Not A River by Selva Almada

Not A river by Selva Almada

Argentine fiction

Original title – No es un río

Translator – Annie McDermott

Source – Personal copy

I decided to take a Charco subscription out just to get their books this year; I have been a fan of them, and they have brought us some great books from Latin America. This happens to be the last in a loose trilogy of books around masculinity by the Argentina writer Selva Almada. This is the first book I will have reviewed by her. But it seemed incredible to have her as the 50th Book from Argentina. I will have checked on the blog. Selva Almada studies social communication and has been writing for 25 years. When her first short stories appeared, she was acclaimed as one of the leading female voices from Argentina. She has also written nonfiction and runs literary workshops. Anyway, when I read this about three men going on a fishing trip, I immediately thought of Craver’s short story So Much Water So Close to Home which is part of his shortcuts collection. Where so fishermen find a dead body. But this is a darker tale.

Just then he hears the engine and the lapping of waves. He moves aside, begins swimming to shore. The boat goes by, bounding over the water, ripping it in two like a rotten old rag. Attached to the back of the boat, a girl in a bikini is water-skiing. The boat swerves sharply and the girl is thrown in the water. From a distance, Enero sees her head emerge, her long hair plastered to her scalp.

He thinks of the Drowner.

Gets out.

El Negro and Tilo are standing on the shore, arms folded, following the boat with their eyes.

Youngsters making a racket.

Says El Negro

The three men notice women so quickly

The story is of three men going on a fishing trip a few years after an earlier where the three men there were all the same age and friends, Enero, eEl Negro and Eusebio, head out on the earlier trip and then when they got back Eusebio had died and the two men now years later meet and have decided to take the son of the late friend on this same trip down the river. They are setting off to the same place where Tilo’s Father had died, and as they do, they take a gun and shoot a stingray. This is an odd way to fish, but it did remind me of a story my dad told me of how the locals used to feel in Donegal, where they used to stay every summer as kids, which involved explosives and catching the fish that had died in a net. But they then hang the stingray. This is almost like a sacrifice or such in a way, but when it is seen by a local, he is highly offended. This also leads to the three men meeting the daughter of this villager, and their story mixes with the three men and the past. These are back countrymen. Violent, yes, but that is their nature. In a way, it is a harsh world, and this is a story of fathers, sons, daughters, men, and all that can bring the older lust after the young village girls that will always cause trouble. Then, there is what happened on the earlier trip in the background.

He’d known El Negro since forever, but Eusebio had moved to their part of town not so long ago. That year, after the July vacation, he started at the school.

The family had come to live in the grandma’s house after the old lady died. Apparently they’d not been on good terms, which was why they’d never visited before.Their arrival didn’t go down well with the neighbours.Some folks said Eusebio’s dad had done time and the old lady had never forgiven him. And that Eusebio’s mother saw men for money.

The three men had been close but Enero and El Negro had been close for so long.

This is a powerful book of secrets of past lives, violent worlds and violent men and what happens when you do something that offends the locals and the mysteries of that earlier trip. The local girls aren’t all they seem, and this is where we may sort of drift into a dark magic realism in this book. This is a Powerful book with echoes of classics like Faulkner and Evening Hemingway, both written about men in a male world. But she has made this a book about how toxic men can be. Also, the way the men act toward the girls is another. I will go back to the other books by Almada in the next 50 books. But this is fitting for the 50th book from a country I love to read books from and shows how in the last 14 years since this blog has started much has changed when it was almost all male writers from Argentina I could read but we have so many great female voices these days but also so many more voices to read from there. Have you read this book or any from the trilogy ? or have a favourite book from Argentina.