The Publisher Says: Out of the Cage opens in 1956, in Argentina, with the freakish death of Aurora Berro, and descends into a dark philosophical exploration of humanity and mortality. In the midst of her family’s celebration of a national holiday, an LP, careening through the air like a “demented boomerang,” severs her jugular. Her family—an agglomeration of perversions, deformities, and obsessions—seems at first not to notice, singing on. Aurora is left behind in a voyeuristic limbo as an omniscient first-person narrator, to observe the depravity of her family and reflect on the farce of her life and human existence.

Fernanda García Lao has been called “the strangest writer of Argentine literature,” and in Out of the Cage, she lives up to that distinction. The book is saturated in strangeness, a blend of formal experimentation, eroticism, grotesque theatricality, and dark humor that evokes the absurdist fictions of Witold Gombrowicz and the style of Silvina Ocampo. The result is a macabre and fantastic vaudeville, a tragicomedy, a kind of Dadaist opus against ideas of eternal beauty and fixed identity, against absolute concepts and universality.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Whatever you're thinking about this book from its cover and/or title, stop thinking it now. Aurora is our cicerone through a family of grotesques, a collection of tics and crotchets defined by their obsessive, angry sexual energy. They—Aurora's husband and conjoined-twin sons—are locked inside a bizarrely passionate, deeply damaged psychosexual cyst on Argentina's Body Politic...and that is the clue to what this book is on about. Noting the years in which this hideous agglomeration of sideshow freaks...brothers locked in sibling rivalry inside one body, a father who manufactures a glamourous Lana Turner sex doll to replace the wife he's simply forgotten has died...the next generation, son of a prostitute fathered by one of those men...all take place in 1956 (post-Perón), 1975 (Los Desaparecidos and the Dirty War), and 1989 (hyperinflation and Menem's economic crisis). Major turning points in the history of the country, all embodied in the person of Aurora of the truly peculiar death and even weirder substitution, Norma the pregnant prostitute with the paralyzed leg seeking one of the Berro men's support for her child, then finally Severino the child of Norma and...?... left to make sense of the previous generations' mishegas and puerility.

I can't recommend it to the sexually prudish, or the easily distracted. It was ably, and intelligently, translated by Will Vanderhyden. ( )