International Booker-shortlisted novels ‘Not a River’ and ‘Crooked Plow’ are a celebration of translations, and rooted in hyper-local communities

Latin American writers explore magical realism, political turmoil, and universal themes in novels, highlighting marginalized voices and realities.

To make the point that everyday life in Latin America is full of the most extraordinary things, Gabriel Garcia Marquez loved to cite the experiences of American explorer F.W. Up de Graff who saw, among other things, “a river with boiling water, and a place where the sound of the human voice brought on torrential rain”. In a conversation with his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (The Fragrance of Guava, 1982), Marquez also paid tribute to his heritage, saying, “The Caribbean taught me to look at reality in a different way, to accept the supernatural as part of our everyday life.” In many of his novels, Marquez wrote about the state of Latin America, its triumphs and despair, losses, revolutions and betrayals, using other-worldly tropes.

In recent times, Latin American writers such as Mariana Enriquez, Samanta Schweblin, Fernanda Melchor and others have turned to ghosts, ghouls and lost souls to mirror the realities of a continent grappling with political coups, repression, inequalities and other divides.

A third of this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist comprises novels from Latin America rooted in magical reality and hyper-local communities, but the stories from the margins also harp on universal themes of love and loss or struggles of the poor against rich and powerful masters.

Selva Almada’s Not a River, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott, is a story from rural Argentina, set around the Paraná River. Two friends, Enero and El Negro, are on a fishing trip with the son of Eusebio. Enero and El Negro set up camp on a river island with Tilo, the young son of Eusebio, who had drowned in the river years ago. The people of the island are not that enamoured with the ‘outsiders’ and tensions rise. Together with the stories and memories of the grief-stricken friends, we meet the characters of the place — a mother, Siomora, who has always liked lighting fires, her twin flirtatious daughters who live dangerously, the forest throbbing with stories, and the fish in the river, particularly a manta ray with its own tales. First published in 2021, it was translated into English this year. With Argentina now in the hands of an ultra right-wing government, which is squeezing funds for the arts, Almada’s novel is incredibly important as it shines a light on a marginalised, impoverished part of the country and harmful neo-liberal policies that have led to misery for the people.

Brazilian writer Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow, translated from the Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz, is also a story from the countryside and it’s about a subsistence farming community in the remote Bahia region. They love and tend the land, even as there are several claimants for it. The novel begins in dramatic fashion with two sisters, Bibiana and Belonisía, discovering a knife in an old trunk belonging to their grandmother. When they want to have a taste of the knife, it leads to injuries that will scar them for life — while one sister loses her tongue and thus the ability to speak, the other is badly injured but will forever try to be her sister’s interpreter. The ‘crooked plow’ of the title is not only the instrument used to prepare the field for sowing but the garbled sounds emanating from Belonisía whose tongue is severed: “My voice was a crooked plow, deformed, penetrating the soil only to leave it infertile, ravaged, destroyed.”

It’s a complex generational saga about Brazil’s African and indigenous people’s roots, and the narrative is filled with the ways of these people, how they live, eat, pray and reach this conclusion — “On this land, it’s the strongest who survive.”

On the International Booker Prize longlist this year, there were two other Latin American writers: the Venezuelan Rodrigo Blanco Calderón for Simpatía, translated from the Spanish by Noel Hernández González and Daniel Hahn, and the Peruvian Gabriela Wiener for Undiscovered, translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches. Simpatía is set in contemporary Venezuela and is an allegorical tale set around the fleeing of elites from the country, leaving their pets behind, with the protagonist Ulises Kan staying back to pick up the pieces. He is entrusted with building a shelter for the pets, which he will embark on not solely for altruistic reasons.