enabling existence to go on. Shit as the link, the fundamental bond in the mosaic of organisms.”
The speed and variety of plots is thrilling, as are the connections the reader can make to geological, biological, zoological, and technological ideas.
While their quality is lower compared to the rest of the book—perhaps due to the vagueness and even incompleteness of their endings and characters—“The Debt,” “Chaco,” and “The Greenest Eyes” maintain the author’s interest in bringing the reader closer to scenes and landscapes that are part of the historical, social, and territorial reality of central South America. “The Debt” takes place in a dying town that had better times when rubber extraction in the Bolivian jungle was synonymous with prosperity and development. In “Chaco”—Quechua for“the hunting land,” a territory that lies between today’s Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina—the action begins with a description of the dispossession suffered by the Matacos at the hands of an oil refinery.
“When Grandpa was young he’d worked with the government people who drove the Matacos off their land. . . . My grandfather was never paid the money they’d promised him for getting rid of the Matacos, money he needed to settle a debt. He lost everything, went bad, became a drunk. That’s what they say.”
The eternal tension between colonizers and colonized and the always difficult and unjust relationship between genetics and social status that still persists in Latin America when it comes to skin color and race is apparent in “The Greenest Eyes” (perhaps a nod to Toni Morrison’s first novel) where the protagonist desires to have the color of his Italian-immigrant father’s eyes, even if the price ends up being too high.
If Mariana Enríquez or Mónica Ojeda placed the horror genre in a central space within contemporary Latin American literature, Liliana Colanzi is one of the Latin American women doing the same for speculative fiction. Following the lineage of previous winners of the Ribera del Duero Prize, such as Guadalupe Nettel and Samanta Schweblin—powerhouses of Latin American contemporary literature—there is promise in Liliana Colanzi’s writing and her interest in constructing the spaces and stories where the social landscape of the Americas flirts with temporal and spatial transmutations. We can only hope that her next work will be a longer installment. - Enrique Aureng Silva
Liliana Colanzi (Bolivia, 1981) has published the story collections Permanent Vacation (2010) and Our Dead World (2014). She studies comparative literature at Cornell University, and edits the Enchanted Forest series for the publisher El Cuervo. In 2015 she won the Aura Estrada Prize. Colanzi is considered by critics to be one of the most promising voices of the new Latin American narrative, and this book is an ambitious formal and thematic leap.
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