A series of short stories, in which the author of Cousins displays her family vitriolic vignettes, her gallery of outcasts, and her unrivalled literary mastery.

The everyday and the esoteric come together in Venturini’s last novel published during her lifetime, a descent into the aftermath of a domestic accident. The mishap left her in a hospital bed, and she describes how she had to learn to walk, talk, and eat again, a particular journey through hell that includes her encounter with the beings who inhabit it. As Mariana Enriquez says: “If in Cousins she is the poor, monstrous girl, and in We, The Caserta, the brilliant girl who sought the origin of her strangeness in her genealogy, in The Rails she is the elderly writer facing death.”

Written when Venturini was ninety years old, it shares the feverish and unrestrained writing of the two previous novels, and a taste for altering language to give it a simplicity that disarms the reader. Incidentally, it also shares her own biography, in which, like a reflection in those undulating mirrors, the story returns a life that is distorted, alien, and fabulous at the same time. An extravagant work—like the author’s life—brilliant and atrocious, which recalls, from the physical decline of old age, some peculiar episodes of her youth.

One of her best books. Mariana Enríquez, Radar Libros, Página 12

A prose with a highly expressive strength (…). A bristly syntaxis. (…). A poetry of the disproportion and a biting humour as a vanishing point (…), all this performs an aesthetical phenomenon of unique characteristics in Spanish. Jorge Consiglio, La Nación

An unforgettable, honest, sharp-witted storyteller, capable of recounting the ups and downs of a family with tender, foul-mouthed prose that is unusual and full of light. Elisa Ferrer

The labels are too small; they are incomplete. What is the same as saying they are unnecessary. The Rails can be read as a novel, memoirs, a treatise on self-help for hospitalization times. (…) Anything that is on these pages is pompous, superficial, hackneyed. Aurora knows how to bring you down to reality with a thump. Walter Lezcano

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