Natalia García Freire

eBook, ePUB

A Carnival of Atrocities (eBook, ePUB)

Beschreibung

The residents of a desolate town nestled in the Ecuadorian Andes are forced to reckon with the legend of Mildred, a girl wronged by the town years ago

Cocuán, a desolate town nestled between the hot jungle and the frigid Andes, is about to slip away from memory. This is where Mildred was born, and where everything she hadher animals, her home, her landswas taken from her after her mother's death. Years later, a series of strange events, disappearances, and outbursts of collective delirium will force its residents to reckon with the legend of old Mildred. Once again, they will feel the shadow of death that has hung over the town ever since she was wronged. The voices of nine charactersMildred, Ezequiel, Agustina, Manzi, Carmen, Víctor, Baltasar, Hermosina, and Filateliotell us of the past and present of that doomed place and Mildred's fate. Natalia García Freire's vivid language blurs the lines between dreams and reality and transports the reader to the hypnotic Andean universe of Ecuador.

Technische Details

• Geräte: eReader
• ohne Kopierschutz

Barrierefreiheit

• Text-to-Speech

Autor

Natalia García Freire was born in Cuenca, Ecuador, in 1991. She teaches Creative Writing at Escuela de Escritores de Madrid. García Freire's debut novel, This World Does Not Belong to Us, was published in English by World Editions and One World in 2022. This World Does Not Belong to Us won the English PEN Translation Award, was nominated for the Tigre Juan Award and selected by the New York Times as one of the best Spanish-language books of 2019. It has been translated into Italian, French, Turkish, and Danish. A Carnival of Atrocities is Natalia García Freire's second novel published by World Editions.

Victor Meadowcroft is a translator from Spanish and Portuguese and a graduate of the University of East Anglia's master's programme in literary translation. His published translations include stories by Agustina Bessa-Luís in Take Six: Six Portuguese Women Writers (co-translation with Margaret Jull Costa, Dedalus Books, 2018) and Toño the Infallible by Evelio Rosero (co-translation with Anne McLean, New Directions, 2022), which was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize in 2023 and longlisted for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute of Translation Prize in the same year. His translation of Natalia García Freire's This World Does Not Belong to Us was published by World Editions in 2022 and was shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize and the Premio Valle Inclán.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: World Editions
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. April 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781642861563
• Artikelnr.: 73177250

Rezensionen

Praise for A Carnival of Atrocities

"A Carnival of Atrocities is a marvel of creative fire that takes uniquely unexpected turns, yet it has parallels with both Hanging Rock and The Leftovers in that its drama centers on the unexplained disappearance of several people, who wander off toward "the crag," while those left behind reexamine and ultimately reinvent their faith." -Los Angeles Review of Books

"For those with an appetite for lyrical absurdity, this dark and demanding journey into a bedeviled nightwill repay the effort. There are echoes of Samuel Beckett in portions of this mordant fable, but Garcia Freire'sdreamy poetry is her own." -The Arts

Fuse

"In Ecuadoran writer Natalia García Freire's latest novel, A Carnival of Atrocities, rising from the landscape is a swirling, multivocal, and vivid portrait of a small town torn apart by prejudices and suspicion. There may be something rotten buried deep in the earth-but perhaps it is history itself. With an expert, distinguished lyricism translated melodiously by Victor Meadowcroft, García Freire aims her incisive sights on the violence and hatred that pervade amidst dissenting belief systems, gesturing towards the ways a limited, desperate existence can further inhibit our shortsighted perspectives." -Asymptote

"A Carnival of Atrocities tracks the breakdown of a destructive social ecology, bringing about not a triumphant restoration of the natural order but instead something stranger and more ambiguous. Even the brief glimpses of the lives destroyed prove affecting, but the novel's final images, seen through the eyes of Filatelio as he lays his beloved Diosmadre to rest in flowing water, deliver a moving catharsis. Natalia García Freire's writing shocks, confounds, and fascinates; this carnival proves well worth the ride."-Ancillary Review of Books

"Years ago, in a town between the steaming jungle and the frigid Andes-a town soon to slip out of existence-a girl was wronged. Mildred was born in Cocuán, and it was there that she had centered her life, but after her mother died, everything-her animals, her home, and her lands-was taken from her. Now, strange things keep happening; there's collective delirium and a shadow of death that hangs over the town, and people think it's Mildred come to take her revenge."-Book Riot, The Biggest Books Out this Spring (BIPOC Edition 2025)

"Set against the backdrop of a remote town in Ecuador, Natalia García Freire's newly-translated novel A Carnival of Atrocities (translated by Victor Meadowcroft) is a tale of a community haunted by its past." -Reactor Mag

"What an event! Natalia García Freire conjures up an ancient forest and sets language and its roots alight, including the living and dead. Marvelous, dazzling, celebratory writing. I can't say it enough: read it!" -MARÍA SÁNCHEZ, author of Land of Women

"The language in this novel weaves together miracles, curses, and deliriums. Natalia García Freire creates disturbing and beautiful books that remind one of the poetic cruelty of far-off mythologies." -IRENE VALLEJO, author of the international bestseller Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World

"This is the story of a town, Cocuán, told through its characters. A story with hints of fable, myth, madness, death, innocence, evil ... It's amazing, as always." -ANDREA CARRASCO, ABC

"In A Carnival of Atrocities, the story of poor Mildred, banished, dispossessed, and ostracized, is preserved in Mother Earth, Pachamama, in Cocuán." -INÉS GARCÍA, Libero Editorial

"In Natalia García Freire's literary universe, everything that was destined to remain a secret, hidden away, has come to light: the wind, the birds, the forest. She writes from the ground level, somewhere between the ferocity of Flannery O'Connor and the sinister nature of Shirley Jackson-it will leave no one indifferent. Hers is a mad and disturbing universe." -CRISTINA SÁNCHEZ ANDRADE, author of The Winterlings

"A beautiful and terrible book." -JOSEP NADAL SUAU, El Cultural

Praise for This World Does Not Belong to Us

"Disquieting and visceral. ... García Freire unearths a brilliant sense of the miraculous from the swarming and putrid subject matter. The result is beautifully macabre." -Publishers Weekly, starred review

"One of the debut novels that most stood out this year in Latin America." -New York Times

"A wronged, bitter young man welcomes his fate in Natalia García Freire's novel This World Does Not Belong to Us. Lucas was just a child when his father sold him to another farmer as a laborer. Years later, Lucas returns, full of resentment and burning for revenge. ... Visceral prose captures Lucas's obsession with death, bugs, and other unpleasant aspects of life. ... There is a strange, unconventional beauty to his morbid world-a beauty that helps him endure pain and humiliation and achieve an unnerving final calm. This World Does Not Belong to Us is a bleak exploration of how all ends in death and decay." -Foreword Reviews

"A deliciously menacing read which I just couldn't put down. Every word punches hard. This World Does Not Belong to Us treads the fine line between beauty and horror effortlessly." -JAN CARSON, author of The Raptures