Claudia Hernández González
Autore di Slash And Burn
Sull'Autore
Opere di Claudia Hernández González
Opere correlate
Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories (Calico Series) (2024) — Collaboratore — 7 copie
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome canonico
- Hernández González, Claudia
- Data di nascita
- 1975-07-22
- Sesso
- female
- Nazionalità
- El Salvador
- Nazione (per mappa)
- El Salvador
- Luogo di nascita
- San Salvador, El Salvador
- Premi e riconoscimenti
- Anna Seghers Prize (2004)
Utenti
Recensioni
Liste
Premi e riconoscimenti
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 11
- Opere correlate
- 1
- Utenti
- 76
- Popolarità
- #233,522
- Voto
- 3.5
- Recensioni
- 3
- ISBN
- 11
- Lingue
- 1
As a girl she sees her village sacked and her beloved father and brothers flee. Her life in danger, she joins the rebellion in the hills, where her comrades force her to give up the baby she conceives. Years later, having outlived countless men, she leaves to find her lost daughter, travelling across the Atlantic with meagre resources. She returns to a community riven with distrust, fear and hypocrisy in the wake the revolution.
Hernández’ narrators have the level gaze of ordinary women reckoning with extraordinary hardship. Denouncing the ruthless machismo of combat with quiet intelligence, Slash and Burn creates a suspenseful, slow-burning revelation of rural life in the aftermath of political trauma.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I think you'll get the real gestalt of this read, of this review and possibly...just possibly...this story, if we listen to Author Horacio Castellanos Moya (my review of his book, Senselessness, will give you a feel for his own emotional-overload storytelling chops) praise Author Hernández:
Castellanos Moya links Author Hernández to men marginalized by their poverty, and sexual natures, whose immense talents were never appreciated in their lifetimes. They were foundational figures in the creation of a magical realist Latinoamericano fiction, famously and fully developed in the hands of Julio Cortázar and García Márquez. That's some heady company Castellanos Moya puts Author Hernández in...and not without reason.
But let me be clear: This read is not a spoon-fed milk-toast cinch. I know a number of people found [[Anna Burns]]'s name-free labels of her characters in her 2018 Booker-winning novel of civil war, [Milkman], to be difficult and off-putting. I am not among their number. Heck, I enjoyed [[Robert Pinget]]'s [The Inquisitory], and that has no names and no punctuation at all. This read is spang in the middle of a continuum between Burns and Pinget. There aren't names ("A name was just a name. In times of war, it served the same purpose as a number or a tattoo or a dog tag you wore around your neck: it was a way of identifying the dead," we're told very, very early in Slash and Burn), but you've got dialogue tags and punctuation...just no clear path to knowing instantly and unequivocally who's speaking, when we are supposed to be...it all makes a lot of sense, in my opinion, as the entire point of reading a woman's take on war is about getting into the stakes of her participation.
She's not anything more than one woman among the thousands, the millions, the billions whose world is trying to defend the girls she's doing her goddamnedest to get through childhood into their own womanhoods.
These aren't happy-clappy figures of Survivorhood. These aren't the women who run charities and organize microlending cooperatives. Author Hernández's women are the ones that make the world, the vicious one they inhabit, function in spite of and in parallel to the wars destroying the world.
It's simple, to her. It's the world, it's not going to do her a blind bit of good to do more than make her odds, of being murdered by these uncontrolled armed fearless and foeless monsters, as low as she can. But there is nothing in this world that isn't violent and abusive on levels unthinkable to most of us reading the story in our warless, unchaotic surroundings.
This is just...life. Life the way people in a war zone that hasn't been anything but a war zone for a generation know it, and so how they do the mechanics of living. It isn't sweet, it isn't about redemption or Coming To The Realization That x; this is what gutting it out, putting food on the table and a roof of some sort over your heads, means.
I've said I don't find the unmoored "she"s troublesome. The reason is that I don't do more than the minimum to associate the references to a general roster of possible identities. I think the read made sense to me because I realized these aren't Characters. These are types, a sort of massive and mostly undifferentiated Woman-ness. Author Hernández isn't telling Maricela's story then Marisol's story then Ludivine's; she's telling their story as the topology of the War they're doing their individual bests to avoid dying in brings them into relevance.
It isn't easy to adjust the novel-reader's expectations to this, or the wealthy-country educated book-consumer's preferences for delineated and labeled identities. Accustoming myself to a more base, earthen interchangeability, fungibility of women playing similar roles at different times was the best adaptation I could make. It felt unnatural for about 30 pages, 10% of the Kindle file. But thinking it through and considering the magical-realist underpinnings of flexible identities and the feminist rage of reducing women, the centers of this unnatural Life, to faceless nameless utilitarian labor units added a nauseating note of indifferent and amoral cruelty to the entire tale. And that is, I strongly suspect, a good deal of Claudia Hernández's point. The title...Slash and Burn is sort of the sense of it, "Roza tumba quema" or "fondle fall burn" in that order...feeling indicative to me of a soldier checking out the goods, knocking them over, not-quite accidentally, not entirely purposefully, but carelessly in all its senses, setting them on fire. This is a solid preparation for the hard, unyielding world that the mass of women, the Woman if you will, simply bends herself into whatever shape she has to so as to make her way into another morning, through its day, and out on the other side of another night.
I found great value, solid art, and a seriously important and timely reminder of the way that war's costs are distributed is violent and unconscionably cruel, in this intense read.… (altro)