Celebrated Ecuadorian author Gabriela Alemán's first work to appear in English: a noir, feminist eco-thriller in which venally corrupt politicians and greedy land speculators finally get their just comeuppance!
In the squalid settlement of Poso Wells, women have been regularly disappearing, but the authorities have shown little interest. When the leading presidential candidate comes to town, he and his entourage are electrocuted in a macabre accident witnessed by a throng of astonished spectators. The sole survivor—next in line for the presidency—inexplicably disappears from sight.
Gustavo Varas, a principled journalist, picks up the trail, which leads him into a violent, lawless underworld. Bella Altamirano, a fearless local, is on her own crusade to pierce the settlement's code of silence, ignoring repeated death threats. It turns out that the disappearance of the candidate and those of the women are intimately connected, and not just to a local crime wave, but to a multinational magnate's plan to plunder the country's cloud forest preserve.
"Poso Wells is ironic, audacious, and fierce. But what is it, exactly? A satire? A scifi novel? A political detective yarn? Or the purest reality of contemporary Latin America. It's unclassifiable––as all great books are."––Samanta Schweblin
"Poso Wells is brilliant, audacious, doubtlessly playful and at the same time so dark and bitter. A truly unforgettable book."––Alejandro Zambra
"The story is a condemnation not only of the corrupt businessmen and the criminal gangs that rule Poso Wells but also of the violence against women that plagues Latin America's real slums."––The New Yorker
"By expertly weaving multiple narratives around the figure of Vinueza, the hapless (but wealthy!) presidential candidate who resembles so many corrupt (but wealthy!) presidential candidates in the modern history of Ecuador, Gabriela Alemán depicts with verve and humor the horrors and absurdities of a society intent on perpetuating itself."––Mauro Javier Cardenas
"Gabriela Alemán has a rhythm worth watching . . . she does something unexpected, things fly apart, she leaps into the void, and you think, 'there's no way she can pull this off'––but no, everything fits together, falls into place, flows, and the story goes on."––Pedro Mairal
"Through scalding wit and straight-faced parody this no-holds-barred absurdist adventure that seems more a movie than a book will have you laughing till you cry as the cruelty of its South American reality sinks in. Imagine a mix of Hunter S. Thompson and Gabriel García Márquez. A small masterpiece."––Michael Taussig
"This compulsively readable book is Gabriela Alemán's debut as a novelist in the English-language. Sparklingly original, full of dry wit, and deliciously suspenseful, Poso Wells could well earn Gabriela Alemán a cult following."––Jon Lee Anderson
"Poso Wells explores the dichotomy between the new and old worlds of Ecuador through an exciting noir about missing women, corrupt politicians, and a journalist's attempt to unravel the secrets of the infinitely labyrinthine cityscape of Poso Wells. This is an exciting debut translation of a celebrated Ecuadorian author, and one that should lead to more translations of her work."––Ely Watson
"Poso Wells is a rare achievement in which a reader comes out the other end wanting to start again. It is a bold and clever tale with a unique voice, and it is poised to have a longstanding impression on readers for years to come."––Rebecca George
"A bizarre little satire that oscillates between adventure yarn and farce, one that pokes fun at modernity and the gross incompetence of the people in charge. A fun, funny, strange book that hits the gas pedal and never lets up."––Justin Souther
"A town built on mud and garbage; a nefarious partnership between corrupt politicians, thugs, and business men; and a reporter investigating the disappearance of hundreds of women. Poso Wells is part satire and part detective story. It's unlike any book I've read in a long time, and I'll be recommending it to everyone I know."––Amy W., Powell's Books
"Thriller and farce, Poso Wells is a magical realist sci-fi, a fierce and biting social allegory by turns hilarious and tragic, cynical and hopeful . . . this is a twenty-first-century cautionary tale of the war between humanity and avarice . . ."––Maria Agui Carter
"Gabriela Alemán's Poso Wells drops the reader, as if dangling from a helicopter's ladder, into a riveting page-turner set in coastal Ecuador. Forces of global capitalism want to mine all that is profitable from the earth, no matter the consequences. By the end we're not sure if Jacob's ladder leads to heaven or hell. The upshot of Alemán's brilliant novel, however: for every rapacious action, there is an equal, opposite, and tenacious resistance."––Mauricio Kilwein Guevara
"Poso Wells is an intriguing name for a thrilling novel of politics, environmental destruction and wildly imaginative occurrences that slide right to the edge of reality. The landscape includes the threatened rape of a cloud forest, a collection of fantastical blind heroes, and a presidential candidate who pees himself to death on stage. The English translation is fast and clear as the story rolls towards its ending on a steaming volcano. The first English translation of noted Brazilian-Ecuadorian novelist, Gabriela Alemán. I hope that many more follow."––Stephen Williams
"A madcap, feminist mash-up of noir, thriller, Science Fiction and satire."––Christy Thomas
Alemán’s first novel to be translated into English is a wild, successful satire of Ecuadorian politics and supernatural encounters. Shortly before the nation’s 2006 presidential election, an unnamed candidate and 10 of his supporters die via freak electrocution while attempting to drum up support in the small settlement of Poso Wells, leaving land magnate Andrés Vinueza as the sole survivor in line for the presidency. After a group of eyeless, possibly alien men steal Vinueza from a rally, journalist Gonzalo Varas begins to investigate the strange events. A series of hidden tunnels under the settlement leads Varas to Valentina, a recently vanished local. After Vinueza reappears three weeks later, newly devoted to God and flanked by five blind men, Varas, aided by his poet friend Benito and area rabble-rouser Bella, suspects the candidate’s disappearance is connected to Valentina and the growing number of women reported missing in Poso Wells. Alemán’s sleek narrative is bizarre and propulsive, and though the novel’s ramshackle finale may come together a bit fast, Alemán’s singular voice keeps the ride fresh and satisfying. - Publishers Weekly
When a freak accident leads to the death of a Trump-like Ecuadorian politician, a reporter assigned to investigate the incident uncovers shocking and sinister truths about the politician and his cohorts.
Opening with a scene of unforgettable absurdism, a campaigning politician has to urinate so badly while giving a speech in a seedy part of Ecuador that he pees his pants, which causes his electrocution. In the wake of his death, Gonzalo Varas, an impoverished journalist living with a failed poet as a roommate, is assigned by his editor to investigate the incident. As Gonzalo receives more and more pressure from his editor to produce a story, he finally, by a stroke of luck, happens upon a strange woman in an underground tunnel who has escaped captivity and is nearly dead, an encounter which soon leads him to uncover a pattern of missing women, a group of eerie blind men, and a conspiracy involving land and mining rights, all of which center around the novel’s titular community, a slum sitting atop a network of interconnected tunnels. One part Thomas Pynchon, one part Gabriel García Marquez, and one part Raymond Chandler, Alemán’s novel contains mystery, horror, humor, absurdity, and political commentary. Her characters are cartoonishly lovable or hateable, and the world they inhabit is overblown and stylized. Though the novel contains flashes of brilliance (a woman's voice sounds like “crystal clear water falling slowly through yards of blue velvet”), her writing sometimes lapses into cliché and lacks specificity, though it is unclear whether this is her doing or the fault of Cluster’s translation. In the end, though the novel never quite finds its footing, Alemán is a good enough storyteller and has a good enough sense of pacing that the story never drags.
A concoction of political thriller and absurdist literary mystery that never fails to entertain. - Kirkus Reviews
Gabriela Alemán weaves noir, feminism, satire, and environmentalism into the strange history of Poso Wells, Ecuador. Poso Wells follows journalist Gustavo Varas as he investigates the disappearance of a prominent presidential candidate. In Poso Wells, women vanishing into nothingness is a common reality, but no one in town seems concerned. The townspeople are quiet and fearful as the military remains a constant and aggressive presence. Varas’s investigation leads him into a literal underworld beneath the town. He encounters a mysterious woman named Valentina inside the mucky tunnels and brings her back to the surface with questions he is not sure he wants the answers to. He learns of five blind men who seem otherworldly and powerful. As he investigates further, a story of terror unfolds.
In the squalid settlement of Poso Wells, women have been regularly disappearing, but the authorities have shown little interest. When the leading presidential candidate comes to town, he and his entourage are electrocuted in a macabre accident witnessed by a throng of astonished spectators. The sole survivor—next in line for the presidency—inexplicably disappears from sight.
Gustavo Varas, a principled journalist, picks up the trail, which leads him into a violent, lawless underworld. Bella Altamirano, a fearless local, is on her own crusade to pierce the settlement's code of silence, ignoring repeated death threats. It turns out that the disappearance of the candidate and those of the women are intimately connected, and not just to a local crime wave, but to a multinational magnate's plan to plunder the country's cloud forest preserve.
"Poso Wells is ironic, audacious, and fierce. But what is it, exactly? A satire? A scifi novel? A political detective yarn? Or the purest reality of contemporary Latin America. It's unclassifiable––as all great books are."––Samanta Schweblin
"Poso Wells is brilliant, audacious, doubtlessly playful and at the same time so dark and bitter. A truly unforgettable book."––Alejandro Zambra
"The story is a condemnation not only of the corrupt businessmen and the criminal gangs that rule Poso Wells but also of the violence against women that plagues Latin America's real slums."––The New Yorker
"By expertly weaving multiple narratives around the figure of Vinueza, the hapless (but wealthy!) presidential candidate who resembles so many corrupt (but wealthy!) presidential candidates in the modern history of Ecuador, Gabriela Alemán depicts with verve and humor the horrors and absurdities of a society intent on perpetuating itself."––Mauro Javier Cardenas
"Gabriela Alemán has a rhythm worth watching . . . she does something unexpected, things fly apart, she leaps into the void, and you think, 'there's no way she can pull this off'––but no, everything fits together, falls into place, flows, and the story goes on."––Pedro Mairal
"Through scalding wit and straight-faced parody this no-holds-barred absurdist adventure that seems more a movie than a book will have you laughing till you cry as the cruelty of its South American reality sinks in. Imagine a mix of Hunter S. Thompson and Gabriel García Márquez. A small masterpiece."––Michael Taussig
"This compulsively readable book is Gabriela Alemán's debut as a novelist in the English-language. Sparklingly original, full of dry wit, and deliciously suspenseful, Poso Wells could well earn Gabriela Alemán a cult following."––Jon Lee Anderson
"Poso Wells explores the dichotomy between the new and old worlds of Ecuador through an exciting noir about missing women, corrupt politicians, and a journalist's attempt to unravel the secrets of the infinitely labyrinthine cityscape of Poso Wells. This is an exciting debut translation of a celebrated Ecuadorian author, and one that should lead to more translations of her work."––Ely Watson
"Poso Wells is a rare achievement in which a reader comes out the other end wanting to start again. It is a bold and clever tale with a unique voice, and it is poised to have a longstanding impression on readers for years to come."––Rebecca George
"A bizarre little satire that oscillates between adventure yarn and farce, one that pokes fun at modernity and the gross incompetence of the people in charge. A fun, funny, strange book that hits the gas pedal and never lets up."––Justin Souther
"A town built on mud and garbage; a nefarious partnership between corrupt politicians, thugs, and business men; and a reporter investigating the disappearance of hundreds of women. Poso Wells is part satire and part detective story. It's unlike any book I've read in a long time, and I'll be recommending it to everyone I know."––Amy W., Powell's Books
"Thriller and farce, Poso Wells is a magical realist sci-fi, a fierce and biting social allegory by turns hilarious and tragic, cynical and hopeful . . . this is a twenty-first-century cautionary tale of the war between humanity and avarice . . ."––Maria Agui Carter
"Gabriela Alemán's Poso Wells drops the reader, as if dangling from a helicopter's ladder, into a riveting page-turner set in coastal Ecuador. Forces of global capitalism want to mine all that is profitable from the earth, no matter the consequences. By the end we're not sure if Jacob's ladder leads to heaven or hell. The upshot of Alemán's brilliant novel, however: for every rapacious action, there is an equal, opposite, and tenacious resistance."––Mauricio Kilwein Guevara
"Poso Wells is an intriguing name for a thrilling novel of politics, environmental destruction and wildly imaginative occurrences that slide right to the edge of reality. The landscape includes the threatened rape of a cloud forest, a collection of fantastical blind heroes, and a presidential candidate who pees himself to death on stage. The English translation is fast and clear as the story rolls towards its ending on a steaming volcano. The first English translation of noted Brazilian-Ecuadorian novelist, Gabriela Alemán. I hope that many more follow."––Stephen Williams
"A madcap, feminist mash-up of noir, thriller, Science Fiction and satire."––Christy Thomas
Alemán’s first novel to be translated into English is a wild, successful satire of Ecuadorian politics and supernatural encounters. Shortly before the nation’s 2006 presidential election, an unnamed candidate and 10 of his supporters die via freak electrocution while attempting to drum up support in the small settlement of Poso Wells, leaving land magnate Andrés Vinueza as the sole survivor in line for the presidency. After a group of eyeless, possibly alien men steal Vinueza from a rally, journalist Gonzalo Varas begins to investigate the strange events. A series of hidden tunnels under the settlement leads Varas to Valentina, a recently vanished local. After Vinueza reappears three weeks later, newly devoted to God and flanked by five blind men, Varas, aided by his poet friend Benito and area rabble-rouser Bella, suspects the candidate’s disappearance is connected to Valentina and the growing number of women reported missing in Poso Wells. Alemán’s sleek narrative is bizarre and propulsive, and though the novel’s ramshackle finale may come together a bit fast, Alemán’s singular voice keeps the ride fresh and satisfying. - Publishers Weekly
When a freak accident leads to the death of a Trump-like Ecuadorian politician, a reporter assigned to investigate the incident uncovers shocking and sinister truths about the politician and his cohorts.
Opening with a scene of unforgettable absurdism, a campaigning politician has to urinate so badly while giving a speech in a seedy part of Ecuador that he pees his pants, which causes his electrocution. In the wake of his death, Gonzalo Varas, an impoverished journalist living with a failed poet as a roommate, is assigned by his editor to investigate the incident. As Gonzalo receives more and more pressure from his editor to produce a story, he finally, by a stroke of luck, happens upon a strange woman in an underground tunnel who has escaped captivity and is nearly dead, an encounter which soon leads him to uncover a pattern of missing women, a group of eerie blind men, and a conspiracy involving land and mining rights, all of which center around the novel’s titular community, a slum sitting atop a network of interconnected tunnels. One part Thomas Pynchon, one part Gabriel García Marquez, and one part Raymond Chandler, Alemán’s novel contains mystery, horror, humor, absurdity, and political commentary. Her characters are cartoonishly lovable or hateable, and the world they inhabit is overblown and stylized. Though the novel contains flashes of brilliance (a woman's voice sounds like “crystal clear water falling slowly through yards of blue velvet”), her writing sometimes lapses into cliché and lacks specificity, though it is unclear whether this is her doing or the fault of Cluster’s translation. In the end, though the novel never quite finds its footing, Alemán is a good enough storyteller and has a good enough sense of pacing that the story never drags.
A concoction of political thriller and absurdist literary mystery that never fails to entertain. - Kirkus Reviews
Gabriela Alemán weaves noir, feminism, satire, and environmentalism into the strange history of Poso Wells, Ecuador. Poso Wells follows journalist Gustavo Varas as he investigates the disappearance of a prominent presidential candidate. In Poso Wells, women vanishing into nothingness is a common reality, but no one in town seems concerned. The townspeople are quiet and fearful as the military remains a constant and aggressive presence. Varas’s investigation leads him into a literal underworld beneath the town. He encounters a mysterious woman named Valentina inside the mucky tunnels and brings her back to the surface with questions he is not sure he wants the answers to. He learns of five blind men who seem otherworldly and powerful. As he investigates further, a story of terror unfolds.
Poso Wells is a perfect complement for the current political state of the United States and the hopelessness caused by constant access to terrible news via social media. The story speaks to the delusion and god complex involved in wanting to lead an entire nation and the destructive power of indifference and greed. It also touches on the silence behind the pervasive violence women encounter in their daily lives.
Alemán has created a disturbing, absurd, at times heart-wrenching story about the atrocities committed by patriarchs in power and the difficulty in fighting against colonialism. If anything, Poso Wells is a book about perseverance and resilience. It speaks to the fight human beings have inside them when they feel powerless. Their power is in protesting historical, structural violence and existence as resistance. - Rios de la Luz
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2018/september/poso-wells-gabriela-aleman
Though the Spanish original of Gabriela Alemán’s Poso Wells was published in 2007, its English translation could not be more apt for a 2018 release. Dick Cluster’s new translation offers a stunning commentary on today’s befuddling anglophone world. With ill-spoken political candidates driven by industry cronyism and scores of missing women ignored by the police, Poso Wells describes a Ecuadorian setting all too familiar to an American reader. Alemán’s novel develops a convoluted series of bizarre events into a searingly lucid political conclusion. Poso Wells is the sort of dizzying novel that only begins to make sense as it finishes, but then becomes so fascinating that you want to read the hazy first hundred pages all over again. Ready for an afternoon stroll with the likes of Gabriel García Marquez and Karen Tei Yamashita, author Gabriela Alemán offers a collection of layered portraits that hover at the edge of realism.
Within the first few pages, a political candidate is electrocuted while standing in a puddle of his own urine. The novel does not become less strange. After his shocking introduction, the candidate disappears, and one journalist, Gustavo Varas, attempts to find him while also investigating a number of missing women. What he finds extends far beyond his expectations.
With paragraphs meandering for over two pages on a frequent basis, it is easy to lose track of what is happening in Poso Wells. As with many English translations from Spanish originals, the pacing adheres to a different aesthetic than your average American crime drama. More than once, I found myself double checking that I had not skipped a page. Yet, much of what Alemán represents is about the disconnection between people and the muddied tunnels where people can disappear from society’s eye if they aren’t valued enough by those in power. The swamp of the first chapters is made even more powerful by its contrast to the sharp sarcasm and accelerating pace of the final fifty pages.
Alemán’s depictions of the political candidate Vinueza prove some of the most successful components of the novel. The disgusting figure sounds all too familiar in his nonsensical conversations with skeptical reporters.
Poso Wells offers a dark optimism for Ecuador, yet one that is tainted by the lurking presence of a Canadian entrepreneur. The novel links the politics and poetics in the floodplains around the port city of Guayaquil to the copper mining and other extractive industries that can come and go from a country as opportunities arise, leaving a destroyed forest and poisoned people in their wake. The Canadian, Holmes, seems better suited to the name Moriarty as he flies off to cause trouble elsewhere when his present machinations are foiled. His dismissive impatience for “peasants and environmentalists,” especially those from Latin America, highlights his neocolonial distance from long-term well-being through the related health of people and place (142-143). Alemán critiques the uncomfortable ties that connect international speculators, political buffoonery, violence against women, and environmental degradation. The novel scorns those local businessmen and politicians who become the puppets of outsiders such as Holmes, handing over cloud forest and masking violence in order to increase their perceived position.
The political monsters of Poso Wells are contrasted by a couple of powerful female characters who refuse to let men bulldoze them (literally, at one point). They are women who carry scars and vipers and who know how to use them. They draw on their resourcefulness and on the strength of their gathered community to resist the frenzied destruction of their lives and homes. One kidnapped prostitute is taken to five men in a hotel room; the men’s assumption of her helplessness leads to their rather comical downfall. Some of the novel’s most satisfying moments are those that start as if they will represent a successful use of patriarchal power only to end in delight when such ploys crumble in the face of a calm, intelligent response.
Don’t pick up Poso Wells when your eyelids are already half-closed. You’ll be as lost as if you too wandered in the tunnels that wind beneath the city. But, with an espresso by your side and a willingness to trust that all the paths will someday converge, you will be ready for an intriguing exploration of what drives people into action in a world that makes no sense. - Emma Schneider
http://www.full-stop.net/2019/02/14/reviews/emma-schneide/poso-wells-gabriela-aleman/
You are standing in the middle of a multitude. You are waiting for the leading presidential candidate to arrive to this peripheral neighborhood and address his voters. You are sweating. The air is moist, and the darkness of the sky reminds you of the mud beneath your feet. You hear the disruptive beat of propellers, the accidental landing of a helicopter behind the stage. The politician walks forward, takes the microphone, and—while the ovation is still on—his body makes a spectacular combustion. It only takes the fire a few minutes to turn him (and his entourage) into ashes.
This improbable scene sets the rules of Poso Wells. A novel written by Ecuadorian writer, Gabriela Alemán, recently translated by Dick Cluster. The ongoing absurdity continues when a national newspaper omits journalist Gonzalo Vara’s pitch on the disappearance of tens of women during the past several decades. Instead, the editor demands Varas a full story about Vinueza, the politician who has to replace the incinerated candidate. Vinueza, the only survivor on stage, is kidnapped by a group of blind men while the fire is still flaring.
Aleman’s satirical thriller was first published in 2007. The idea of creating this novel came after reading a short story named “The Country of The Blind,” written by one of her favorite authors, H. G. Wells. And so, the story—placed at the economical capital of her country, Guayaquil— brought to the surface real local issues such as corruption and femicides. The fantastic twist comes when we, the readers, allow ourselves to immerse into the aura of sci-fi, just to realize that sometimes realism is built with elements of the unbelievable.
“Poso Wells does not appear on any map. How could it? The last time anyone did a topographical survey, that enormous mass of mud dredged from the estuary was still part of the river.” With these first lines, Alemán describes the murky and fictional corner of Guayaquil that names her novel.
Poso Wells exists within two dimensions. One is the ordinary landscape of a marginal community, where law is imparted by local and violent leaders. The other is what lives underneath that shell. The piece has the atmosphere of a journalistic feature, not only because Varas –the journalist— is our hero, but because the division between fiction and nonfiction is blurry. For example, in order for Varas to find the entrance to the underworld, he looks into the archives of the newspaper. There, he finds a piece published five decades ago by a foreign journalist, who wrote about a lineage of mysterious blind men living in the area. Did that really happen? As a reader, I felt the need to look into the archives of that old newspaper and corroborate it myself.
Throughout the book, Alemán embroiders a series of characters that are at times ironical, and other times fall into the depiction of cartoons. They are playful and ironic, however (at times) it feels like the outcome of their actions is predictable or too good to be true. But the masterfulness of the pieces lies in how language plays a fundamental role to understanding the interaction between places (the ground and the underground), belief systems (religion and patriarchy), and power (politics and money).
If you are looking for an exciting story to take your breath away–non-stop— Poso Wells is the answer. With this piece, Alemán achieves a serious composition that transports the reader to the settings of television series such as Stranger Things and Twin Peaks, without losing a sort of Dickensian style of storytelling. She draws a full circle of political and social criticism while still preserving the freshness of her voice. After getting to the end, we might look for an excuse to read her again. -
Quito, the capital of Ecuador, is an Andean city ninety-three hundred feet above sea level, squeezed into a narrow valley fifteen miles south of the equator. On the west side, you can take the teleférico up to the shoulder of the Pichincha volcano and step out of your gondola onto an alpine landscape at an elevation of more than thirteen thousand feet.
Looking down at the urban area from above the tree line reminds me of cities closer to the poles than to the equator—Bergen, Cape Town, or even Anchorage. But unlike those other locations, Quito is not a port, and its cityscape is not set against a background of bright blue. Rather, the city spreads like an elongated flow of white and beige concrete poured between green ridges that hem it in. It’s a low-slung city—the tallest spire is still the steeple of the cathedral built at the turn of the twentieth century. It all looks diminutive from above. Across the valley rises Parque Metropolitano, the city’s green forested lung. If the clouds permit, you can also see a series of snowcapped, conical volcanoes in the distance.
Those cones remind you that you are standing on an active volcano. In 1660, the last major eruption of Pichincha spewed a massive column of ash into the air, plunging Quito—which was founded in the previous century by Spanish conquistadors on an earlier Inca site—into darkness and blanketing it with more than a foot of debris. After centuries of dormancy, Pichincha stirred again in 1981 and again in 1999, both times raining ash on the capital. So, too, to a lesser degree, did a 2015 eruption of Cotopaxi, a volcano fifty miles distant, one of the peaks visible from the top of the teleférico. “One hundred miles from the snows of Cotopaxi” is where H. G. Wells set his 1904 short story “The Country of the Blind,” the tale of a pristine, fertile valley sealed off from the rest of Ecuador by a huge fictional eruption, “the stupendous outbreak of Mindobamba, when it was night in Quito for seventeen days.”
Wells’s text gets a sizable nod in Poso Wells, the second novel by the Quito-based Ecuadorian writer Gabriela Alemán. Near the end of Poso Wells, a similar volcano threatens to erupt. Birds fall from the sky; sulfurous gases emerge from the peak. Key characters in the story—four aged men from an ancient civilization whose members have all gone blind—fall to the ground and wait for the end of the world. The blind men are refugees from Wells’s story, but in Alemán’s imagination, the creations of the English writer are no longer isolated or exotic; rather, they roam the Ecuadorian countryside, always up to no good. The malevolent refugees are connected to the disappearance of a series of several women from a squatter settlement, and to attempts by a multinational mining interest, in league with corrupt Ecuadorian politicians, to despoil the lush landscape from which their ancestors came.
In this “mouth of the fucking devil,” forgotten by authorities (except during election years), a demagogic presidential candidate and his closest lieutenants perish in a freak accident involving a campaign speech, a microphone, an electric spark, and the candidate’s bladder overflowing with urine from too much whiskey and beer. When his surviving top-level acolyte, a millionaire next in line for the presidency, vanishes, legions of soldiers, police, and journalists are dispatched to look for him. In contrast, no official attention is paid to the disappearances of poor women in the same settlement, though they’ve been disappearing for years. Reports of the disappearances molder, untouched, in the archives of the police. This scandal lies at the heart of the book and is counterpoised with the high-level intrigue—a puzzle that one principled reporter and one determined local woman in Poso Wells set out to solve. But Poso Wells also offers scenes set in the country’s cloud forest, in between the lowlands and the volcanic massifs, where golden-crowned quetzals survive in what is left of their habitat, where even the cuyes (domestic guinea pigs raised as food) can sense the evil of certain visitors, and where the local villagers defend their lands.
Interspersed with the narrative are fragments of poetry—not poetic description but poems in several genres, long and short. They are declaimed by a pair of characters on a bed or found on discarded scraps of paper, palimpsests of verse and soda-bottle stains. The mash-up of genres and geographies is typical of Gabriela Alemán, about whom the Argentine writer Pedro Mairal has said, “In Bogotá, where I met her over mojitos and spiced canelazos, I watched her dance. I saw right away that within the harmony of her movements, there was something that threatened to come apart. She looked like she’d fall flat on her back, but she didn’t. She kept on dancing. Sometimes she writes like that—she does something unexpected, things fly apart, she leaps into the void, and you think there’s no way she can pull this off—but no, everything fits together, falls into place, flows.” In 2007, Alemán was included in the Bogotá39, Hay Festival’s list of the thirty-nine Latin American writers under age thirty-nine that everyone should read. Alemán was selected based on her first novel, Body Time (set in New Orleans, where she studied for a doctorate in Latin American film); Poso Wells; and three books of short stories. Since then, she has published two more books of short stories and another novel, edited several anthologies, and cofounded a print and digital press in Quito, El Fakir Ediciones.
El Fakir Ediciones has its office in the historic center of Quito, and its mission is to explore how to identify audiences for Ecuadorian writing in the twenty-first century. As Alemán explains, “Ecuador is not a country that prides itself on its reading habits, so one of our main concerns is spreading the love of books. To do that, we try to make very affordable books and tap into established genres whose Ecuadorian practitioners aren’t well-known. Last year, we put out an anthology of horror stories from the nineteenth century, and this year, it’s going to be Ecuadorian sci-fi. Ecuador doesn’t have a tradition of graphic novels, so one of our collections concentrates on those. There are also a number of very good books that are out of print or have disappeared from the canon, and we are doing an archaeology of sorts to attempt to rewrite it.” These include the work of the poet and short-story writer César Dávila Andrade (1918–1967), whom the publisher considers to be the preeminent Ecuadorian writer of the twentieth century, though he is far from a household name. Andrade was known to his friends as Fakir on the basis of both his skeletal build, which suggested a religious ascetic, and a certain tendency toward the occult—hence the name of Alemán’s press.
Alemán’s personal tastes in literature vary widely, from Latin American writers of many stripes to Toni Morrison, Karel Capek, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Her own oeuvre is equally eclectic. Her father was an Ecuadorian diplomat, which is why she was born in Brazil and grew up in a variety of cities in Latin America and Europe. Humo (Smoke), her third novel, published in 2017, is a historical fiction set in the rivers, jungles, deserts, and cities of Paraguay. Her short stories trot across borders, but Alemán never forgets her roots. The stories in her 2010 collection, Albúm de familia (Family album), feature characters from Mexico, the U.S., Puerto Rico, Germany, Argentina, and more, yet every story has a connection to the country that one narrator calls “the Middle of the World.” In one story, John Wayne Bobbitt (whose penis, severed by his wife, Lorena, figured in one of the biggest U.S. tabloid sensations of 1993) shows up in Buenos Aires in the arms of an Argentine ex-actress. Another, called “Superheroes,” revolves around El Santo, the wildly popular Mexican wrestler, comic-book superhero, and film actor of the twentieth century. One of Alemán’s dogged journalist characters tracks down the key to his appeal in a mountain village in the north of Ecuador, where an ex-girlfriend of the wrestler (Venezuelan by birth) has chosen to settle for the rest of her life. “Whoever embodies the myth becomes it,” the journalist concludes. “The mechanism is perfect; the gearing, precise; the house of cards, fragile. And the story? Who cares? It can pass for perfect.”
Translation also tries to pass for perfect while playing down the fact that it’s a kind of sleight of hand. The challenge of translating Poso Wells began with the title, the name of the squatter settlement. Poso is an unusual word in Spanish, echoing el pozo (“the well”) but actually meaning “sediment.” Wells, of course, refers to H. G., whose story Alemán read at age fourteen, amazed to find that one of her favorite English writers had set a story in her country. Much later, packing for one of her many moves from place to place, she found the book, reread it, and decided she had to do something that would make use of it.
The solution to translating the title turned out to be not to do it. The original title is half English and half Spanish, so the translation might as well be that way too. Other issues called for more intervention (or invention). The local boss, thug, and fixer in Guayaquil is referred to by his surname, Salem, which U.S. readers will hear as either a city famous for its witch trials or a vanished brand of menthol cigarettes. The heroine, Bella Altamirano, has a name that means “beauty,” but her face has been disfigured by a scar resulting from domestic violence. The newspaperman has a Mexican poet sidekick whose language is peppered with the slang and tastes of Mexico City, and their repartee is a comment on the cultural influences and divides between their countries. His poems are brief, aphoristic, and drenched in devices that only Spanish syntax allows, A long poem recited by a different character contains the line “musica de más pájaros negritos / y pajaros pajeros / como yo,” which says, roughly, “music of black birds and birds that jerk off, like me.” But that’s not how it says it, of course, because the centerpiece is the pun, “pajaros pajeros,” which has other associations as well. The translation required a voyage in the direction of feathers and cocks.
But puzzles like these are also what makes literary translation so enjoyable, and for this book, I had the collaboration of an author who frequently translates from English to Spanish, so our conversations about these and other mysteries were enriching for us both. She compares it to the experience of a writer friend who translates his own work while he’s writing “so he can see whether what he’s saying makes sense.” In the end, she says, “it was like reading my own novel as if someone else had written it.”
And as a matter of fact, there are certain fragments of her book that someone else did write. The Mexican poet character is named Benito del Pliego, and his poems are the creations of a real person by that name, not a Mexican but a Spaniard resident in North Carolina. The long poem with “pajaros pajeros” is by the Quito-born writer Andrés Villalba, who gets credited as “my friend Andrés” by the character reciting the poem, a gender-fluid poetry fan who rescues Benito from a police roundup. Ever the editor and disseminator, Alemán borrows not only from Wells but from her friends who are poets and practitioners of Spanish-language literature around the globe. Perhaps it’s not surprising that she, a citizen of the Andes, should have such an expansive view. - Dick Clusterwww.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/07/30/literary-citizen-of-the-andes-gabriela-aleman-and-quito/
Though the Spanish original of Gabriela Alemán’s Poso Wells was published in 2007, its English translation could not be more apt for a 2018 release. Dick Cluster’s new translation offers a stunning commentary on today’s befuddling anglophone world. With ill-spoken political candidates driven by industry cronyism and scores of missing women ignored by the police, Poso Wells describes a Ecuadorian setting all too familiar to an American reader. Alemán’s novel develops a convoluted series of bizarre events into a searingly lucid political conclusion. Poso Wells is the sort of dizzying novel that only begins to make sense as it finishes, but then becomes so fascinating that you want to read the hazy first hundred pages all over again. Ready for an afternoon stroll with the likes of Gabriel García Marquez and Karen Tei Yamashita, author Gabriela Alemán offers a collection of layered portraits that hover at the edge of realism.
Within the first few pages, a political candidate is electrocuted while standing in a puddle of his own urine. The novel does not become less strange. After his shocking introduction, the candidate disappears, and one journalist, Gustavo Varas, attempts to find him while also investigating a number of missing women. What he finds extends far beyond his expectations.
With paragraphs meandering for over two pages on a frequent basis, it is easy to lose track of what is happening in Poso Wells. As with many English translations from Spanish originals, the pacing adheres to a different aesthetic than your average American crime drama. More than once, I found myself double checking that I had not skipped a page. Yet, much of what Alemán represents is about the disconnection between people and the muddied tunnels where people can disappear from society’s eye if they aren’t valued enough by those in power. The swamp of the first chapters is made even more powerful by its contrast to the sharp sarcasm and accelerating pace of the final fifty pages.
Alemán’s depictions of the political candidate Vinueza prove some of the most successful components of the novel. The disgusting figure sounds all too familiar in his nonsensical conversations with skeptical reporters.
“We’re at the edge of an abyss,” he pronounced, “and we need to take a step forward.”Alemán’s humor bites at such powerful figures. She describes “an old iguana perched in a tree, looking more serious and dignified than any member of the national legislature” (103) and a businessman who begins to look “less like a slippery fish, and more like an eel with an upset stomach” (56). Just when the men in power seem to have the most influence, she takes them down a notch. A blackmailing attempt is laughed off for being behind the times; a plutocrat is scorned by a flock of British birders. Although the characters lack depth or development, they are so bizarrely on point as to hold interest.
“Off the cliff?” the same reporter asked. (104)
Poso Wells offers a dark optimism for Ecuador, yet one that is tainted by the lurking presence of a Canadian entrepreneur. The novel links the politics and poetics in the floodplains around the port city of Guayaquil to the copper mining and other extractive industries that can come and go from a country as opportunities arise, leaving a destroyed forest and poisoned people in their wake. The Canadian, Holmes, seems better suited to the name Moriarty as he flies off to cause trouble elsewhere when his present machinations are foiled. His dismissive impatience for “peasants and environmentalists,” especially those from Latin America, highlights his neocolonial distance from long-term well-being through the related health of people and place (142-143). Alemán critiques the uncomfortable ties that connect international speculators, political buffoonery, violence against women, and environmental degradation. The novel scorns those local businessmen and politicians who become the puppets of outsiders such as Holmes, handing over cloud forest and masking violence in order to increase their perceived position.
The political monsters of Poso Wells are contrasted by a couple of powerful female characters who refuse to let men bulldoze them (literally, at one point). They are women who carry scars and vipers and who know how to use them. They draw on their resourcefulness and on the strength of their gathered community to resist the frenzied destruction of their lives and homes. One kidnapped prostitute is taken to five men in a hotel room; the men’s assumption of her helplessness leads to their rather comical downfall. Some of the novel’s most satisfying moments are those that start as if they will represent a successful use of patriarchal power only to end in delight when such ploys crumble in the face of a calm, intelligent response.
Don’t pick up Poso Wells when your eyelids are already half-closed. You’ll be as lost as if you too wandered in the tunnels that wind beneath the city. But, with an espresso by your side and a willingness to trust that all the paths will someday converge, you will be ready for an intriguing exploration of what drives people into action in a world that makes no sense. - Emma Schneider
http://www.full-stop.net/2019/02/14/reviews/emma-schneide/poso-wells-gabriela-aleman/
You are standing in the middle of a multitude. You are waiting for the leading presidential candidate to arrive to this peripheral neighborhood and address his voters. You are sweating. The air is moist, and the darkness of the sky reminds you of the mud beneath your feet. You hear the disruptive beat of propellers, the accidental landing of a helicopter behind the stage. The politician walks forward, takes the microphone, and—while the ovation is still on—his body makes a spectacular combustion. It only takes the fire a few minutes to turn him (and his entourage) into ashes.
This improbable scene sets the rules of Poso Wells. A novel written by Ecuadorian writer, Gabriela Alemán, recently translated by Dick Cluster. The ongoing absurdity continues when a national newspaper omits journalist Gonzalo Vara’s pitch on the disappearance of tens of women during the past several decades. Instead, the editor demands Varas a full story about Vinueza, the politician who has to replace the incinerated candidate. Vinueza, the only survivor on stage, is kidnapped by a group of blind men while the fire is still flaring.
Aleman’s satirical thriller was first published in 2007. The idea of creating this novel came after reading a short story named “The Country of The Blind,” written by one of her favorite authors, H. G. Wells. And so, the story—placed at the economical capital of her country, Guayaquil— brought to the surface real local issues such as corruption and femicides. The fantastic twist comes when we, the readers, allow ourselves to immerse into the aura of sci-fi, just to realize that sometimes realism is built with elements of the unbelievable.
“Poso Wells does not appear on any map. How could it? The last time anyone did a topographical survey, that enormous mass of mud dredged from the estuary was still part of the river.” With these first lines, Alemán describes the murky and fictional corner of Guayaquil that names her novel.
Poso Wells exists within two dimensions. One is the ordinary landscape of a marginal community, where law is imparted by local and violent leaders. The other is what lives underneath that shell. The piece has the atmosphere of a journalistic feature, not only because Varas –the journalist— is our hero, but because the division between fiction and nonfiction is blurry. For example, in order for Varas to find the entrance to the underworld, he looks into the archives of the newspaper. There, he finds a piece published five decades ago by a foreign journalist, who wrote about a lineage of mysterious blind men living in the area. Did that really happen? As a reader, I felt the need to look into the archives of that old newspaper and corroborate it myself.
Throughout the book, Alemán embroiders a series of characters that are at times ironical, and other times fall into the depiction of cartoons. They are playful and ironic, however (at times) it feels like the outcome of their actions is predictable or too good to be true. But the masterfulness of the pieces lies in how language plays a fundamental role to understanding the interaction between places (the ground and the underground), belief systems (religion and patriarchy), and power (politics and money).
If you are looking for an exciting story to take your breath away–non-stop— Poso Wells is the answer. With this piece, Alemán achieves a serious composition that transports the reader to the settings of television series such as Stranger Things and Twin Peaks, without losing a sort of Dickensian style of storytelling. She draws a full circle of political and social criticism while still preserving the freshness of her voice. After getting to the end, we might look for an excuse to read her again. -
Mixing satire with fantasy and ribald humor, she creates an imaginary wasteland called Poso Wells where hundreds of women disappear mysteriously and grotesque occurrences happen every day.
A Panamanian-Chinese-Ecuadoran teenager named Sun Yi earns a living as a prostitute and protects herself with a poisonous snake. Señor Banegas, a flamboyant populist, grows up imitating Humphrey Bogart’s performance in “The Maltese Falcon.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/books/article/Poso-Wells-by-Gabriela-Alem-n-13216501.phpQuito, the capital of Ecuador, is an Andean city ninety-three hundred feet above sea level, squeezed into a narrow valley fifteen miles south of the equator. On the west side, you can take the teleférico up to the shoulder of the Pichincha volcano and step out of your gondola onto an alpine landscape at an elevation of more than thirteen thousand feet.
Looking down at the urban area from above the tree line reminds me of cities closer to the poles than to the equator—Bergen, Cape Town, or even Anchorage. But unlike those other locations, Quito is not a port, and its cityscape is not set against a background of bright blue. Rather, the city spreads like an elongated flow of white and beige concrete poured between green ridges that hem it in. It’s a low-slung city—the tallest spire is still the steeple of the cathedral built at the turn of the twentieth century. It all looks diminutive from above. Across the valley rises Parque Metropolitano, the city’s green forested lung. If the clouds permit, you can also see a series of snowcapped, conical volcanoes in the distance.
Those cones remind you that you are standing on an active volcano. In 1660, the last major eruption of Pichincha spewed a massive column of ash into the air, plunging Quito—which was founded in the previous century by Spanish conquistadors on an earlier Inca site—into darkness and blanketing it with more than a foot of debris. After centuries of dormancy, Pichincha stirred again in 1981 and again in 1999, both times raining ash on the capital. So, too, to a lesser degree, did a 2015 eruption of Cotopaxi, a volcano fifty miles distant, one of the peaks visible from the top of the teleférico. “One hundred miles from the snows of Cotopaxi” is where H. G. Wells set his 1904 short story “The Country of the Blind,” the tale of a pristine, fertile valley sealed off from the rest of Ecuador by a huge fictional eruption, “the stupendous outbreak of Mindobamba, when it was night in Quito for seventeen days.”
Wells’s text gets a sizable nod in Poso Wells, the second novel by the Quito-based Ecuadorian writer Gabriela Alemán. Near the end of Poso Wells, a similar volcano threatens to erupt. Birds fall from the sky; sulfurous gases emerge from the peak. Key characters in the story—four aged men from an ancient civilization whose members have all gone blind—fall to the ground and wait for the end of the world. The blind men are refugees from Wells’s story, but in Alemán’s imagination, the creations of the English writer are no longer isolated or exotic; rather, they roam the Ecuadorian countryside, always up to no good. The malevolent refugees are connected to the disappearance of a series of several women from a squatter settlement, and to attempts by a multinational mining interest, in league with corrupt Ecuadorian politicians, to despoil the lush landscape from which their ancestors came.
In this “mouth of the fucking devil,” forgotten by authorities (except during election years), a demagogic presidential candidate and his closest lieutenants perish in a freak accident involving a campaign speech, a microphone, an electric spark, and the candidate’s bladder overflowing with urine from too much whiskey and beer. When his surviving top-level acolyte, a millionaire next in line for the presidency, vanishes, legions of soldiers, police, and journalists are dispatched to look for him. In contrast, no official attention is paid to the disappearances of poor women in the same settlement, though they’ve been disappearing for years. Reports of the disappearances molder, untouched, in the archives of the police. This scandal lies at the heart of the book and is counterpoised with the high-level intrigue—a puzzle that one principled reporter and one determined local woman in Poso Wells set out to solve. But Poso Wells also offers scenes set in the country’s cloud forest, in between the lowlands and the volcanic massifs, where golden-crowned quetzals survive in what is left of their habitat, where even the cuyes (domestic guinea pigs raised as food) can sense the evil of certain visitors, and where the local villagers defend their lands.
Interspersed with the narrative are fragments of poetry—not poetic description but poems in several genres, long and short. They are declaimed by a pair of characters on a bed or found on discarded scraps of paper, palimpsests of verse and soda-bottle stains. The mash-up of genres and geographies is typical of Gabriela Alemán, about whom the Argentine writer Pedro Mairal has said, “In Bogotá, where I met her over mojitos and spiced canelazos, I watched her dance. I saw right away that within the harmony of her movements, there was something that threatened to come apart. She looked like she’d fall flat on her back, but she didn’t. She kept on dancing. Sometimes she writes like that—she does something unexpected, things fly apart, she leaps into the void, and you think there’s no way she can pull this off—but no, everything fits together, falls into place, flows.” In 2007, Alemán was included in the Bogotá39, Hay Festival’s list of the thirty-nine Latin American writers under age thirty-nine that everyone should read. Alemán was selected based on her first novel, Body Time (set in New Orleans, where she studied for a doctorate in Latin American film); Poso Wells; and three books of short stories. Since then, she has published two more books of short stories and another novel, edited several anthologies, and cofounded a print and digital press in Quito, El Fakir Ediciones.
Gabriela Alemán.
Alemán’s personal tastes in literature vary widely, from Latin American writers of many stripes to Toni Morrison, Karel Capek, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Her own oeuvre is equally eclectic. Her father was an Ecuadorian diplomat, which is why she was born in Brazil and grew up in a variety of cities in Latin America and Europe. Humo (Smoke), her third novel, published in 2017, is a historical fiction set in the rivers, jungles, deserts, and cities of Paraguay. Her short stories trot across borders, but Alemán never forgets her roots. The stories in her 2010 collection, Albúm de familia (Family album), feature characters from Mexico, the U.S., Puerto Rico, Germany, Argentina, and more, yet every story has a connection to the country that one narrator calls “the Middle of the World.” In one story, John Wayne Bobbitt (whose penis, severed by his wife, Lorena, figured in one of the biggest U.S. tabloid sensations of 1993) shows up in Buenos Aires in the arms of an Argentine ex-actress. Another, called “Superheroes,” revolves around El Santo, the wildly popular Mexican wrestler, comic-book superhero, and film actor of the twentieth century. One of Alemán’s dogged journalist characters tracks down the key to his appeal in a mountain village in the north of Ecuador, where an ex-girlfriend of the wrestler (Venezuelan by birth) has chosen to settle for the rest of her life. “Whoever embodies the myth becomes it,” the journalist concludes. “The mechanism is perfect; the gearing, precise; the house of cards, fragile. And the story? Who cares? It can pass for perfect.”
Translation also tries to pass for perfect while playing down the fact that it’s a kind of sleight of hand. The challenge of translating Poso Wells began with the title, the name of the squatter settlement. Poso is an unusual word in Spanish, echoing el pozo (“the well”) but actually meaning “sediment.” Wells, of course, refers to H. G., whose story Alemán read at age fourteen, amazed to find that one of her favorite English writers had set a story in her country. Much later, packing for one of her many moves from place to place, she found the book, reread it, and decided she had to do something that would make use of it.
The solution to translating the title turned out to be not to do it. The original title is half English and half Spanish, so the translation might as well be that way too. Other issues called for more intervention (or invention). The local boss, thug, and fixer in Guayaquil is referred to by his surname, Salem, which U.S. readers will hear as either a city famous for its witch trials or a vanished brand of menthol cigarettes. The heroine, Bella Altamirano, has a name that means “beauty,” but her face has been disfigured by a scar resulting from domestic violence. The newspaperman has a Mexican poet sidekick whose language is peppered with the slang and tastes of Mexico City, and their repartee is a comment on the cultural influences and divides between their countries. His poems are brief, aphoristic, and drenched in devices that only Spanish syntax allows, A long poem recited by a different character contains the line “musica de más pájaros negritos / y pajaros pajeros / como yo,” which says, roughly, “music of black birds and birds that jerk off, like me.” But that’s not how it says it, of course, because the centerpiece is the pun, “pajaros pajeros,” which has other associations as well. The translation required a voyage in the direction of feathers and cocks.
But puzzles like these are also what makes literary translation so enjoyable, and for this book, I had the collaboration of an author who frequently translates from English to Spanish, so our conversations about these and other mysteries were enriching for us both. She compares it to the experience of a writer friend who translates his own work while he’s writing “so he can see whether what he’s saying makes sense.” In the end, she says, “it was like reading my own novel as if someone else had written it.”
And as a matter of fact, there are certain fragments of her book that someone else did write. The Mexican poet character is named Benito del Pliego, and his poems are the creations of a real person by that name, not a Mexican but a Spaniard resident in North Carolina. The long poem with “pajaros pajeros” is by the Quito-born writer Andrés Villalba, who gets credited as “my friend Andrés” by the character reciting the poem, a gender-fluid poetry fan who rescues Benito from a police roundup. Ever the editor and disseminator, Alemán borrows not only from Wells but from her friends who are poets and practitioners of Spanish-language literature around the globe. Perhaps it’s not surprising that she, a citizen of the Andes, should have such an expansive view. - Dick Clusterwww.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/07/30/literary-citizen-of-the-andes-gabriela-aleman-and-quito/
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