From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling novel about legacy, memory, and
the desire to know and be known.
Julio is a disillusioned professor of literature, a per-petual wanderer
who has spent years away from his home, teaching in the United States.
He receives a posthumous summons from an old friend, the writer Aliza
Abravanel, to uncover the mysteries within her final novel. Aliza had
raced to finish her work as her mind deteriorated. In her man-uscript is
a series of interconnected accouncs of loss, tales that set Julio
hurtling on a journey to uncover their true meaning. Austral tracks
Julio's trip from Aliza's home in an Argentine artists' colony to a
forgotten city in Guatemala, to the Peruvian Amazon, and through Nueva
Germania, the anti-semitic commune in Paraguay founded by Elisabeth
Forster-Nietzsche.
A story of mourning and return-to one's na-tive country, to one's
darkest memories, to oneself- Carlos Fonseca's Austral interrogates
the obsessions and upheavals faced by survivors of a rapidly
glob-alizing world. A treasure map of intertwined ex-periences, each
cleaving its own path through time, the novel is a fascinating
investigation into the dis-appearance of culture and memory and a
chart-ing of the furthest limits of what language can do. With this
remarkable exploration of the traces we leave behind, chose we erase,
and how we seek to rebuild, Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as one of
the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.
