Austral

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 per­petual 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 man­uscript is a series of interconnected accounts 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 anti­semitic commune in Paraguay founded by Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche.

A story of mourning and return-to one's na­tive country, to one's darkest memories, to oneself­ Carlos Fonseca's Austral interrogates the obsessions and upheavals faced by survivors of a rapidly glob­alizing world. A treasure map of intertwined ex­periences, each cleaving its own path through time, the novel is a fascinating investigation into the dis­appearance of culture and memory and a chart­ing 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.