Critically acclaimed, prize-winning author Andrés Neuman's Fracture
is an ambitious literary novel set against Japan's 2011 nuclear accident
in a cross-cultural story about how every society remembers and forgets
its catastrophes.
Mr. Yoshie Watanabe, a former electronics company executive and a
survivor of the atomic bomb, has always lived like a fugitive from his
own memories. He's spent decades traveling the world, making a life in
different languages, only to find himself home again, living in Tokyo in
his old age. On the afternoon of March 11, 2011, Watanabe, like millions
of others, is stunned by powerful tremors. A massive earthquake has
struck to the north, triggering the Fukushima nuclear disaster--and a
stirring of the collective past. As the catastrophe unfolds, Watanabe's
mind, too, undergoes a tectonic shift. With his native land yet again
under nuclear threat, he braces himself to make the most surprising
decision of his nomadic life.
Meanwhile, four women who have known him intimately at various points in
time narrate their stories to a strangely obsessive Argentinian
journalist. Their memories, colored by their respective cultures and
describing different ways of loving, trace sociopolitical maps of Paris,
New York, Buenos Aires, and Madrid over the course of the twentieth
century. The result is a metalingual, border-defying constellation of
fractures in life and nature--proof that nothing happens in only one
place, that every human event reverberates to the ends of the earth.
With unwavering empathy and bittersweet humor, and facing some of the
most urgent environmental concerns of our time, Andrés Neuman's
Fracture is a powerful novel about the resilience of humankind, and
the beauty that can emerge from broken things.
