Comemadre
ABOUT
THE BOOK
On the outskirts of Buenos Aires in 1907, Doctor Quintana pines for head nurse Menéndez while he and his colleagues embark on a grisly series of experiments to investigate the line between life and death. One hundred years later, a celebrated artist goes to extremes in search of aesthetic transformation, turning himself into an art object. How far are we willing to go, Larraquy asks, in pursuit of transcendence? The world of Comemadre is full of vulgarity, excess, and farce: strange ants that form almost perfect circles, missing body parts, obsessive love affairs, and flesh-eating plants. Here the monstrous is not alien, but the consequence of our relentless pursuit of collective and personal progress.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Heather
Cleary
Heather Cleary is an award-winning translator whose work has been recognized by English PEN and the National Book Foundation, among others. A member of the Cedilla & Co. translation collective, she has served as a judge for several national translation prizes and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction (Bloomsbury 2021).
Heather Cleary is an award-winning translator whose work has been recognized by English PEN and the National Book Foundation, among others. A member of the Cedilla & Co. translation collective, she has served as a judge for several national translation prizes and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction (Bloomsbury 2021).
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Comemadre, Roque Larraquy’s first book translated into English, is a compact, whimsical, and often horrific take on humanity’s grandest curiosities and aspirations. In 1907, the medical staff at a sanitarium outside Buenos Aires experiment with beheading patients to better understand life and death. In 2009, an artist confronts scholarship on his life and aesthetics, detailing his journey from artist to piece of art through the deformities, mutilations, and physical transformations of himself and others. With a clever use of recurring symbols and imagery, and criticism that is sometimes serious, but always winking, Larraquy connects these disparate words in surprising, entertaining ways. Cleveland Public Library, USA