Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Mariana Dimópulos, Giramondo Publishing, $24.95.
Translated from Spanish by Alice Whitmore, this is the first title in Giramondo’s pioneering ‘Southern Latitudes’ series.
Focusing on innovative fiction and non-fiction, this novel has overlying essays, which follow the travels of a young Argentinian woman across Europe (Málaga, Madrid, Heidelberg, Berlin) and then back to Argentina (Buenos Aires, Patagonia). She is followed as she takes flight from situation to situation, job to job and relationship to relationship.
A backstory emerges within the intricacy of the narrator’s situation. It’s about a brutal murder in Patagonia that may or may not implicate her. Though not clear if this is the case, her driver is as much by psychological concerns, together with her relationship with her father, uncertainty about her identity and purpose in life.
As the title suggests, the novelette is a directory of goodbyes that result from a ‘decade-long cycle of self-inflicted alienation which the narrator, despite herself, seems fated to perpetuate’.
In its structure it recalls the rich Argentinian tradition of Cortazar and Borges; its language is by turns direct and intricate, ruthless in its economy and yet lyrical in its descriptions.
